Who's the little guy in the suit?

 I was idly looking through my 1964 Topps cards when I stumbled upon the 1964 Milwaukee Braves team card, and wondered, "Who's the small man in the black suit on the far left?" 

It turned out be a man named Don Davidson, who was the Braves' traveling secretary at the time.

Davidson suffered a bout of sleeping sickness when he was five which stunted his growth, and he grew to only 4'2". He began his life in baseball in 1939, as batboy for the Boston Braves, and joined the Braves office in 1948. He held various jobs with the Braves, among them public relations director and assistant to the president, until he was fired by Ted Turner in 1976. 🙄

He served with the Astros for a few more years, and died of cancer in 1990 at 64.

Davidson is supposed to have given Henry Aaron his nickname of "Hammering Hank." 

His autobiography was titled "Caught Short." 

As his obituary says, "Davidson received the New York Baseball Writer's Bill Slocum Award for long and meritorious service in 1971, was honored by the Houston chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America in 1986, and received the Robert O. Fishel Award for baseball public relations excellence in 1989."

When the small suited gentleman on the far left of the Braves' team card caught my eye, I had no idea how much history was behind him. 

Speaking of history...

I wrote two other blog posts today for my two baseball history blogs. (This is my first time to turn the hat trick of writing posts on all three of my blogs.) One was about a player named George Ely, a one-armed left-handed second baseman who starred in Los Angeles semi-pro baseball for several years, and the other was about Bernard Hannegan, who may have thrown the first curveball.

https://semiprobaseballhistory.blogspot.com/2023/11/george-ely-one-armed-wonder.html
https://johnsbaseballblog.blogspot.com/2023/11/did-bernard-hannegan-throw-first-curve.html