John J. Evers Chicago-N 1/6/10

This entry catalogs the Sporting News Supplement of John Joseph Evers dated January 6, 1910, distributed as a loose premium with The Sporting News during the 1909–13 supplement run. The player is Evers (1881–1947), the wiry Chicago Cubs second baseman whose name had just been immortalized in Franklin P. Adams's "Baseball's Sad Lexicon" — Tinker to Evers to Chance — published the previous summer. The 1/6/10 dateline places the supplement at the very start of the year following the Cubs' 1908 World Series title and 1909 second-place finish behind Pittsburgh. Evers batted left and threw right, played 18 major-league seasons through 1929, and managed the Cubs and the Chicago White Sox. He died March 28, 1947 in Albany, New York, the city near where he had been born in Troy, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1946 alongside double-play partners Joe Tinker and Frank Chance. The Sporting News supplements of this era are oversized newsprint sheets, fragile and prone to creasing, with surviving high-grade copies a true rarity.