Newest custom card: T202 Triplefolder Honus Wagner

As promised several days ago, here is my latest custom card creation.

It's done in the style of the 1912 Hassan Triplefolders that have been known to generations of collectors as T202, the set's number in the pioneering American Card Catalog by Jefferson Burdick.

There were 132 different cards in the original T202 set, comprised of 110-120 or so black-and-white center panels with various combinations of color end panels featuring teammates or rivals. For the most part the end panels were cropped versions of the players' cards from the previous year's T205 Gold Borders set.

My T202 homage features a couple of Pittsburg (that's how it was spelled at the time) Pirates who did not appear in the original T202s. Max Carey was only in his first full major league season in 1911 when the T205s were issued. His "rookie card" appeared in 1912 in the T207 Brown Background set. The portrait I used for this card is that used on his T207, though I tweaked the color a bit and "flopped" it to have him facing the center panel.

Wagner, of course, had made his displeasure at being pictured on a cigarette card known to the tobacco company in 1909, when his card was pulled from the T206 set. The picture I used on my T202 is one that appeared on a circa 1910 celluloid pinback.

The central action photo is something I stumbled across on the internet. It is so close to the one used on the classic T202 card, "Ty Cobb Steals Third," that when I first saw it, I knew a T202 creation was in my future.

Despite having collected baseball cards for decades, I've never owned an original T202, so I had to solicit a lot of help from the experts to broaden my card-making into this format. Most instrumental was T202 guru Lee Behrens who provided some original scans and some valuable critique as the project developed. Thanks, Lee!

Another collector, on viewing my T205 versions of the Carey and Wagner cards, told me something I never knew about T205s (and, by extension, T202). The National Leaguers in those sets feature the first use of a facsimile autograph on a baseball card. At least I always thought about it as a facsimile signature. It turns out that the signatures on the cards made no attempt to replicate the players' actual autographs; they were just identification applied by some long-gone commercial artists working on the T205/T202 issues.

By the time I fould that out, I'd already become attached to the actual signatures of Carey and Wagner, so I decided to go with those for my cards.

You'll notice that the signature on the Wagner reads, "John H Wagner." In reality, his name (as shown on my card back) was John Peter Wagner. My best guess is that by the 1910s, Wagner had capitulated to popular demand and that the "H" on this version of his signature was intended to represent his universally-known nickname of Honus. In fact, I've seen later Wagner autographs that are signed, "J. Honus Wagner."

I have one more T202-style card on my immediate to-do list of custom card projects. Be sure to watch this space for it.

Standard Catalog Update #45 : Pogue's Department Store

As promised yesterday, we present here a newly reported regional issue courtesy of Cincinnati Reds collector Patrick Smith.

What we have here is a photocard along the lines of other contemporary issues that appear to have been produced in conjunction with autograph appearances by Reds players at area stores.
It is 3-1/2" x 5-1/2" with a semi-glossy surface and blank back.

In this case, Smith speculates we're looking at a 1973 issue, as the photo of Joe Morgan on this card is identical to that on the team-issued postcard of that year.

For those not familiar with Cincinnati's retail scene, Pogue's was founded in 1863 and was a typical big city downtown department store, famed for its elaborate Christmas displays. It was merged with L.S. Ayres in 1983.

We'll list this Pogue's card in the next (2011) Standard Catalog. Perhaps in time other players in the series will turn up.

Standard Catalog Update #44 : 1970 Dayton Daily News All-Stars

I suppose it's all relative, but I've always felt that collectors of Cincinnati Reds cards and memorabilia had more than their share of regional collectibles in the post-war era. From the Harry Hartman team issues of 1939-1940 to the Kahn's hot dogs issues from 1955 through the Sixties, to Burger Beer photos, to team-issued postcard sets most years since the mid-Fifties. (I know, I know . . . we Milwaukee Braves collectors had a pretty nice selection of regionals through the 1950s. As I said, it's all relative).

I'm sure that wealth of goodies is what inspires what seems to be an extraordinary number of very dedicated, very competitive collectors. Fortunately for us, most of the these collectors are extremely generous in sharing their discoveries and their knowledge with the rest of the hobby.

One such collector, Patrick Smith, recently forwarded information about a couple of Reds items that are worth adding to the Standard Catalog.

The first is a pair of variations of the 1970 "Bubble-gumless Cards" issued as newspaper cutouts by the Dayton Daily News. This is one of the largest of that eras's newspaper "card" sets, at least among sets that were baseball-only.

For many years the checklist for that set stood at 160 players from what looks to be all major league teams in both leagues. The pictures were printed in black-and-white in a size of about 3-1/2" x 4".

Smith has sent scans of two previously uncataloged paper cards that have to be considered variations of the basic set. They are All-Star cards of Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, the two Reds that had been selected to the N.L. squad in fan balloting. The All-Star versions are very similar to the regular cards except that they are printed with red background decor to complement the black type and b/w photo. Instead of a card number in the panel below the picture, there is the designation "All-Star".

The existence of these two special cards leads a cataloger to wonder if that was the extent of the All-Star series. The 1970 All-Star Game was played at Riverfront Stadium on July 14. The Nationals won their eighth consecutive A-S contest and the game is famous for Pete Rose's slide into home plate that broke the left shoulder of Indians catcher Ray Fosse.

Smith is unsure of when the All-Star cards were printed in the Dayton paper. They might have been printed when the team rosters were announced, or they might have been printed on July 14.

Were the other A-S starters included in the series? Were the other Reds who were chosen for the team (Pete Rose and pitchers Jim Merritt and Wayne Simpson)?

Let us know if you can shed any light. Tomorrow we'll present Smith's other Reds "find."

Standard Catalog Update #43 : 1955 Topps Jim Robertson variations

I'm still working through my holiday vacation backlog and I came upon a report from Cliff Bowman about an heretofore uncataloged variation among the 1955 Topps high numbers.

Bowman sent a scan of the back card #177, Jim Robertson, on which the red lines that complete the stat boxes for lifetime batting average and putouts are incomplete.

I checked the various '55T Robertsons for sale on eBay, and ALL of the cards that had back images available were like this (incomplete boxes).

When I posted an inquiry on the post-war section of the Net 54 baseball card forum, however, I was surprised to find the several of those who responded were able to provide scans of Robertson cards with complete boxes in that area.

I'm not sure which version was printed first, and so far the relative numbers of the two variations seem about equal, so that initially there doesn't seem to be any value differential warranted.

Back on Sept. 20 we published a similar discovery concerning the 1956 Topps Willard Schmidt card. Two days later we had an update that showed the Schmidt card was really a progressive problem that occured during the course of printing, rather than a pre-press variation. For that reason we decided not to list it as a variation in the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards.

That makes it hard to specify why I'm leaning towards listing this card as a variation. If, after publication of this report, and a suitable time for reader response, we don't hear of any "transitional" variations between the "full boxes" and "partial boxes" versions. You'll likely see this listed in the 2011 edition.

Michael Oher -- I'll jump on the bandwagon

No, I haven't seen the movie yet. I haven't been to a movie since 2006 (The Longest Yard) when I was totally turned off by the entire theater-going experience.

But I have been an Ole Miss fan since the 1980s. So when I noticed that there were a lot of great color pictures of Oher available on the 'net, I figured I'd knock out a 1955-style card over the holidays.

Now that the Packers didn't advance in the playoffs, and since the Giants (Eli) aren't in it, I guess I'll pull for the Ravens to make it in the AFC. In the NFC I'm hoping to see the Vikings in the Super Bowl. I'm not all caught up in the love Brett/hate Brett thing that we have going here in Wisconsin, but how can you not root for a 40-year-old quarterback to win the big one? Though if he does, I'll have to revise my Brett Favre custom card. I made that right after he "retired" the first time and it really should be updated.

My T205 Honus Wagner, Max Carey

I've been expanding my repertoire of custom card creations. In recent weeks I've been working on replicating the classic 1911 T205 Gold Borders with a Honus Wagner card "that never was."

Because he said he didn't want children buying cigarettes in an attempt to get a card with his picture, Wagner refused to cede the rights to issue a card of him to the cigarette companies during the heyday of the tobacco-card era circa 1909-1919. That's what makes his T206 card the "King" of baseball cards and worth six figures in even the most deplorable condition.

It was therefore quite natural that I chose "The Flying Dutchman" as the subject for my first T205 project. I'm still fine tuning the images, but shown above are the back and two possible fronts I'm considering when I finally get the cards into print.

The green-background card uses a portrait identical to the famed T206 Wagner, but has more of an artwork look as the result of its having been used on a contemporary American Caramel Co. issue. The blue-background card uses a portrait that originally appeared on a pin-back celluloid button.

At right is the semi-final version of a T205 Max Carey "rookie card." Actually, Carey's real rookie card came in 1912, in the T207 Brown Background set, but he could have appeared in T205 if the tobacco/card magnates had recognized the future Hall of Famer's potential earlier.

The portrait on my T205 is a "flopped" version of that which appeared on his T207.

I haven't produced a back for my T205 Carey, and I may never do so, because the fact is that both of these T205s are just stepping stones to a more ambitious project I've got underway.

I'm currently at work on a pair of 1911 T202 Triplefolders. Like the original T202s, the end panels of my cards will be adaptations of the players' T205s. I've got a great action photo of Honus Wagner to use as the card's center panel, and have completed the back write-ups in a style that I'm confident pays proper tribute to those unsung writers who did the work on the original T205s and T202s.

Kepp your eye on this space in coming days for the debut of my T202 custom card, titled "Wagner Safe at Third."

Watch out for Mantle program reprints

If there was a Hall of Fame for unsung baseball historians, the minor league wing should be named for John G. Hall of Columbia, Mo.

For the past 16 years, Hall has been chronicling the Kansas- Oklahoma-Missouri League, a Class D circuit that existed for only half that long, from 1946-1952.

Hall publishes a quarterly (or so) newsletter called The KOM League Remembered, and in recent years has been supplementing the print presentation with what he calls KOM League Flash Reports on the internet.

Hall seems to know virtually every alumnus of that minor league or their surviving relatives. His newsletter and Flash Reports are full of great stories of the ballplayer veterans of the K-O-M League and of virtually everything else related to the circuit. His writings bring to life many of the faces that card collectors are familiar with from their Bowman and Topps cards of the late 1940s and 1950s.

These reports are not only historically important, but they are written in an entertaining style that makes them great reading for any baseball fan. You can get a sense of the author's style from the copyright notice on each issue, which concludes, "All rights reserved until the day I die. Within a month afterward no one will remember ths publication ever existed. And, justifiably so." Elsewhere he states, "Some of the news in this publication isn't fit to print, but is."

Besides his work in detailing and preserving the history of the K-O-M, Hall was in the past involved in setting up reunions for its players. In conjunction with the 1998 reunion, he created reprints of a pair of scorecards for games in which Mickey Mantle had played with the 1949 Independence Yankees and the 1950 Joplin Miners.

Mantle is unarguably the most famous alumnus of the K-O-M League. Hall wrote a 2005 book titled, Mickey Mantle: Before the Glory, that has long since sold out at its cover price of $29.95 and now sells on used-book sites for as much as $100+. He's also the author of a K-O-M League photo book, Images of Baseball, published in 2004.

In exchanging e-mails with Hall in recent months, since he contacted me following our recent posts on Ponca City Dodgers cards of 1952, the subject of his scorecard reprints came up and we agreed that it would be a good idea to publicize their existence so that collectors are less likely to be fooled into buying them as valuable original artifacts of Mantle's minor league days.

And that IS a concern, because the reprints are extremely well done and are not overtly identified as reproductions. There was a total of 500 of each of the scorecards made in 1998, and besides distributing them to the players at the reunion, some have been dispersed to fans and collectors over the years.

The cover and that portion of each of the scorecards that lists Mantle are shown here.

At top is a 1949 scorecard of a game between Mantle's I-Yankees and the Iola Indians. Like the original, it is a four-pager printed in 7"x 11-1/4" format, printed in red and black. The Mick, wearing number 16 and playing shortstop, batted seventh in that game and was hitting .315 at the time. I can't decipher the scorer's (Hall said the original from which this was reprinted was scored by a friend of Iola right fielder Dick Getter) system, but it looks like the Yankees were 6-0 winners over Iola, though I can't tell what Mantle's contributions might have been. Obviously this neatly detailed scoring would immediately identify any example of a 1949 Independence-Iola scorecard that might be offered in the collector market as a reprint. So would the unique "Lucky Number" 10016 on the cover.

Some years ago I got into a bidding war on eBay for a similar Independence-Iola scorecard. It wasn't one of Hall's reprints, since it was unscored and had a different lucky number on the cover. I lost out to another collector, but can't today recall what the winning bid was. I wanted the card because of its Iola connection, rather than its ties to Mantle, so I wasn't willing to seriously compete with the Mantle fanatics.

The other Hall reprint is for a 1950 Western Association game with the St. Joseph Cardinals visiting Mantle's Joplin Miners. This was an eight-page affair, in 7" x 9-3/4" size, printed in red and black. The scorecard portion is unmarked, but the reprint would be readily identified by the Lucky Number 5307 on the third page, under a photo of Joplin infielder Carl Lombardi. (I wonder if other printings of the scorecard might have a photo of Mantle?). For the Miners, Mantle was at shortstop, batting clean-up and wearing number 12.

The historic value of scorecards like these would be significant even without the Mantle name. Significant at least to true fans of minor league baseball back in the day.

Just off the top of his head, Hall made these comments about some of the players listed in the line-ups on the Joplin-St. Joseph card.

"The guy in the St. Joseph lineup, playing first base, was "Smokey" Joe Cunningham who was with the Cardinals four years later. Hal Olt was at Springfield, Mo. in 1941 with Stan Musial. The Barth playing left field was Eugene Barth whose greatest fame came as an official in the National Football League. The right fielder that night for St. Joseph was Ace Adamcewicz. He was killed during the Korean War. He died November 21, 1952 in Ft. Devens, Mass. Both catchers at Joplin that year had major league affiliations. Cal Neeman eventually made it to the Chicago Cubs et. al. and the other catcher was the late Lyle Westrum. He was the younger brother of long-time major league catcher, Wes Westrum. Lyle died at an earlyage while duck hunting. I got to know his family a few years ago when I had the reunion of the Joplin Miners at the kickoff of my "book tour" for Mickey Mantle: Before the Glory.

Hopefully, publication of this information on the scorecard reprints will help prevent any fraudulent misrepresentation while at the same time engendering some appreciation for Hall's enthusiasm for K-O-M baseball.

If you have any interest in minor league ball in the immediate post-war era, I can't urge you strongly enough to contact John Hall and support his efforts at historic preservation. Check him out at http://komleaguebaseball.blogspot.com. Hall has also offered to make the few remaining pairs of his reprints available to collectors at $25 per pair, postpaid. The chances of an original of one of these Mantle-related scorecards turning up in the hobby market are slim to none, so this is a rare chance to get the next best thing. The revenue raised will be put towards the printing and mailing of his newsletter. You can order by sending check or money order to John Hall, 1709 Rainwood Place, Columbia, MO 65203.