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Originally Posted by paul
Were the baseball cards really distributed into 1937?
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At least one series must've been printed and sold in 1937 and perhaps a few. Based on the set's available back scans on Tradingcarddb.com, at least two cards show changes made in the 1937 calendar year.
#76 Vosmik - "Traded to St. Louis by Cleveland early in 1937." Joe was traded in Jan 1937 and WWG updated his team to Cleveland on the card. Being card #76 of a 135-card set, I think it's either a half-1936, half-1937 set or that they left a gap at #76 in 1936 and filled it in during the 1937 printing.
#128 - Stevie Stephenson - "...1936 with the Chicago NL club." The card shows Stevie's team as the Montreal Royals, where he played in 1937.
Based on how the back text's written across all 135 cards, it reads like a set created in batches between 1934-37, because the meanings of "last year" and "last World Series" change over time. About 30 cards feature International League players, most of them in #78-84 and 115-135. My hunch is that WWG wrote up #1-75 between 1934-35 and printed them for 1936, leaving some gaps. Cards sold in 1937 filled in the gaps and included about half International League players, who would be better known in Montreal and other IL cities, where these could've been distributed. That use of gaps to encourage kids to buy more cards matches the approach Goudey used for Indian Gum, 1933 Goudey #106, and a few other sets, so it wouldn't surprise me here.
The 1936-37 WWG baseball set also matches the WWG front/back design for their 1937-38 hockey set, which is known to cover both years. While there's no natural reason for a baseball set's distribution to match hockey distribution, given hockey's fall/winter/spring schedule, the sets are close cousins and could've shared local printing and distribution methods.