What I Have Learned from Pat Romolo’s Piedmont 150 Plate Scratch Research: Part One

Pat Romolo’s research on the Piedmont 150 Plate Scratches has produced a number of interesting findings.  It’s really cool to be able to look at a recreated sheet and see how the cards were laid out when printed.  Pat’s initial goal was to put the cards together like a puzzle, but in doing so, he unearthed numerous nuggets of information.

I believe some of the questions I have about the set have been answered by Pat’s work.  In this four-part series, we’ll take a look at a few of the head-scratchers I have noticed over the years and how they can be explained by Pat’s research:

Why were a number of the “150 Only” players pulled from production before being printed with 350 backs, only to be featured on a new pose in the 350-460 Series or 460 Only Series?

This is a question I didn’t ever expect to be answered to my satisfaction.  There are 14 poses from the 150 series that were discontinued prior to printing of 350 backs.  Among them are Honus Wagner and the Sherry Magie error.  These two were pulled from production early on and exist in very small numbers.  The remaining 12 are generally referred to as “The 150-Only Subjects”.  They are as follows:

  • Ames, Red (Hands At Chest)
  • Brown, Mordecai (Cubs On Shirt)
  • Browne, George (Chicago)
  • Burch, Al (Batting)
  • Donlin, Mike (Fielding)
  • Doyle, Larry (Throwing)
  • Evers, Johnny (Cubs On Shirt – Blue Sky)
  • Pattee, Harry
  • Pelty, Barney (Horizontal)
  • Powers, Mike*
  • Reulbach, Ed (Glove Showing)
  • Schulte, Wildfire (Front View)

You’ll notice I have decided to include Schulte (Front View) in the 150 Only group.  There have long been discussions among collectors as to whether Schulte belongs in this group.  He would be a shoe-in if not for the find of a single Piedmont 350-backed specimen.  To read more about that find, check out the article I wrote about it here.

There are obvious reasons why some of the above players were pulled from production, but most didn’t make much sense.  George Browne was selected off waivers by Washington on April 21, 1909.  Donlin left baseball for Vaudeville following the 1908 season and didn’t return until 1911.  On one hand, that might seem like a good reason for his card to be pulled.  On the other hand, his other 150-350 Series pose, Donlin (Seated) was not pulled from production.  It can be found with EPDG, Old Mill and the entire slate of 350 backs.  Harry Pattee played his final game in the Majors in 1908, so it makes sense that he was pulled from future printings.  Mike Powers passed away two weeks into the 1909 season.  His sad and untimely death was likely the reason he was removed from the set early.

There are rational explanations for why Browne, Pattee and Powers were pulled from production.  The same can’t be said of the remaining nine players (although we have a possible rationale for Donlin).  Each of those nine players were pulled, only to be released again with a new pose later in T206 production.  I have read the theory that perhaps a number of the Cubs players were pulled because ATC wanted to quit using “Cubs” on the players’ jerseys, instead replacing it with the “Chicago” that we see on subsequent poses.  That seemed as good a guess as any but didn’t necessarily make complete sense.

This is where the Plate Scratch research comes in.  Pat wrote the following on net54baseball.com on September 9, 2017 (to read the thread, click the link below under Sources:

Another interesting thing about this sheet is most of the 150 only subjects are all together in a horizontal row, they include Evers(Cubs), Doyle (Throwing), Donlin (Fielding), M.Brown (Cubs), Pattee, Reulbach, Burch, Ames, and Schulte who I consider a 150 only subject.

The other 150 only subjects that don’t have confirmed scratches on this sheet are Wagner, Magie (fixed name), G.Browne (team change) and Powers who is the only 150 only subject in the SC150/649 subset and he has confirmed scratches on another plate scratch sheet (the A-B sheet).

The image above is too small to be viewed on most devices, so please click this link to see a larger, zoom-able image

This shows clearly that all of these poses were together on a sheet.  While this doesn’t prove anything with 100 percent certainty, I feel very comfortable drawing a conclusion based on this data.  To me, it seems likely that the printers at ALC wanted to remove Pattee from production, and in the name of convenience, chose to pull an entire row of cards rather than do the work it would have taken to replace Pattee with a different pose.  This is why stars such as Brown, Evers and Reulbach were pulled from production: because it was the easiest way to pull Pattee from production.  If you think about it, it makes sense that the reason would be something like this.  It clearly wasn’t a conscious decision.  There’s just no reason to pull Ames (Hands at Chest) but not Ames (Portrait) and likewise Donlin (Fielding) but not Donlin (Seated).  There’s also no apparent reason to have pulled Brown, Doyle, Evers, Reulbach and Schulte, stars who were soon chosen to be featured again.

*Powers is the only member of the “150-Only” group who does not reside on Sheet 2a2b.  Powers is on Sheet 1a/1b with the other poses that were printed with Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 649 backs.

I’d like to thank Pat Romolo for collaborating with me on this series of articles.  Thanks for answering all my questions, making sure I wasn’t missing anything, and for providing all the scans I kept asking for.

Sources: