Willie Keeler portrait red background

"Wee Willie" Keeler (1872–1923) stood five-foot-four, weighed under 140 pounds, and made a career out of slapping fair-territory baseballs into the ground in front of bewildered third basemen. A left-handed hitter and thrower who closed his major-league run with the New York Yankees of the young American League, Keeler set hitting-streak records and batting-average benchmarks that survived deep into the twentieth century. The American Caramel E90-1 "red background" portrait is part of the foundational 1909–1911 caramel-card window — the same broad confectionery release that produced cornerstone cards of Cobb, Wagner, and Mathewson. Keeler retired with 2,932 hits, an on-base ability the live-ball era never quite reproduced, and a 44-game hitting streak from 1897 that stood as the National League record until Pete Rose tied it eighty-one years later. He died on New Year's Day 1923 in Brooklyn, the borough of his birth. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1939.