Recently, a group of 80 hand-cut Polar Bear came to market via Weiss Auctions. To my knowledge, this is the first time these cards have been known to the hobby. When I first heard of Weiss Auctions, I assumed it was a small auction house, but upon checking out their website it looks like that is not the case at all. It looks like they mostly deal in antiques, but they have sold some high profile baseball items in the past including a SGC 40 T206 Wagner (which sold for $791k). I don’t think Weiss Auctions is on the radar of most T206 collectors, but it may be a good site to bookmark just in case they get some more cards in the future.
The cards were sold in two groups, one had 44 cards and the other had 36. If my count is correct, there are 59 unique poses in the group, with 21 of them having a duplicate. You’ll notice that all 80 cards feature poses from the 350 Only Series. There are two Hall of Famers in the group, Joe McGinnity and Jake Beckley. Unfortunately, neither of them is duplicated.
The quality control on Polar Bears was pretty good, so it’s rare to see a significant print flaw on a card with a Polar Bear back. Prior to seeing this group, I had never seen or heard of a hand-cut T206 with a Polar Bear back.
When a friend of mine told me about these cards, I couple of questions came to my mind immediately:
- Did these cards all come from the same sheet(s)?
- I wonder if they can be lined up and put back together like a puzzle?
A friend of mine won the lot of 44 and sent them to me so that I could take a look at them. I was excited to see if I’d be able to line them up and re-create a partial sheet (or even just connect a few of the cards).
When I received the cards in the mail, I realized pretty quickly that it was not going to be easy. While all of the cards are clearly hand-cut, only a few of them have a really unique cut. Ideally they’d all have some wacky cuts that would make it easier to figure out how they fit together. When I sat down to work on the puzzle, I was hoping to make some cool discoveries about how the sheet may have looked.
I’m sad to say, I didn’t find any cards that I’m 100% sure were situated next to each other on a sheet. The only possible match is these two Bugs Raymond cards below. I’m not totally sure they are a match though, as I think the space between the to cards looks a little thin.
I still think these cards came from the same sheets, but unfortunately I was not able to prove it. My hypothesis is that the cards were cut from a sheet by hand, but whoever cut them did a little extra trimming on some of the cards. If that happened, it would explain the difficulty I had in trying to piece them back together like puzzle pieces.
I don’t know who won the other lot of 36 cards. If you won it, please reach out to me and let me know. There’s still a chance that some of the cards I have fit with some of the cards in the other group. It would be pretty significant if we could re-created a partial 350 Series Polar Bear sheet. Even if we’re not able to learn more from this group, it’s still pretty cool that there are now some Polar Bear backed examples of printer’s scrap in the hobby.
