Today’s factoid from uncommongoods was quite a surprise.

Boston Red Sox backup catcher Bob Montgomery stepped up to the plate for the last time in 1979,becoming the last major league player to stand in the batter’s box without a helmet. A grandfather clause in the edict that made helmets mandatory for all other batters allowed Montgomery to get around the mandate by wearing a protective plastic liner in his cap.

So you are telling me that a MLB ballplayer in 1979 was allowed to bat without a batting helmet? What? 1979? Really? I was expecting something like 1950-something.

Naturally, I wanted to see if any baseball cards existed of Bob Montgomery batting without a helmet. In the 1970s, there weren’t many action shots of a batter standing at the plate. A lot of portrait shots. If the player was swinging a bat, it would be a staged shot off to the side before the game or in spring training.

But there is a card of Bob Montgomery (1980 Topps #618) featuring him kneeling in the on-deck circle wearing a regular baseball hat—no helmet.

I tell ya, there are so many obscure cards that I want to get. tcdb says this card should cost only $0.18. Naturally, comc.com sells cards for a minimum around $0.75. I’d rather not pay that much. I want to show up in a card shop, and look through the shop’s binders, and pull cards at the price they should cost. Do card shops like this still exist? My brother would do this all the time in the late 1980s.

I’m going to start a master list of the cards I’d like, and the trivial reason why. It would be fun to have a binder full of cards like this. Maybe I’ll design my own trading card to have the explanation for each card. So in the binder, I could have my trading card explanation next to the actual card.

For now, I have this blog on 57hits.com to share obscure cards.

Since Bob Montogomery was grandfathered in to be allowed to not wear a batting helmet, who are the other players to not wear a helmet when it was a rule?

• 1956: National League required the use of batting helmets by all players on all teams.
• 1958: American League requires all players to wear helmets.
• December 1970: Major League Baseball enforced strictly mandatory use of the batting helmet for all batters. Veteran players, however, were allowed to choose to wear a helmet or not, as they were grandfathered into the rule.

So from 1970 to 1979, there were players who didn’t wear a helmet. Who are they?

https://www.57hits.com/last-player-to-not-wear-a-batting-helmet

#618 #BobMontgomery