"Forrest Yantis’ skill as a photographer has captured this history, and his family’s donation of the images to the Hall of Fame ensures that this history will be preserved so generations of fans can enjoy it.”
Picture This
Secreted up a long stairwell in a Main Street insurance office in the small city of Troy, Ohio, a gallery of baseball portraits hung hidden for years – the avocation of a man named Forrest S. Yantis.
In the style of a 19th-century Paris salon, Yantis displayed his player photographs in multiple rows and columns stacked from waist height all the way up to the ceiling. The wall held a montage of faces, captured in startling intimacy and reproduced in larger-than-life, poster-sized, black-and-white photographic prints. The gallery featured Forrest’s favorite baseball players.
Today, those players – via those portraits – are part of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum thanks to a generous donation from Yantis’ family.
A talented amateur photographer, Yantis worked at his day job surrounded by the ballplayers he watched on the field and captured on film. He possessed a “hobby of following the baseball clubs,” and was “an ardent admirer” of his local team, the Cleveland Indians. He expressed his passion for the game by wielding his camera. For a decade between 1928 and 1938, Forrest photographed more than 200 players in Cleveland’s League Park and Municipal Stadium and other Midwestern venues. The affable, young insurance salesman charmed his way onto the field and into dugouts, persuading players to pose for him.
Pat Kelly, Photo Archivist
Forrest’s close-up, bust-length photographs focus on the players’ faces and reflect his remarkable ability to put his sitters at their ease. The revealingly personal images he created show the players not in the stiff, formal poses of studio portraits, but off-guard, capturing their personalities and their distinctive individuality. The large-format prints show the players’ amazing faces in striking detail, featuring elements that make human faces so engaging and unique to each person. They show Tommy Bridges’ dimples; Frankie Frisch’s crooked nose; Clint Brown’s two gold teeth; a mole beside Lefty Gomez’s mouth; Wes Ferrell’s haunting eyes; the grey hair at Jim Bottomley’s temples; Odell Hale’s bow-shaped mouth; and Mickey Cochrane’s wondrous ears.
“These pictures are snapshots in time of some of the biggest baseball stars of the day,” said Hall of Fame photo archivist Pat Kelly. “But they are also shots of everyday players. The photographic quality, however, is far from ‘every day.’ Forrest Yantis’ skill as a photographer has captured this history, and his family’s donation of the images to the Hall of Fame ensures that this history will be preserved so generations of fans can enjoy it.”
Yantis shared his intimate portraits with the men whose faces he captured. After taking the portraits, Yantis returned home where he had the film from his Graflex camera developed, and the photographs enlarged and printed on 16 x 20 inch fine art paper. On subsequent trips to the ballpark, he carried multiple copies of his large portraits, presenting photographs to the players who posed for him, and securing their autographs on those copies intended for his own collection.
Retaining a natural preference for his own team, most of the images Yantis took and chose for his gallery captured his familiar Cleveland Indians players. In the decade he was actively photographing, the Cleveland team never achieved more than a mediocre performance in the standings. But during the same period, steadfast Cleveland fans had the opportunity to cheer some very talented batsmen and hurlers.
Yantis rooted for and photographed Cleveland’s greatest stars of the era. He watched Hall of Famer Earl Averill throughout his career with the Indians as he banged out 226 home runs and steadily drove in his teammates for a still-standing team record of 1,084 RBI. Averill and four of his teammates had hitting streaks of 20 or more games in 1936. Outfielder Joe Vosmik, a popular local lad who as a boy regularly skipped school to sneak into games at League Park, led the league in hits, doubles and triples in 1935. Sensational rookie Hal Trosky started his baseball career in 1934 with a .330 average, 35 home runs and 142 RBIs. Ferrell won 20 games in four straight seasons between 1929 and 1932. Mel Harder, a tough curve baller and one of the best pitchers in the American League, threw for the Indians for 20 years starting in 1928. And in 1936, Cleveland’s all-time greatest pitcher Bob Feller joined the team.
In addition to his local stars and regulars, Yantis coaxed dozens of celebrated players from visiting teams to sit for him. All-Star Games and World Series contests held in regional stadiums provided him with additional opportunities to photograph outstanding players from both leagues. He preserved the faces of a remarkable number of men who would later be honored in Cooperstown including Jim Bottomley, Ty Cobb, Mickey Cochrane, Joe Cronin, Jimmie Foxx, Frankie Frisch, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez, Goose Goslin, Hank Greenberg, Rogers Hornsby, Connie Mack, Eppa Rixey, Red Ruffing, Babe Ruth, Al Simmons, Tris Speaker, Bill Terry, Walter Johnson, and Arky Vaughan. The faces of future Hall of Famers intermingled with those of his beloved Cleveland Indians on Yantis’ own “wall of fame.”
Many of the extraordinary portraits from Yantis’ own personal gallery and others taken by him on his trips to regional ballparks are exhibited in Cooperstown. Thanks to the generosity of the Whitaker Family, Forrest’s daughter and his four grandchildren, these images will be preserved forever at the Museum. The Whitakers recently donated all of Yantis’ extant baseball images comprising more than three hundred film negatives and dozens of player portrait prints to the Hall’s permanent photographic collection.
The family’s magnanimous gift ensures Forrest’s photographs will continue to delight baseball fans for generations to come.
Jenny Ambrose is the former photo archivist at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum