Friday’s ad is for Ballantine, from around 1950. The ad features Pittsburgh Pirate right fielder Roberto Clemente, so it must have been before 1973, since Clemente died in a plane crash while delivering aid to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua on December 31, 1972. I still have one of his baseball cards from when I was a kid. If I had to guess, I’d say the ad is not an ad per se, but more likely was part of a baseball program sold at the stadium, except that at second glance the text is in Spanish, saying “Roberto Clemente at bat for Ballantine beer.”
