A few weeks ago I saw an ebay listing for a framed Birds on the Bat. It looked authentic, it was chainstitched, and on the back it had a Liebe sticker of authenticity on it, so I bought it.
Check it out! Click images to zoom.
I thought these were hanging in the ground floor lobby at the 7th and Clark entrance to Busch II, so I emailed Cardinals Museum Curator, Amy Berra, to see if that was true. Here’s what she had to say.
We have a set of four of these, but they are samples from Majestic from 1997 that Bill had in his office and are not framed. I could have sworn we had a similar one framed, but I was unable to locate it. I looked for photos from the original lobby in our photo database , but no luck there either. I even looked in the Lelands Busch Stadium Auction catalog with no results.
Interesting! So maybe they weren’t hanging on the walls. My memory is fuzzy, I was only a child when I used to walk through that lobby. Nonetheless, there are a couple interesting quirks to this piece.
First, the feet are noticeably not what was actually worn. These have what we refer to as hook feet. For whatever reason that we don’t know, the hook feet were used in many historical reproductions of old Birds on the Bat logos. You’ll still see some floating around, like this example from Mitchell & Ness. But it should be noted that the hook feet were never officially used in a team graphic or worn on a team uniform in yesteryear, nor in modern times.
Second, upon close inspection, the outlines are black threads and not navy threads. When these logos were being made, and presumably also these stitching samples at the same time, the official design was to use Pantone 289, a very dark navy blue. And historically as well, looking back at Birds on the Bat from the past such as 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, there were 4 thread colors used. Red and yellow threads were used for the fills. Navy blue was used for the outlines, and black was used for the bird’s facemasks. The modern Birds on the Bat design ditched black threads completely and went with navy all around for both the outlines and facemasks. But in this piece, they used black threads.
Other than that, the embroidery is clearly authentic and clearly done by Liebe. The patterns and stitching technique are consistent with historical examples. It’s a cool piece and I wish there were more like it!
Cardinals Uniforms & Logos 