Posted By:
Frank WakefieldThis thread is prompted from an exchange of emails between Ted Zanidakis and myself...
The idea is to see what information can be gleaned from the number of times the grading folks have graded certain of the white border tobacco cards, T206s.
Super Prints refers to those cards identified by Scot Reader in his erudite publication, Inside T206. If you've not read that, I highly recommend it. Scot identifies Chance with yellow background, Chase with blue portrait, Chase with dark cap, Cobb red portrait, Evers batting "Chicago" yellow background, and Mathewson dark cap. Scot perceives that American Litho printed more of each those 6 cards than other cards for American Tobacco, so that the tobacco companies could take advantage of the current popularity of the players.
My thinking is that Cobb cards have a greater likelihood of being graded than other typical cards. And to an almost similar extent the same would be true for major HOFers, Johnson, Lajoie, Mathewson, and Young.
The question would be how many times the companies have graded those cards. And to set some sort of standard for comparison, numbers for a few other cards are sought...
Scott Fandango has been most helpful at assembling numbers like this, we hope he'll help this time.
How many times have these cards been graded?
**denotes a superprint
Bresnahan portrait
Bresnahan with bat
Chance batting
Chance red portrait
Chance yellow portrait**
Chase with trophy
Chase blue portrait**
Chase pink portrait
Chase throwing dark cap**
Chase throwing white cap
Cobb green portrait
Cobb red portrait**
Cobb bat off
Cobb bat on
Evers portrait
Evers bat "Chicago" yellow**
Evers bat "Cubs" blue
Johnson portrait
Johnson with glove
Lajoie portrait
Lajoie throwing
Lajoie batting
Mathewson portrait
Mathewson dark cap**
Mathewson white cap
Perdue (a southern leaguer)
Reulbach with glove
Reulbach no glove
Young portrait
Young with glove
Young throwing
Bresnahan is in there as a control low tier HOFer. Perdue is in there as a typical southern leaguer. Reulbach with a common card, and a less common one. Then we have major HOFers, and all of the superprints.
I'm thinking that we'll see that red and green Cobbs have been graded the most. Lots of Mathewsons and Youngs. And that the superprints will shine through with more yellow portrait Chance cards than either of the other Chances; same for Evers with more of the yellow sky batting with "Chicago" on the shirt than either of the other two; and the same for Mathewson.