Card of the Week 09/15/08

There were two ways I could go this week. An insanely detailed complex post, or something quick and easy. Since I have about a dozen e-mails to respond to, packages to prepare and general life crap to attend to, I'm going to go easy. This week's Card of the Week is of K-Rod, the new single season saves champ.

It's an amazing achievement, but I feel a little bummed for Steve. It sucks to have a record held by a player from your favorite team broken. Then again, William is pretty happy right now so it all evens out I suppose.

So what of this card up above? What is this thing? It's a Topps Trading Card History insert from 2008 Topps. TCH61 to be exact. Like many of the cards in the set there is no exact description of what set the design is supposed to be from, just "1952 Baseball Card". Topps has done this before, think back to last year when Bowman Heritage was released.


This sucker was a box topper in the 2007 Bowman Heritage Hobby Boxes. The set based on 1952 Bowman. The two cards look a little different because the box topper left off the text box for some reason, but both took their design from this set:

1952 Red Man Chewing Tobacco. Red Man did not significantly change the design from 1952-1955 when they inserted them in pouches of chewing tobacco. If you've seen one Red Man card, you've kind of seen them all, but then again, the design is so good it didn't really need changing. You'll notice that the Gordon card has a little tab on the bottom while Earl here does not. You can see why on the back:


If you read the bottom of the ad, you'll see that 50 of the stubs on the bottom could be exchanged for a major league baseball cap. PSA and Gem Mint and 'trimmed' was not in any kid's vocabulary in the 1950s, but "GEE WHIZ! FREE BALLCAP!" sure was. As a result the vast majority of Red Man cards on the market are found sans tab. As far as I'm concerned the cards look so good they don't need a tab. The bright colors, illustration and writeup are good enough for me. Each set contains a 25 player 'team' for both the National and American Leagues. The '52 and '53 sets also include a manager for each team bumping the total checklist to 52 cards each.

If you're not overly concerned about condition this is a extremely affordable oddball set from the '50s. The '52 set has the key card of the series - Ted Williams - and Mays, Snider, Musial and Yogi. None of the other sets have all five, and most importantly, NO MANTLE. Mickey Mantle cards will completely frustrate a vintage collector on a budget any time. So if you wanted to build a set on the cheap, any one of these sets is doable with a little work and patience. If you are interested in a challenge where money is no object, tracking down high quality copies with the tab intact will keep you busy for a while, and you'll have a spectacular collection when you're finished. You can still have fun collecting these if you're broke though as cards in crummy condition like Torgo here still look really good. Best of all they neatly fit in 4 pocket sheets for storage.

Topps did pretty good with Francisco's card here (much better than the Gordon card actually) and it's a good one to honor K-Rod's achievement.

August is catch up month

I know it's uncouth to post about what you're going to be posting about in the near future, but when you have 58 posts in your draft folder you kinda have to do something to start clearing out the backlog. See, by announcing that I will be using the upcoming month to focus on flushing out those half written posts and finishing up some long neglected projects I set myself up for ridicule and mockery if I get distracted and decide to dedicate a couple of weeks to a card by card review of 1996 Collector's Choice. Hey, that might actually be some kick ass posts right there... NO! Must. Stay. Focused.

So expect to see some old favorites finished up in the next few weeks. Don't worry, I'll still post random crap, I'll just be posting all the random crap I never finished because I twitted off to some other random crap. I know metaposts suck and you just want to see the cards, but it's just something I gotta do to get myself motivated to get this blog back on the rails. Like the Actual Trading Card History posts, remember them? Where I'd take a card from Topps' Trading card History insert set like this one of Chin Lung Hu,

and post some interesting tidbits about the card set it is based off of? Like this card is based on the 1959 Topps set, which at 572 cards in the set was the the largest set to date from Topps. The cards looked like this:

and the backs were printed in red and green for the low numbered cards and red and black for the scarce high series numbered 507-572. The key rookiecard in the set is of Bob Gibson while the most expensive card as usual is the Mickey Mantle. The set was the first to include a Rookie Stars subset, although the biggest names to be included were minor stars like Bob Allison and Ron Fairly. There is also an All-Star subset in the high series, Several "Baseball Thrills" and multi-player combo cards peppered throughout the set and the famous card of Roy Campanella in his wheelchair.

The set is well known to recent collectors as the basis for the 2008 Topps Heritage design, which can be seen here:

Smaller than the original '59 set at 500 cards, Topps' annual Retro set copies the original it's based on very closely. It keeps the Rookie Stars, Baseball Thrills, combos and All Star subsets while adding modern innovations like short prints, inserts, autographed cards, relic cards, Heritage Chrome, and super short printed cards of Johan Santana and Jon Smoltz designed to suck a true collector's very soul right out of their body and chew it up into tiny little shattered pieces, leaving the loyal fan broken and weeping in despair. It's one of the best sets of the year!

See? It was easy and fun and I knocked the draft folder down to 57 posts. 56 actually, since this post was in draft while I was writing it. Here's looking to a good month.

Actual Trading Card History - I actually figured this one out

Remember what I said last time about Insta-Post? This card is a Brave and an obscure design that I sort of recognise but don't remember exactly what it is. So yeah, Insta-Post applies even though this card was released last week and I didn't go to the shop to pick it up until today. This is card TCH44 a "1908 Baseball Card" of former Brave Andruw Jones.

Pretty funky looking card eh? So what is this sucker? Extensive research (ie. look it up in the SCD) tells me this is the design of a Rose Company postcard. The Rose Company was a major manufacturer of novelty postcards at the time and had a variety of subjects. Baseball was a popular subject for postcards in the early 1900's and the ones from Rose Co. were one of the more elaborate and distinctive designs. The card's elaborate design was embossed on the card and a high quality studio portrait was affixed to it instead of being printed directly on the card. There are about 200 subjects in the set including major and minor leaguers and a few rare "do it yourself" cards have also surfaced. The big cards include Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Cy Young, Christy Mathewson and Walter "Big Train" Johnson. These cards can sell for $5,000 and up, but even low grade common cards can go for several hundred. Team collectors like Blue Heaven and myself will have to admire these from afar unless a bargain pops up out of the blue. The cards don't show up for sale that often either. There has been exactly one on eBay in the past month or so. If you like the design, but can't swallow the expense, Perez-Steele galleries included the design as part of their Masterworks collection. There are ten Rose style cards in the set including a Warren Spahn that I really need to get my hands on.

Topps did a good job on this design although the card I received is oddly miscut. It adds an air of authenticity to the vintage style card though so I won't complain. this is the last Brave in the set as far as I can tell from the checklist. Maybe Topps will continue the set to Updates and Highlights and make it an even 100 card set?

Actual Trading Card History - What the hell is this card supposed to be

Ok, This history lesson is for last week's giveaway card of Miguel Cabrera. Here it is:


The back of the card says it's from a 1940 card design. There are four types of cards from this set as far as I'm concerned.

1) The card has the name of the card issue on the back.
In this instance I usually say "cool card" put it in the binder and ignore it. Most of these cards are Topps designs and everyone knows what they are anyway.

2) The card does not have the name of the card issue on the back and I know what it is.
Usually these cards will say "1933 card design" when everyone bloody well knows it's a Goudey but Topps can't use the word lest Upper Deck's lawyers get enough overtime to buy that second Benz. These are on my short list to feature, but laziness/business has gotten in the way.

3) The card has a Brave on it.
Insta-Post. I pay the card shop owner to let me use his computer so I can have it online before he even hands me the card.

4) The card does not have the name of the card issue on the back and I do not know what it is.
Now we are at the group of cards that will make me post the sucker to the blog. What happens is I look at the card, think "wtf is that" and by the time I've figured out what the heck the design is from I have enough info on the thing that I may as well go ahead and write the post. This Cabrera is one of those cards.

Now, when I finally get around to writing up these posts, here's the methodology I use to figure out what kind of card it is:


First place I look is here. It's an old Baseball Card investment guide from the late 80's (5 Year Projection for 1988 Topps - Well Above Average) that lists out all of the major card issues and a lot of the oddball issues from the 1800's to 1988. It's not comprehensive, but there are tons of photos and usually at least a half page of information on each set. The best thing about it is that it's in chronological order going backwards. So if you're looking for an unknown card from 1940 you can head straight to that date and look it up. The only 1940 set in this book is Play Ball which this card is not. So now I look in here:


Ok, it's a little old, but it's got everything I need to look up obscure vintage cards. I have no idea how the air freshener sticker got on there and I'm not going to bother to take it off. The card set that this design comes from is in this book somewhere, I just need to find it. Unfortunately the book is arranged alphabetically and not chronologically, so it's time to hit the index.


Not many card sets were printed in 1940 so this should be a quick search. I'll have to go through the book and look up each one I'm not familiar with from the Associated Stations San Francisco Seals set to the Wheaties Champs of the USA set. So what do you do if you don't have all these fancy books? The same thing you do when you look through all thse card issues and don't find a single match like what just happened to me! Off to the Interwebs!

The stupid thing is that I recognize this design, I just don't know exactly what the thing is. It sure isn't a design from 1940, unless Topps unearthed an uncatalogued card issue. So where to start? Looking at my go to pages for vintage card info, Vintage Card Traders don't have a virtual set for 1940, Baseball Almanac only has Play Ball, and Old Baseball Cards has a list of sets, but not much more info than the SCD index. Old Cardboard also has a list of card issues with links to pics, but no matches among 1940 cards. Dave's Vintage has truckloads of picks but no way to figure out what 1940 issue we're looking for.

I struck out on my go to pages, so now Google is my friend. I do a search for "1940 baseball card" and get a lot of stuff. Since I don't know what I'm looking for, but I know what it looks like, Google Images is useful. Just make sure Safe Search is ON or you might get a nice surprise. The results aren't that specific though and I'm getting everything from Honus Wagner T206 cards to some dude's grandpa. For the record the first girl in a bikini is on page 4 of the results. So back to the links. A lot of the search results are cards for sale, but those are actually pretty useful. If a card exists, it's likely to be for sale somewhere. Google shopping is ok, but why not just go to the motherlode. EBay single cards, 1940-1949.

With the now standard gallery views on the side you can scroll through a lot of pages and get almost 99% cards from the 40's instead of Gramps. This has the added benefit, or disadvantage if you prefer, of being able to keep an eye out for cool cards to buy. I'm seeing a lot of Menko cards that are distracting me right now. So after following one false lead, putting a bunch of stuff on my watchlist and bidding on no less than THREE cards (someone stop me!) I still haven't figured out where this lousy card is from using my usual research steps. However sometimes lady luck is on your side.

While flipping through the SCD looking for the 1940 Buffalo Bisons minor league set, a set by Centennial Flour caught my eye. Here's the listing from the SCD:


That looks like the right stuff! Now that I know what I'm looking for, a Google search for "Centennial Flour Seattle Rainiers" makes things easy and I find what I'm looking for. That Old Cardboard link had what I was looking for, and I actually clicked on it but didn't scroll down to see all the cards. I only saw the 1943 version and passed before finding the rest of the designs on the bottom. FKW Century Old Cards has an example from 1947 as well, and I think we've found our card. According to the SCD the '45 version is blue and white and Miguel's card is black (well, kind of sepia actually, but I'll let it slide) and white. Both sets have the same style black bar with the player name in caps and the team name in italics. Success! The Topps Trading Card History card of Miguel Cabrera, card number TCH43, is using the design from the 1947 Centennial Flour Seattle Rainiers minor league set.

So Topps for their Trading Card History set - which is supposed to celebrate the history of trading cards - used the design of an obscure minor league set from the 40's and didn't identify the set or discuss the set at all in the copy on the back of the card. Plus they GOT THE FREAKING DATE WRONG as well. Good Job Topps! Way to celebrate history! With proofreading like this, I'm looking forward to pulling a 1960 Presidential Campaign insert card of Terry Kennedy and Mojo Nixon. Even Miguel looks disgusted by the whole thing. All shall be forgiven if I win one of those auctions I bid on though. There are some really neat cards from the 40's out there!

Actual Trading Card History - 1887 Allen & Ginter

I think y'all know all about Allen & Ginter by now. This Topps card is in the style of the 2006 Topps Allen & Ginter set which swiped the design from the 1887 Allen & Ginter "World's Champions" series 1 set (ACC designation N28), which itself was a rip off of the N27 "World's Beauties" series 2. Got all that? Well forget it because 2008 Allen & Ginter swiped the design from the N26 "World's Beauties" series 1 set, which I can't link to because the scan has disappeared from my post.

Did you know if you went to Google, typed in "2008 Allen & Ginter" and clicked "I'm feeling lucky" it goes to MY crappy blog? Isn't that terrifying?? WHAT HATH I WROUGHT???

Anyway, I hadn't done one of these in a while and Joey Votto is on freakin' fire and this is probably the only post I'll have time for on any blog today the way it's looking so I wanted to post something and here it is. Enjoy.

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.

Card Of the Week 3/03/08

Once again, there's no way I'm going to get to this tonight. I'll deliver the full monty tomorrow (maybe, tomorrow's schedule is looking awful too...) and in the meantime let's just say I've been drooling over this card ever since I saw it in the pre-sell checklist. And it's now mine. MINE ALL MINE!

Ha! Wednesday! That's only mostly terribly late.

So what's this here then. Why it's another of Topps' Trading Card History with absolutely no history on the back of the thing. As on many of the other cards, it only says "1941 Baseball Card" on the back, likely because rival Upper Deck used the design in an impossible to get boxtopper insert numbered to 15 copies each. That's 1500 total cards for the entire 100-card set. Meh. If they had made a seperate retail only insert with a different color ink on the back I'd still be buying Goudey blasters but oh well. Upper Deck didn't really need my money anyway. Here's a copy of the Upper Deck version that I ganked off eBay for comparison:

So what is it? It's the 1941 Double Play design. Double Play was put out by the same company who did the Play Ball set from 1939-1941. Upper Deck did a couple homage products to that set a few years ago. The 2003 set was great, the 2004 version is one of the worst trading card sets of all time. But let's save that for later. But we'll save that for later.

Double play cards are very simple. Each card has two players on the front with a blank back. The front has a large sepia colored photo for each player with the name, stats and card number underneath. The photos are a portrait or action shot, with the layout of the portrait cards being horizontal and the Action shots being vertical, like the card above. Each card has two numbers on it, one for each player. This can cause problems, as seen below:

These cards were often cut up into individual cards. This pretty much negates most of the value but hey, a vintage card is a vintage card. The set is 150 players (or 75 cards) in size and the cards numbered 101-150 are more scarce than the low series. The set has a lot of stars in it, including DiMaggio, Ted Williams and the first card of Pee Wee Reese. 1941 is a significant year for trading cards as those are the last major sets released before the war would curtail such luxuries. A lot of these cards ended up in paper drives as well which is a reason why a lot of pre war cards (especially 1941 cards) are so scarce. These cards don't have the high profile as some of its fellow 30's era gum cards and are fairly affordable. Expect to pay several hundred dollars for a Williams or DiMaggio, but an acceptable copy of a common can be found for well under 20 bucks. Tiptons like the one above are even cheaper. Wanna see some? Here's a gallery thanks to the work of Dan Austin.

This card made the cut as Card of the Week for the very same reason my first Card of the Week did. When I first saw the sell sheet for 2008 Topps I looked over the checklist, saw the Tex and Frenchy card and flipped out. I've wanted it since then and I snagged it in a lot of these History cards on the Bay. Mark and Jeff will be anchoring the lineup this year and it's neat seeing them on this old style card, like Ted Williams and Joe Cronin from the original set. Let's cross our fingers and hope they can hit like Ted and Joe this year.

Actual Trading Card History - 1933 Delong

Today's history lesson comes via card 13 from Topps' Trading Card History set, a Johan Santana card patterned after 1933 DeLong. Topps was able to use the name on the back of the card at least, but still no indication on what this set is all about. In 1933 a slew of bubble gum card sets appeared including the iconic '33 Goudey set. The epicenter of the gum card craze was based in Boston, home of not only DeLong, but also Goudey, George C. Miller, National Chicle (AKA Diamond Stars) and US Caramel. All had significant sets released in 1932-1933 and the competition was tough. Of all the sets put out that year, DeLong's was certainly the most distinctive. Somewhat small at 24 cards, the DeLong set is known for its bright colors and unique baseball diamond design where the player towers over lilliputian fielders and base runners. The checklist is incredible, fifteen of the twenty four cards are of Hall of Famers headed by Lou Gehrig.

This is not Topps' first go at this set, last year their card-a-week promotion at hobby shops were all in the DeLong style. Above is Johan's other card in the DeLong style. Once again the tiny little players are in grave danger of being squashed by the MechaJohan. These cards were distributed in packs of "Play Ball" gum, but not the same Play Ball from Philadelphia's Gum, Inc., another famous set from the pre-war period. I don't actually have one of these cards since they are fairly scarce and quite expensive, but Dover comes through with a reprint of another dominating southpaw, Lefty Gomez.

Pretty much the same, Topps copied this design reasonably closely. The font's off a tad, but that's being nitpicky. The backs forgo stats in favor of a baseball playing tip from Boston sports writer Austen Lake. Here's a picture of the actual back (well, the reprint back at least) and the Topps back from last year.
Topps does an excellent job of mimicking the design but misses the point by talking about Santana so much. It's a nice card set, but the color really starts to hurt your eyes after a while. Here's a checklist for anyone out there looking to complete your own original set:

1 Marty McManus - Boston Red Sox
2 Al Simmons - Chicago White Sox
3 Oscar Melillo - St. Louis Browns
4 Bill Terry - New York Giants
5 Charlie Gehringer - Detroit Tigers
6 Mickey Cochrane - Philadelphia Athletics
7 Lou Gehrig - New York Yankees
8 Kiki Cuyler - Chicago Cubs
9 Bill Urbanski - Boston BRAVES
10 Lefty O'Doul - Brooklyn Dodgers
11 Freddie Lindstrom - Pittsburgh Pirates
12 Pie Traynor - Pittsburgh Pirates
13 Rabbit Maranville - Boston BRAVES
14 Lefty Gomez - New York Yankees
15 Riggs Stephenson - Chicago Cubs
16 Lon Warneke - Chicago Cubs
17 Pepper Martin - St. Louis Cardinals
18 Jimmy Dykes - Chicago White Sox
19 Chick Hafey - Cincinnati Reds
20 Joe Vosmik - Cleveland Indians
21 Jimmy Foxx - Philadelphia Athletics
22 Chuck Klein - Philadelphia Nationals (Phillies)
23 Lefty Grove - Philadelphia Athletics
24 Goose Goslin - Washington Senators

Last but not least, here's a gallery of the original 1933 DeLong set courtesy Dan Austin.

Actual Trading Card History - 1948 Swell Sport Thrills

I love the Trading Card History set from Topps, but they really dropped the ball by not describing what these designs are on the back. I can get factoids about Grady Sizemore from about 1000 of his other cards, but info on just what the hell this black & white design is on the card is a lot harder. It doesn't help that on the back it simply says "1948 Baseball Card". So now we know it's from 1948 and it has "Sport Thrills" on the front. Thanks, Topps. When I watched Chris Harris' 2008 Topps box break and both he and the shop owner were perplexed by the card I knew something had to be done. When the Dean of card blogging and someone who makes a living off cardboard didn't recognize what that card was, what hope was there for all the casual collectors out there? Heck, I recognized the design but it took some searching in my SCD to actually find out what set it was from. Since I like the set so much, I'm going to post all the ones I have and give a little actual trading card history on the designs to give Topps a helping hand.

This design is from Philadelphia Gum's 1948 Sport Thrills set. I don't have one of these cards in my collection, but Chris Stufflestreet has a good picture of one along with a better writeup than I'll be able to write. Philadelphia is best known for their NFL card sets from the mid 60's, but in 1948 they put out two baseball sets. One was a set that tied into the William Bendix film The Babe Ruth Story. They also released the Sport Thrills set which is distinctive for featuring action shots from famous moments in baseball history. The set is packed with stars and features moments like Jackie Robinson's debut, Johnny Vander Meer's no hitters and Babe Ruth's called shot. The cards are not the standard modern size, but are a little shorter at 2 1/2" by 3". A gallery of the cards can be seen here, thanks to Dan Austin. These cards are pretty scarce but they are not prohibitively expensive despite the star power. Philadelphia Gum is still around today with their Swell brand, which could be why the back avoids using the proper name of the set.

Card of the Week 2/18/08

Last week I gave you a steath Braves representative for Card of the Week, this week I'm giving you a double barrel of Bravos right in the face. We'll start off with THE Brave. Face of the Franchise, so to speak. Mr. Larry Wayne Jones.

It's actually pretty surprising it took this long for Chipper to become the card of the week. I could switch the format of this blog to "All Chipper, All The Time" and still be able to post at my current rate for 3-4 years. I got a lot of Chipper cards. Nothing fancy enough to compete with the Supercollectors out there, but what I lack in patches, 1 of 1s and autos, I make up for in sheer volume. This here is my newest Chipper card, do you know what it is? If you said yet another one of those Topps retro cards, then you are correct, sir. This week's Card of the Week is actually last week's card of the week, for Topps' Trading Card History giveaway at Hobby shops. For those of you who have a hobby shop close by that's actually a good hobby shop and doesn't charge their customers for HTA promos or sell them all on eBay, this is the card you could get for free with a purchase of a Topps pack last week. If you didn't get one, just ask the good hobby shop owner about it and maybe they'll be nice and let you have it anyway. If not, there's always the ones on eBay.

So now we know what it is, but what is it? Well it's Chipper on a very simply designed card with a very dark background. Flip the card over and we see Trading Card History TCH31 T-207 and a write up on Chipper's career. OK, so if Topps can be trusted, we can assume that this is copying the T-207 design. So what's that? A tobacco card like T-205 or T-206? That is correct! This is a set put out in 1912 that is the same size as the T-205 and T-206 sets but is generally a little scarcer that the other two. The set is known as the Brown Backs due to the distinctive background. The backs of the cards are very simple, they have the player name up top, a bio of the player taking up two thirds of the card in the middle and an advertisement for a tobacco brand at the bottom. An ad for Recruit Little Cigars is the most common, but five other brands are known. The set is not as popular as the T-206 and T-205 sets due to a weak player selection and a somewhat drab look to the cards, but it's still considered one of the "big three" Tobacco sets of the era. It's also a gold mine for Team collectors as there are a lot of obscure players with few or no other cards from the period. Here's what an original T-207 card looks like:

This here is Irving Lewis, who supposedly played for the Boston Braves (or the Rustlers, as they were known in 1911). Collectors familiar with the set just did a double take. Irving's card is one of three insanely rare cards out of the set, the other two being Ward Miller of the Cubs and Louis Lowdermilk of the Cardinals. The scarcity might be a reflection of their careers. Miller didn't play in 1911, but came back in 1912 to play a few years including a very good stint in the Federal League. Lou Loudermilk pitched only 20 games in the majors and poor Irving may have never made it at all. I can't find even the slightest information about his career anywhere online on in any of my books. The only matches for "Irving Lewis" in an online search bring up an author, a philosopher and some guy named Scooter. The cards may have been pulled early in the run or simply not replaced after a printing plate broke since they were such fringe players. Loudermilk is easily the scarcest and by far the most valuable card from the set, but Irving trumps him by having a variation as seen in this article from the Spring '84 edition of the Baseball-Hobby card report:


Irving's card (already hard to find) can be found with a Braves logo on the sleeve and without. Since the team was known as the Rustlers in 1911 before changing their name back to the Braves in 1912, the logo variation was probably printed later to reflect the change. Why the change was made on a player that was extremely short printed and never played a game in the majors, I couldn't say. Before you ask how the heck I managed to get one of the rarest baseball cards in existence, the truth is I got it out of an early 80's Baseball Card Collector kit. Possibly the same kit where I got the magazine I scanned that article from. Here's the back of the card:

Simple and to the point. A classic example of early 80's reprint sets. Cards like this is where I first learned about and became fascinated by the early tobacco and bubblegum baseball cards. How could you not be fascinated by this boring little card where the original is somehow worth 700 dollars? (Nowadays you're looking at more like three to four thousand) Plus since Irving never quite made it to the Show, his T-207 cards and subsequent reprints are the only cards of him at all. I'm glad Topps chose Chipper in a T-207 design to kick off their card giveaway program because it allows me to highlight and correct the most glaring problem with their otherwise excellent Trading card History set. Here's a scan of the back:


There's a whole lot on there about Chipper, but nothing at all about what the heck a T-207 could be. The "Brown Background" label isn't even mentioned. It's really not so much a Trading Card History set, but a Trading Card Design set, which is a shame. There's a lot of interesting information out there on these old sets, more than enough to fit on the back of a card. I'm collecting this set this year and I've decided to show off my collection by posting each of them throughout the season and helping Topps out by filling in on the History part. Topps couldn't link to an awesome T-207 gallery of the original set on the back of their card, but they could point out that one of the best cards in the set is one of White Sox third baseman Buck Weaver of Eight Men Out fame. These old style cards are much more fun to pull when you actually know about the design used on the card.