350 – That T206 life

T206 Sweet Caporal 350 Factory 30 “Big Factory Numbers”

Luke April 1, 2017 April 2, 2017

A fun oddity to keep an eye for are the “Big Factory 30s”. Certain poses from the 150-350 series can be found with a large “30” right in the middle at the bottom of the back, like this Tannehill above. It appears that the large “30” was used to differentiate sheets of Sweet Caporal 350 factory 30 from Sweet Caporal 350 factory 25, and vice versa.

There have not been any of these “Big Factory Numbers” found on Sweet Caporal 150 backs that I know of. My guess is there were some problems in the print shop during 150 series production that lead to them adding these large numbers to the sheets for the 350 series, so that the process of getting them out to the correct factories would run more smoothly. This article focuses on the Big Factory 30s, mainly because we have more data about them. There are 22 different poses that have been found with a “Big Factory 30”, while I only know of two players who have been found with a “Big Factory 25” (Ames portrait and Steinfeldt portrait).

Here are the 22 poses which have been found with Sweet Caporal 350 “Big Factory 30s”. I expect that more will be discovered, but for now this is the known checklist. Thank you to Erick Summers for keeping track of these over on the net54 forum.

Ames (portrait)
Beaumont
Clarke (portrait)
Cobb (bat on shoulder)
Dahlen (Brooklyn)
Dooin
Durham
Gilbert
Hemphill
Johnson (portrait)
Jones, Fielder (portrait)
Keeler (with bat)
Killian (pitching)
Mathewson (portrait)
McGraw (no cap)
Merkle (portrait)
Overall (portrait)
Seymour (batting)
Spade
Steinfeldt (portrait)
Tannehill (“L” on front)
Wagner (bat left)

Erick and others have been keeping track of these oddities for the last few years in this thread on net54baseball.com. If you have or know of any Sweet Caporal 350s with Big Factory Numbers at the bottom (either 25 or 30) please stop by that thread and add your card or scan to the list.

For the most part, each of these checklist entries represents a unique card. However, some of the above poses have been found more than once. I have seen three different Steinfeldts for instance. Because not everyone knows about these cards, there are probably quite a few of them out there that have not been noticed yet. Often the top of the “30” is just barely visible, and doesn’t look like much more than a bit of red ink. This is another reason why these cards tend to fly under the radar.

Is the George Davis Sovereign 350 a Hoax?

Luke March 9, 2017 March 5, 2017

For awhile now, I’ve been keeping an eye out for a George Davis Sovereign 350. It’s a front/back combo that has been thought to exist, but to have printed in very limited quantities. The SGC Pop Report lists one Sovereign 350 back for Davis (an SGC 80) and PSA’s Pop Report shows zero copies. In addition, a collector has been actively searching for this card via the Buy/Sell/Trade on net54baseball.com for a few years, with no success.

This recent post by Jon Weil on the net54 forum brought up an interesting question:

I looked through the population reports and found eight cards from the T206 Resource list that both PSA and SGC show no record of having graded. We previously had mentioned the Fred Clarke, Frank Chance red portrait, and Jack Chesbro. Here’s the list of the eight “pop zero” Print Group 1 Sov 350 (forest green) cards that T206 Resource classifies as “confirmed.”

Frank Chance Red Portrait Chi Cubs
Jack Chesbro Portrait NY Highlanders
Fred Clarke Portrait Pittsburgh
Tim Jordan Portrait Brooklyn
Ed Killian Pitching Detroit
Ed Konetchy Glove High StL Cardinals
Tommy Leach Portrait Pittsburgh
Jim Pastorius Ready to Throw Brooklyn

Can anyone out there confirm independently that any of these eight cards exists?

On a related note, SGC’s pop report shows a single graded copy of George Davis, while PSA shows no graded copies. I’m wondering if SGC might have made an error. Has anyone else ever seen a George Davis with a Sov 350 back?

He brings up a lot of good questions here. The theory that the Davis Sovereign 350 could just be a data entry error makes a lot of sense. As a general rule, poses from Print Group 1 that were printed with both Sovereign 150 and Sovereign 350 backs are much more plentiful with the Sovereign 350 back. This has made the Davis somewhat of a curiosity. If it does exist, it’s the only Sovereign 350 back that is a true rarity. Yesterday, Jon was able to ask a representative for SGC if there is any way to double-check their records to make sure the SGC 80 Davis Sovereign 350 was indeed a 350 back. He was told that unfortunately, they do not scan cards they grade and they have no way of going back and looking at the card.

The other cards listed above are also very questionable inclusions in the Sovereign 350 checklist. Since we know that Sovereign 350 tends to be more plentiful than Sovereign 150 for Print Group 1 poses, all of those poses above should be relatively easy to find with a Sovereign 350 back. That is, if they exist at all. So far, no one has come forward in the net54 thread with proof of the existence of any of the above cards with Sovereign 350 backs. We know that T206resource.com has these cards listed as confirmed, with the exception of Fred Clarke portrait. They have Clarke portrait listed as a “Probable No Print” in the Sovereign 350 checklist, but in the T206 Master Checklist, it is confirmed to exist. Hopefully, a deeper look into all nine of these subjects will help us get to the bottom of this. T206resource.com is an invaluable tool for back collectors, and I’m not trying to nit-pick their work. Their checklists are extremely reliable, and they allow collectors to have conversations like this using a common rubric. However, in this case I think it’s fair to wonder if these Sovereign 350s with zero Pops might be data entry errors on their part. The SGC Pop Report below for Art Devlin shows a typical distribution of Sov150 v.s. Sov350:

Personally, I’d be surprised if Davis or the other 8 poses listed above exist with Sovereign 350 backs. I am about 99% sure I’ve not seen any of them, but to be fair I’ve only been actively looking for a few years. If evidence that any of these cards do exist surfaces, I will be sure to write an article with an update. I hope they do show up, so that we have some more scarce cards to hunt after.

If you own any of these cards, or have scans of any, please send me an email at luke@thatt206life.com

Understanding the American Beauty backs: T206 American Beauty 350 no frame (Part 3/4)

Luke February 9, 2017 December 15, 2016

There are 37 different poses in the American Beauty 350 no frame checklist. This subset was released in 1910 and consists entirely of poses from the 350-460 series (also referred to as Print Group 3). It’s easy to confuse the two American Beauty 350 backs. There are two important distinctions. First, AB350nf backs tend to sell for more than a AB350w/f back in similar condition. The reason: There are only 37 cards with AB350nf backs and 190 AB350w/f backs. So, in the aggregate, AB350nf is the scarcer back. However, when you are looking for a specific pose with either an AB350nf or an AB350w/f back, you will likely have a harder time finding the AB350w/f. This is because, on average, a specific pose from the AB350w/f checklist is scarcer than a specific pose from the AB350nf checklist. To put it in simpler terms: The average combined PSA & SGC pop report totals for a given AB350nf card are greater than 10. For AB350w/f, the average combined total is less than 10.

19 of the 37 cards in this subset were also printed with American Beauty 460 backs. This can be confusing because sometimes you will see a listing for one of these cards that simply states the back is an American Beauty back, but does not tell you whether it is a 350 or 460 back. These 19 poses exist with both AB350nf and AB460 backs, but are much scarcer and more valuable with the AB460 back:

Burch fielding
Conroy with bat
Crawford with bat
Jennings two hands showing
Jordan batting
Lake St. Louis, no ball
Leifield batting
Manning pitching
McQuillan with bat
Mullin with bat
Overall hand at face level
Pelty vertical
Pfeister throwing
Steinfeldt with bat
Wagner bat on right shoulder
Wilhelm with bat
Willetts
Willis batting
Wiltse pitching

Of course, this means that 18 of the poses in the AB350nf subset do not exist with AB460 back. For these 18 cards, it is easier to read the SGC and PSA pop reports and get a feel for how many copies have been graded. SGC and PSA have not always differentiated between the two backs. This makes it tough to get a handle on the true populations of AB350nf versus AB460 for the group of 19 above. I went through both the PSA and SGC Pop Reports and attempted to compile the combined Pop Report totals for each of the 37 cards in the AB350nf subset. This proved to be more difficult than I had imagined. For all of the 19 poses listed above, there are generic entries which could be either AB350nf or AB460 backs. We know that they are far more likely to represent a AB350nf back, but we can’t be sure.

The table above shows the results of my research into the SGC and PSA Pop Report Numbers for every card in the American Beauty 350 no frame subset. Because both PSA and SGC have generic American Beauty listings, it is impossible to know with 100% certainty how many of each pose are in each Pop Report. However, it is possible to look at all the numbers and make a reliable guesstimate. The table below shows the work I used to arrive at the estimates above. As you can see, there are 15 poses in the table below that do not have any ambiguous entries. For those 15, we have the exact Pop Report numbers. For the other 22, I have made an educated guess. For the cards in the AB350nf subset that also exist with an AB460 back, we know that the AB350nf will be far more plentiful. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a 4:1 ratio. This is how I arrived at my estimates. If there are 10 generic American Beauty backs in the PSA Pop Report, I have estimated that 2 of them will be AB460 backs, and 8 of them will be AB350nf backs.

This data shows that the individual cards in this subset are not particularly rare. Steinfeldt has the lowest Pop, at an estimated 10 copies. There are plenty of Old Mill, Tolstoi, AB350w/f, and Cycle 350 front/back combos that are more scarce than any card in the AB350nf subset. But, demand for this back remains high. A few of these cards have relatively high Pop numbers, but I don’t recall seeing a single copy for sale in the last couple years. Apparently they are out there, but they don’t change hands often.

Thanks to t206resource.com for the use of their checklists.

Understanding the American Beauty backs: T206 American Beauty 350 with frame (Part 2/4)

Luke February 9, 2017 November 30, 2016

American Beauty 350 with frame is the most straight-forward of all the AB subsets. The checklist consists of 190 different poses. As a result, it is easier to list the “no-prints” here than the full checklist. 184 of the cards in the AB350w/f checklist come from Print Group 2. Print group 2 consists of 202 cards. This leaves these 18 poses that were not printed with an AB350w/f back:

It’s not readily apparent why most of these players were excluded from the AB350w/f print run. Demmitt STL and O’Hara STL are the two that make sense, because we know the team name changes were made near the end of 350 series production, and they were only printed with Polar Bear backs.

That covers 184 of the 190 cards in the subset. The other 6 are the “Super Prints”, also known as Print Group 5. The Super Prints are an interesting subset that have their own rules. They were printed with more backs than any other poses in the entire set. I will most likely devote an entire post to them at some point. As you can see, all 6 were very popular players at the time:

As I said in Part One of this series, there are more T206s with AB350w/f backs in existence than AB350nf backs. The reason is that AB350w/f were printed on 190 different poses while AB350nf backs were printed on only 37 poses. So, if you just want one copy of each back and you don’t care who is on the front, you’ll have an easier time finding the AB350w/f. You’ll also most likely pay less.

One thing that many collectors do not realize is that individual poses with AB350w/f backs are usually more scarce than their AB350nf counterparts. I think the best way to illustrate this is with an example. There are 8 players who have one pose that was printed with AB350w/f back and another with AB350nf back. If you were working on player back runs for any of these players, you would most likely find the AB350w/f back tougher to locate. 4 of those players also were printed with AB460 backs. I will exclude them from the example because their Pop Reports are harder to read. PSA only recently started to differentiate between AB350nf and AB460 backs, so our Pop Report Results would be suspect if I were to include those 4 players. Here is the list of the remaining 4 players, along with PSA and SGC pop report numbers for each front/back combo*.

This example serves as a fairly random sampling of cards from each subset. As you can see, each card on the AB350w/f list is more scarce than the AB350nf pose. To get a better idea of the Pop Reports for cards with each back, play around a little bit with the PSA and SGC Pop Reports.

Some poses are very tough to find with AB350w/f and command a premium over the more common subjects. Thielman (2 combined in PSA & SGC Pop Reports) and Herbie Moran (3 combined in PSA & SGC Pop Reports) are a couple examples. There are also some subjects that are pretty easy to find. The best tool we have to help us judge scarcity is the Pop Reports, so I recommend using them to help you make a buying or selling decision.

*-For each of these players, the SGC Pop Report also lists a generic “American Beauty” back. Since these cards could be either pose, I simply excluded them from the results.

Thank you to T206resource.com for allowing me to use their checklists.