A Brief History of Bobbleheads

I absolutely love these little guys. They make me laugh. However, a lot of people don’t know the history of the bobblehead, so, I thought I’d share a few random bits of trivia.

Bobbleheads have been around in modern baseball since the sixties, but, their history extends back to at least 1842, to what is commonly believed to be the first reference to these wobbly necked guys. It was in Nicolai Gogol’s 1842 short story, The Overcoat, in which the main character, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a copy clerk, sharpening pencils, copying documents and being endlessly tormented by his co-workers. Gogol describes his neck "like the necks of plaster cats which wag their heads." From there, Bobbleheads had been referred to as ‘shakers’ or ‘nodders’ or ‘wobblers’.

It was in 1958, that Danny Goodman says the first ‘bobblehead’ was brought to him from Japan. Danny Goodman is not a character who you can just lightly breeze over. To say that Danny Goodman was the director of advertising for the LA Dodgers is like saying James Brown dabbled in soul music. Danny Goodman is the Godfather of the baseball souvenir industry.

He began his career at the age of 14 as a hot dog vendor in a minor league ballpark in Milwaukee back in 1926. As a young man, he saw an opportunity to sell trinkets and souvenirs. But the managers and owners were convinced that the only thing that would ever sell would be the food and beverages. Despite the warnings and admonitions against selling anything other than beer and hotdogs, Danny went on to be the first to create and sell a number of goodies; felt pennants, baseball caps, programs, batting helmets and bobbleheads.

Goodman introduced the bobbleheads for the first time at Gilmore Field, which is a former minor league baseball park that was home to the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League from 1939-1957.

Well, they were a hit, so by 1960 the MLB produced a series of papier-mâché bobblehads, one for each team, available for sale at “one of the many gay souvenir stands in the stadium.”

They were great, but the thing was, they all with the same face.

The World Series of 1960, was when the first player-specific bobbleheads were introduced, and they were: Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Willie Mays. And that was cool, but they still all with the same face.

The bobbleheads themselves, underwent a face-lift, changing from papier-mache to ceramic, and they would be produced for all kinds of sports, cereal characters cartoons. One of the most famous bobbleheads of all times, were The Beatles.

By the mid-1970s, though, the bobblehead craze was in the process of winding down and it would be another two decades before the Great Bobblehead Renaissance. The reason for that was another change in manufacture, from ceramic to plastic, enabling limited numbers, with specific faces to be produced.

The first baseball team to offer a bobblehead giveaway was the San Francisco Giants,

which distributed 35,000 Willie Mays head nodders at their May 9, 1999 game.

#sanfrancisco