Why was Wilbur Goode printed with Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 649 back, but Ty Cobb and Cy Young were not?
An unexpected result of Pat’s research is that he was able to recreate the Piedmont 150 sheets that were later used to print Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 649 backs. I always wondered how the players were chosen to be printed with this back. Logically, if I were going to print a subset made up of just 34 cards, I would pack it with stars. So what was Wilbur Goode doing there? Well, now we know. ALC simply took two plates it already had and printed them with Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 649 backs. The printers had done their best to include a group of stars, or they might have just gone with pure convenience based on which plates they had handy. Despite missing Cobb and Young, those two plates include Bresnahan, Davis, Griffith, Johnson, Lajoie, and Mathewson, so it was by no means devoid of stars.
The image below shows Piedmont 150-backed examples of the poses in the Sweet Caporal 150 Factory 649 subset. To see a larger image, please click the link below.
https://photos.imageevent.com/patrickr/updatedplatescratchsheets/Sheet%201A-1B.jpg
Why wasn’t Ty Cobb printed with a Brown Hindu back?
Brown Hindu was the first of the tougher backs that I studied and began to collect when I got interested in back collecting. The first thing I did was to make sure I had a complete checklist of which cards were printed with Brown Hindu backs. It struck me immediately that neither Ty Cobb pose from the 150-350 Series was printed with a Brown Hindu back. I wondered why.
The plate scratches answer this question as well. If you take a look at the Plate Scratch collages below, you’ll notice that all of these players who appear together on a sheet were left off the Brown Hindu print run. Much like the SC 150/649 subset, the poses that were printed with Brown Hindu backs were likely chosen primarily for convenience on the part of the printers. In other words, they didn’t pick and choose individual players. They just took existing sheets and printed them with Brown Hindu backs. They simply chose not to use a sheet with Cobb on it for the Brown Hindu print run.
The partially recreated sheet below shows us that almost this entire section consists of poses that were not printed with Brown Hindu backs. Curiously, there is a section right in the middle (the cards inside the red rectangle) with four poses that were all printed with Brown Hindu backs. That is an odd wrinkle, and likely something that will never be fully explained.
The image below is too small to see detail, so please click this link to take a look at the image in full detail:
https://photos.imageevent.com/patrickr/updatedplatescratchsheets/Sheet%203%20Full.jpg
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:
- http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=245528
- Baseball-reference.com
- Inside T206 by Scot Reader