Walter Evers wasn’t tagged with the nickname “Hoot” because of any special affinity he had for owls, or because he was particularly professorial, or due to his keen eyesight.
In his childhood, he revered the early 20th century cowboy matinée hero Hoot Gibson: “On Saturday afternoons, “[Evers] and his buddies would play Wild West games. He insisted on impersonating Hoot because he liked to win. Soon his buddies began calling him Hoot and the name stuck for the rest of his life.”¹
Evers’s playing career was curtailed by injuries, but after his retirement, he worked in professional baseball for the rest of his life, as a front office executive, coach, director of player development, and scout.
As far as the strigine — now there’s my new vocabulary word of the day — aspect of this card, owls have, of course, served as a symbol of spookiness for millennia. Romans, Egyptians and Sumerians all depicted owls in varying dark and haunting ways, associating them with witches, the underworld, and departed human souls. (The Greeks associated owls with Athena, the goddess of wisdom, the arts, and learning, but after they lost the Battle of Corinth to the Romans in 146 BCE, the darker Roman view of owls started taking over the zeitgeist.)
Some notes on the design for this card:
–This card is based on Evers’s 1952 Topps baseball card. I replaced his autograph with an owl footprint.
–The owl depicted here is a barred owl, for no particular reason except that its North American range includes all the places he played, as well as his hometown.
Look for more members of the All-Fall/All-Halloween Team, posted here every day between now and Saturday, October 31, 2026!
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