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Originally Posted by darwinbulldog

Absolutely. I'm guessing at least 100 million would recognize it as a picture of an old baseball player. You'd have a lot more people guessing Ruth, Gehrig, Cobb, and DiMaggio than getting it right; but he's the single greatest pitcher in the history of the game after all, so 250,000 seems about right to me. I grew up in New Orleans. We've got about 400,000 people there. Surely there are at least a few hundred old-timers in the entire city who would take one look at that photo and say, "Well that's Walter Johnson of course. Why do you ask?" And that's not even a baseball city. You'd do much better in St. Louis or Boston. And of course there are hundreds of other cities, to say nothing of the suburbs and the countryside.



Among baseball card collectors, the 1 in 1000 number doesn't seem plausible. I think about 80% of pre-war collectors would know, maybe 20% of the Topps era collectors would know (or at least guess correctly), and then maybe 1% of the modern card collectors. In total, I'd guess 5-10% of all baseball card collectors, not 0.1%.

I wish all of this were true, I really do. I agree that 80% of pre-war collectors would know Walter Johnson. It might even be 90-95%. The rest is wishful thinking.