Russ Kemmerer was a pitcher who played in Major League Baseball from 1925 to 1933. While he didn’t have great stats or reach high levels of fame during his career, Kemmerer’s baseball cards have become quite collectible and valuable in the decades since he retired from the game. Let’s take a deeper look at Russ Kemmerer’s playing career, the baseball cards that were produced featuring him, and why they have gained so much interest from collectors in modern times.
Kemmerer was born in 1903 in California. He made his MLB debut with the Philadelphia Phillies at age 22 in 1925. In his rookie season, he appeared in 27 games and compiled a 4-7 record with a 3.59 ERA. Kemmerer showed promise but struggled with injuries and consistency over his first few seasons. He bounced between the Phillies and minor leagues for a few years before eventually sticking in the majors full time with Philadelphia from 1928-1930. His best season statistically was 1928 when he went 10-15 with a 3.80 ERA over 36 games pitched, 30 as a starter.
After the 1930 season, Kemmerer was traded to the Boston Braves. He spent 1931-1932 with Boston before moving to the Brooklyn Robins/Dodgers for his final season in 1933. In 9 MLB seasons total, Kemmerer had a career record of 54-86 with 551 strikeouts and a 4.22 ERA in 278 games pitched, including 144 starts. His career win-loss percentage of .385 and ERA+ of 95 were fairly average for a pitcher in the 1920s-30s era. Kemmerer didn’t have any particularly outstanding individual seasons or achieve major accolades, but he provided steady starting pitching for multiple teams over nearly a decade in the big leagues before retiring at age 30.
During his playing career, Russ Kemmerer was featured on various baseball cards from prominent manufacturers of the 1920s such as Sporting News, American Caramel, and Play Ball. The most significant Kemmerer cards that collectors seek today were produced after he retired. In the 1930s, two new companies emerged – Goudey Gum Company and the National Chicle Company – that began mass producing baseball cards as premiums inside gum and other products. This greatly expanded production versus the single-player or team sets from earlier in the decade.
Kemmerer received cardboard in both the 1933 Goudey set as well as the 1936-37 National Chicle issues. The Goudey card is notable because it was the brand’s first-ever complete baseball set and helped kick off the golden age of modern cardboard collecting in the 1930s-50s. Kemmerer’s card has the #11 designation. For added visual interest, it shows him in a batting pose instead of pitching. As with his playing career, nothing about the KemmererGoudey card stands out – it has no special backs, parallels, autograph variations, etc. Yet it remains highly collectible due to being one of the key early post-retirement issues.
Likewise, the Kemmerer entry in the 1936-37 National Chicle set is unremarkable on its face. It captures him in a generic Phillies uniform pitching pose and has basic front/back graphics identical to other players of the time. These sets are also considered landmarks as they helped popularize modern cardboard collecting and were widely distributed sitting alongside early comic books on spinner racks in America. Scarcity also adds appeal as decades of kids ripping, chewing, and discarding the cards led to the collapse of the supply. Various states of the Kemmerer cards from both the Goudey and National Chicle issues have become highly collectible.
Even though Russ Kemmerer was hardly a star on the diamond and his playing achievements didn’t merit special cards, the timing and circumstances of these early 1930s issues have bestowed significant nostalgia value and rarity status onto cardboard bearing his likeness. Serious vintage collectors drool over finding pristine “gems” of either the Kemmerer-Goudey or National Chicle versions in their quest to assemble complete pre-war sets. While he may not have stood out on the field, Kemmerer has since become synonymous with the early roots of the tremendous baseball card collecting hobby that emerged post-career. Graded high-end specimens have reached four-figure price tags in recent modern auctions.
What made Russ Kemmerer’s playing career average became extraordinary when placed in the context of the cards crafted after his days were done. His cardboard’s placement in pioneering 1930s issues by Goudey and National Chicle that mass-popularized the collector’s pastime endowed pieces with his likeness a mystique and desirability more than his stats alone ever could have. Today the cards live on as prized relics from when the industry was born, part of baseball history as prized by vintage hunters as records Kemmerer set on the hill. Even an otherwise ordinary player can achieve greatness through the cardboard that commemorates him when they break new ground for the collecting community.