Posted By:
warshawlawThat is a really interesting question. No one really knows since no one has an uncut sheet, but I tend to believe that the Ruth in question is a 1921 issue that was short-printed in the bordered variety:
1. There are other cards with borders and borderless cards with the same 1921 format. Rogers Hornsby is one I can confirm. Without an uncut sheet I am dubious of an assertion that the bordered and borderless cards are from different years.
2. Earlier hobby references list the Ruth border and borderless card at the same price as part of the same set. If they were that rare I would not have expected equivalent treatment in early references.
3. In order to make a bordered card, the company would have had to reshoot the raw image and create a new printing plate (halftone processing requires a new printing plate every time you want to make a change, including the size of the image on the plate). I find it hard to believe that the company redid the Ruth plate in 1923 with the exact same image solely to add a border. They could have, I guess, but it would be contrary to their known practices. The 1921 and 1923 boxing sets contain a number of reused fronts (Jack Dempsey and Benny Leonard, who were Ruth's equivalents in boxing, are the most prominent). These cards are great references for ESCO practices because the boxing card backs have copyright dates and biographies and we can definitively date them. The 1923 cards of Leonard and Dempsey with 1921 images reuse the old fronts. It does not make sense that for the baseball set ESCO would redo the issue rather than reuse yet for boxing they would only reuse images.
I think the bordered and borderless cards are both 1921s, although the card with borders clearly is harder to find. It is not, however, as rare as any of a number of other ESCO baseball cards, including any PCL issue.
Now let's see what everyone else thinks....