Actual Trading Card History - 1910, um... Caramel? or Something.

I got all cocky about showing up Topps on their Trading Card History set and then they go and throw one at me that I can't figure out. This Glavine is the current week's giveaway card from Hobby shops, and I'd like to thank Topps for leaving Tommy in a lousy Mets uniform in a card that they already photoshopped to death to give it a Retro look. Nice work there buddies. They then label the card on the back "1910 Baseball Card". Um, what? Not even a clue? throw me a bone man! There are about 50 baseball issues from 1910, most of them look the same and the rest are so obscure that it's hard to find a photo of them! I tried looking through my SCD for clues, but unfortunately the sets are listed alphabetically and not chronologically so it was a lot of work for not a lot of results.

It could technically be a T206 since they were printed in 1910, but they are more commonly referred to being a 1909 set and beside, Topps has a different style for their Topps206 rip-offs. Instead I'm thinking it's one of the many sets that look mostly like T206es but have slightly different looking pictures and a different ad on the back. I'm not 100% about this, but I'm going to guess that this design is swiped from either the American Caramel set or the Philadelphia Caramel set from 1910. Neither are an exact match, but then again Topps hasn't exactly nailed down the details on all these cards either. There's quite a few 'off' fonts even on the Topps designs and in a lot of cases the font and the ad are the only things that differentiate the T206 lookalikes.

The Philadelphia Caramel card look a lot like badly printed T206 cards. The printing doesn't look as crisp as the T206s, as you can see in the gallery linked above. Check out the rosy cheeks on Connie Mack. While the background colors are bright on many cards, others have the pastel look like Chief Myers here. The American Caramel cards also have the same inferior looking pictures, but they also are much more muted than the Philadelphia cards. Compare the harsher darker Mordecai Brown card from the Philadelphia set with the lighter feel of his American card. The Chief Bender card from this page even had the same style of background as the Glavine. The only thing that keeps me from declaring definitively that this as a knock off of the American Caramel set is the fact that while everything else appears to be right, Topps forgot to add the position between the name and the team on the bottom of the card. I know it's probably just a mistake and the Philadelphia card has the player name in all caps unlike Glavine's card, but that small little detail still bugs me. Yes, I know I take these things too seriously. Here is the bonus I got with this card:

Yep, I bought another pack of Opening Day. I still think they look ugly, but they have one advantage: When you are forced to buy a pack to get the free Topps card of the week, it's sometimes better to buy a dollar pack instead of a pack of "working on my third set" Topps or a 6 dollar pack of Upper Deck or Moments and Milestones. Somehow I got lucky and pulled Smoltz and Chuck James out of my mandatory purchase.