Tag: Sweet Caporal 649

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

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:

The “Dark Ink” Connection Between The T206 Sweet Caporal Factory 649 Subset, 150-350 Old Mill Subset, and the Elite Eleven: Part One

When you’ve handled enough T206s, certain patterns start to take shape.  It starts by noticing something small that seems a little odd on a certain card.  Most of the time these slight variations between cards are due to the inexact nature of the printing processes and don’t point us toward a larger pattern.  However, after you see the same oddities a few times with the same card, or a group of cards that can be linked together in some way, that’s when some interesting patterns can start to take shape.

Typically the articles that I write are completely researched before I publish them, but this group of articles will be a little different.  With this subject matter, it’s hard to “prove” anything, so I am content to just throw the idea out there for now.  One huge obstacle in trying to put together the pieces of this puzzle is that these 150-350 Series Old Mills are scarce.  Connecting the dots necessarily requires putting faith in the conclusions drawn from examining a small set of examples.  But, I figure I have handled more 150-350 Old Mills than just about anyone, so I feel qualified to throw out a new theory regarding them.  I’ll be interested to see what other people think, and I will continue to delve into the topic in the future.

This series of articles is going to take a look at the three backs noted above, but it feels natural to start with Old Mill, even though they were printed last.  I’ve studied T206s with Old Mill backs more extensively than any other back, and it was looking at Old Mills that lead me down this train of thought.

There are three distinct print qualities that I have observed on dozens of cards from the 150-350 Series Old Mill Subset:

1. Clean, crisp images that look more like 150 Series images than 350 Series
Sullivan Old Mill that is neither overly dark nor “washed out” in appearance
2. “Dark Ink” cards that are much darker and more heavily inked than other cards
Schlei Catching Old Mill with a noticeably darker appearance than a copy from the 150 Series
3. “Washed Out” images that lack the clarity of #1 and tend to be a bit lighter as well
Overall Portrait with Old Mill back and a “washed out” appearance

These three distinct “looks” of Old Mills from the 150-350 Series lead me to one obvious conclusion, and one that may not be so obvious.  First, because these Old Mills can be classified into three distinct groupings, clearly that means each group was printed separately.  What it doesn’t tell us is whether there is any pattern to be found.  It’s very possible that different runs on the press were just inked to varying degrees, which created the different results that we can see above.

I think there were three or more different print runs for 150-350 Series Old Mills.  I also think the different print runs were made up of a different set of players/poses on the sheets.  There seem to be some players that were not printed on the “washed out” sheets, and likewise with the “dark ink” sheets.  In Part Two, I’ll delve into the “dark ink” 150-350 Series Old Mills and we’ll see what patterns and theories we can infer from them.