Posted By:
Tim Newcombthat Rob has asked-- we could speculate all night on it. My guess is that Rob's #1 is most operative, though the others might also be to a degree.
Another point that hasn't been mentioned is the strong present-day tendency to grade HOF cards where commons might be left ungraded. As I remember, the PSA/SGC population reports, which I don't have in front of me, exhibited an even stronger slant toward HOFer cards in this set compared to commons.
I suspect it's largely a combination of both early and present-day collecting patterns. Actually maybe we have to say that it's a continuous timeline of likelihood or unlikelihood of being saved: at every moment between 1912 and contemporary collecting, it was more likely that cards of players whose names were recognized would have been saved, compared to players totally forgotten.
It would be interesting to examine closely the careers of the players in a set like this through 1911. The HOF was not even a gleam in anyone's eye at that point, but you could come up with a "most likely to be saved" category of player that would include all the HOFers at the bottom of the scarcity list (McGraw, Bresnahan, Johnson, Marquard) plus some stars who looked like potential immortals in 1911-12 (Rucker, Schulte, Dooin, Doyle, Reulbach, etc.) and see if we could determine any patterns of scarcity that were distinct from the retrospective category of HOFer. Wheat, Carey, Hooper and Speaker were all just starting out in 1912 and couldn't have been considered any more likely to become immortal than two or three dozen other guys at the same stage of their careers.
Concerning the "super-print theory," in the case of T207 I doubt the HOFers were printed in greater numbers than the other players in their "series." Wallace, Speaker, and Hooper I have speculated were in the second Recruit "series" of 50, printed in smaller quantities along with the rest of that group.
There are, of course, some sets that did double or triple print stars-- most notably R316 Kashin (where Ruth appears four times as often as the rest of the cards) and M116 Sporting Life (where the star-heavy first series was clearly reprinted many times over to satisfy continued demand).
Do we know whether any of the caramel sets did that?