1933 Goudey #148 - Eddie Farrell

When I visited my grandparents’ house as a boy, I was intrigued by a framed photo of a baseball player in their den. The room was large and filled with mementos and artwork collected over a lifetime. Watercolors, family snapshots, sports memorabilia from my grandfather’s amateur football playing days and those of his four sons who followed in his cleat prints decades later.

But it was this small photo that caught my eye.

In the image a man held a blond baseball bat to his right shoulder, his steely gaze reaching out beyond the paper on which it was printed. He wore a blank, baggy white jersey with blue trim and a matching hat. The jersey sleeves reached down to his forearms and strong hands protruded from them, clutching the barrel. Over his left shoulder was printed the name, EDDIE FARRELL.

Upon closer inspection I realized it wasn’t a photo but a baseball card. One unlike any I had ever seen. At the time, collecting baseball cards was an obsession of mine. I opened my first pack when I was five (1986 Topps) and soon after tore through the basement of my father’s childhood home, excavating treasures from his childhood which survived laundry pins and bicycle spokes. By the time I was ten, I had thousands of cards stored in long cardboard boxes in my bedroom closet. Stacked two by two, the tower reached my eyes. But this card was different. The image was more like a painting than a photograph. It had an old-timey look to it.

Who’s in that picture, I asked my mother.

That’s your great-grandfather. Grandpa Eddie was a ballplayer…and a dentist.

I would learn more about Eddie Farrell from the back of that baseball card, but not until I tracked down one of my own years later from an ad in Sports Collectors Digest. Before the internet, a sixty-year-old card of a common player wasn’t easy to find. Every week I would comb the listings of SCD for dealers who sold any 1933 Goudey cards, and my father would pick up the phone to inquire whether they had any Eddie Farrells. We struck out on most calls but every blue moon we’d get a hit and pay upward of $100 per card to get these rare treasures in our possession. Then each year around my birthday we’d attend a card collectors show and my eagle eyes would prowl row after row of display cases in the local Marriott convention hall for old cards.

“Got any Goudeys?”

“Nah."

But once or twice there was a 1933 Goudey #148 in a box of commons stacked deep behind the dealer’s folding chair, far from the high-priced all-star rookie cards that gleamed in his plexiglass case. The condition or price of the card did not matter. I handed over the cash and held my breath as it was placed in my hands. Those blue eyes stared at me again through the hard plastic sleeve which I cradled until I could show my mother another of her grandfather’s cards. The one I found.

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Eddie Farrell’s bio on the back of his 1933 Goudey card reads:

EDDIE FARRELL
NEW YORK YANKEES

Eddie is a registered dentist, besides being a high grade major league baseball player. He was graduated in 1925 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he captained the baseball team for two years.

Eddie is a handy man to have on a ball club, as he can play three different infield positions.

He has served with the Giants, Braves, Cardinals and Cubs in the National League, and is now with the New York Yankees.

Eddie was born in Johnson City, N.Y. 1902, is 5 feet, 8 inches tall and weighs 160 lbs., batting and throwing right handed.