On February 6th 2016, Pat posted a thread on net54 titled “I Believe This Could Be A Complete Horizontal Layout For This T206 Sheet”. In it, he goes into great detail about how he re-created a Piedmont 150 sheet by connecting the Plate Scratches on the backs of the cards.
In Part One of this article, I posted a Cliffs Notes version of Pat’s net54 thread. You can read Part One by clicking the link below:
Piedmont 150 Bull Durham with dark plate scratch on the back
For Part Two, I wanted to dive in a little deeper. Pat was kind enough to work with me by providing scans and answering all the questions I had. Our conversation is below:
Q: How long have you been collecting T206?
A: I purchased my first T206s at the 2003 National in Atlantic City. I don’t remember exactly how many, but it was around ten raw Fair-to-VG commons that included a couple of Sovereigns and a Jennings (One Hand) in a PSA 5 holder.
Q: Before beginning to collect the P150 Plate Scratches, how did you collect the set?
A: I never really had a strategy, but early on I did have a phase when I was collecting non-Piedmonts and Sweet Caporals (like many T206 collectors, I wish I had stayed with that longer).
Q: How did you first become interested in the plate scratches?
A: When Steve Birmingham started the thread on Net54 about the plate scratches, he was looking for scans. So I checked my collection and found that I had one. I started tracking ebay and past sales looking for scans to send Steve. Each one I found motivated me to search for more, hoping he would be able to come up with a sheet layout from them.
Q: Do you remember the first card you owned that had a plate scratch?
A: It was a Shipke scratch that I had in my collection and, coincidentally it matched up next to one of the Cobb scans that Steve had.
Q: What gave you the idea to try and re-create an entire sheet of Piedmont 150s using the plate scratches?
A: Once again, all the credit goes to Steve. Steve and I were emailing back and forth. I was sending him scans of the scratches I found and he was working on trying to piece a sheet together. At the time it seemed like he was gaining the most traction around the Cobb, but in a couple of our emails he stated he didn’t have much free time to work on it. I don’t think anyone was sure if there was more than one sheet involved, but I decided to try and see what I could come up with from a Seymour I had with a double scratch on it.
The circled pink mark offers more evidence that Seymour and Cicotte were neighbors on this Piedmont 150 sheet
Q: Can you share any breakthroughs that you have had while working on it?
A: There have been several, but I would say three of the main ones are:
The first time I found an unconfirmed scratch using a template I made off the Seymour scratch.
Finding a Seymour with a print mark on the front that connected to a mark on the front of a Cicotte (Seymour and Cicotte have several different scratches on the back that link them together).
Filling the last missing slot on what I call the “A-B sheet”.
Q: Have you had any missing pieces to the puzzle that have taken you a very long time to find?
A: There are still a few that I think should exist and probably a lot more I don’t know about. I think the A-B Sheet is complete minus a second subject that matches O’Leary, but I can’t say for sure. It took me four years to find a Gibson that filled the Gibson/Bresnahan slot in the A-B Sheet. A month or two later, I found the Bresnahan. Also, Steve had sent me a scan of a Powell scratch that I could never find another scan of until one was listed on ebay about a month ago. Coincidentally, another one popped up a couple weeks later. So it took me almost five years to find one, and then two showed up within weeks of each other.
Q: Do you try to own a copy of each scratch, or are you generally happy to just save scans?
A: In the very beginning I was just saving scans, but I purchased a couple of the cheaper ones when I saw them on ebay. I found when I had them in hand I could glean more information from them. I have a few that had a second scratch on them that I didn’t notice until I had them. I have also picked up a few that only had front scans in the listing but I knew they were plate scratches because of a flaw on the front. I have at least one copy of the majority of them, but I do lack most of the expensive ones. There are four different Cobb (Bat on) scratches, two Cobb (Green Portrait), three Johnson (Portrait), three Mathewson (White Cap) and one Mathewson (Portrait). I do have one of the Cobb (Bat On), but the rest are too expensive for me.
Q: Is there anything I didn’t think to ask that you have learned from your work on this project?
A: On a side note, the mystery surrounding the Plank continues over to the Plate Scratches. There are only a few (all hand-cut) Piedmont 150 Planks, but two of them have the same Plate Scratch. The Plate Scratch on the Plank goes almost straight across. All of the other Plate Scratches are on a few different angles, so the Plank doesn’t match up with any of them.
I do have a theory about why this might be. Awhile back someone mentioned that the scratches could have been caused by a nail or something on a shelf they were stored on. I have seen pictures of the stones on shelves and also on pallets.
If a worker taking one of the stones off the shelf or pallet slid it back and turned it to grab one of the corners, it would create a straight scratch for a couple of inches and an angled scratch across the rest of the stones. If Plank was on the end of a sheet, that would cause the straight scratch that’s seen on the two examples.
On February 6th, 2016, Pat Romolo posted a thread on net54 titled “I Believe This Could Be A Complete Horizontal Layout For This T206 Sheet”. In it, he goes into great detail on how he put together a complete Piedmont 150 sheet, using Plate Scratches on the backs of the cards. I asked Pat to explain his Piedmont 150 Plate Scratch project, and this is what he said,
At some point, damage occurred to a few of the stones used for the Piedmont 150 back plates. The damage might have been caused by something between the stones or something on a shelf or pallet that they were stored on. It’s also possible that it could have been caused by cracks in the limestone, but I’m leaning more towards the scratches.
This two part series is meant to be a companion piece to Pat’s net54 thread. Think of them as a Cliffs Notes of sorts. I’ve done my best to summarize the most significant discoveries Pat has made, but I strongly urge you to follow this link and read the net54 thread in its entirety:
In Part One, we’ll take a look at some of the most important posts from the thread:
Post #2
Pat unveils the complete sheet, which he has re-created. This particular sheet is composed of 17 different poses from left to right and each pose is repeated 12 times vertically (the image at the top of this article).
Post #13
Erick Summers responds to an earlier question by pointing out that to date, no Piedmont 150 backed “two-namer” card has been found with a plate scratch. The sheet that Pat re-created has the same subjects repeated vertically. We know that some sheets had more than one player in a vertical column because a number of “two-namer” cards like the Hinchman-Stovall below have been found. The fact that no “two-namers” have been found with a plate scratch means the sheet layouts were changed over time. Before Pat put this sheet together, I think most T206 collectors (at least the ones who are really into the minutiae) believed that most sheets were 17 poses wide and featured at least 2 subjects repeated vertically.*
T206 Hinchman/Stovall Piedmont 150 “two namer”
Post #34
In response to a comment made by a member who was having trouble understanding the significance of the project, Pat posted an additional bit of supporting evidence. Seymour (Batting) and Cicotte appear next to each other on the re-created sheet because the Plate Scratches on the back show that they were neighbors. Pat posted front scans of each pose sharing a pink mark on the front that confirms they were right next to each other.
Post #45
Pat posts a scan of a mis-cut Sheckard (No Glove Showing) with Goode showing on the right side with a Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 30 back. One of the missing spots in Pat’s template was next to Goode. Pat had looked for a Sheckard with Plate Scratch for awhile with no luck until finding one that fit the template the day he made this post.
T206 Sheckard Goode SW Cap 150 Fact 30
Post #47
Pat posts:
I was pretty sure before but now I’m positive this sheet mirrors a SC150/649
sheet and I think this is one of two 649 sheets that were printed.
This is a huge discovery. I had wondered in the past how the 34 poses in the Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 649 subset were chosen. The players chosen never made much sense to me. Pat has proven they were selected pretty much at random. The printers just used two sheets that they had handy.
Post #50
Pat posts a summary of what he has learned up to that point.
This 3 card section shows the scratches up close
*The 460 Only series is an exception to this loose rule of thumb. To date, we haven’t found any “two-namers” from the 460 Only Series, leading us to believe that vertical rows most likely featured only one pose.
