OCD is occasionally useful

Anyone who has read more than two posts on this blog has figured out by now that I am a Braves fan. A natural consequence of having a devoted following to a team and an incurable card addiction is that you tend to collect a ton of that team's cards. Needless to say, I have put together a few Braves team sets. I'm starting to get to the point where the number of affordable cards I need for my Topps team sets from the 50's and 60's are beginning to dwindle. The holes in my collection are mostly Aarons, Spahns and Mathews with few Buhls, Menkes and Alous left for me to find. So obviously since I don't have enough expensive cards to chase I decided to go through my collection of cards from the 30's and 40s and add those team sets to my Braves binder.

The good thing about the Braves teams from the 30's and 40's is that they were all terrible and there are not many stars that have to be chased. The only truly impossible Braves card from that era is the '35 Goudey Babe Ruth, but reprints of that card are available pretty cheap. Even the Hall of Famers Rabbit Maranville from '33 Goudey and '35 Diamond Stars and Al Lopez from '38 Goudey are affordable as long as I'm willing to scrounge around for ones in a Tipton grade. With this in mind, I got them all together, found a team set checklist and started putting the Goudeys, Diamond Stars and Play Balls together in pages. My cunning plan hit a snag however, I couldn't find a 1939 Play Ball team set list anywhere to save my life.


This guy didn't have a list for 1939 Play Ball. The usually reliable reprint sellers on eBay didn't have a Bees* set up for sale. Yahoo Auctions died, so that wasn't an option any more. My eyes! The Googles do nothing! Not one 1939 Play Ball checklist with team designation to be found.

Now you think this was going to stop me? Oh hell no. I would not rest until I figured out which cards from that set were Bees. God forbid I just put the ones I had in order and rearrange them later once a reprint set went on sale. Utilizing the resources of eBay PowerSellers (thank goodness for Mike Wheat) and advanced Google-fu I finally figured it out. For anyone who wants to know, here is the 1939 Play Ball Boston Bees team set checklist:

49 Eddie Miller
57 Buddy Hassett
61 Tony Cuccinello
69 Elbie Fletcher
70 Fred Frankhouse
72 Debs Garms
85 Johnny Cooney
87 Milt Shoffner
120 Rabbit Warstler
121 Bill Posedel
149 Max West
155 Jimmy Outlaw

As a service to my fellow collector, once I get it together I'll post the complete team checklist separately. so the next poor schmuck looking for a team checklist from this set will be able to find it in a search.


*Yes, Bees. The 1935 team was so ungodly awful it ran Babe Ruth out of the league and prompted the team owners to change the name from Braves to Bees. An ahead of its time PC name change, a switch to blue and yellow team colors and more uniform design changes than the Diamondbacks didn't improve the team's play so they went back to the Braves in 1941.