1921 Schapira Bros. Candy Babe Ruth - population of each card

[brianp-beme]

The 1921 Schapira Ruth set was issued on two panels of each box of their candy. As far as I have seen of the full boxes and what I have read, one panel features Babe's portrait, and the other panel on the opposite side featured one of the other 5 non-portrait Ruth designs. A redemption offer upon the portrait panels identifies that 250 of the portrait panels could be sent in to receive an autographed Babe Ruth ball. The portrait panel has two variations, one that has arrows that run from the top at the "Send 250 of These Pictures" line on both left and right sides, down to point directly at Babe's portrait, while the other variation does not have these arrows. To me it makes sense that the non-arrow Portrait version was printed first, and then the arrow version replaced it to make it clear to the customer that they should only send in the portraits for redemption. Sending in 250 of these portraits would have been a challenge to pull off, so I doubt too many autographed balls went out the door.

I was curious if the population on the PSA and SGC reports would roughly be in this same 5 portrait to 1 non-portrait ratio that would theoretically occur if these candy boxes were issued with one portrait and one non-portrait panel. So I checked both reports, and here is the population of each of the 7 different cards that I found, shown below as PSA/SGC/Total:


Portrait w/arrows - 70/85/155

Portrait no/arrows - 10/0/10

Cleared the Bags - 12/8/20

Home Run - 8/8/16

Over the Fence - 14/18/32

They Passed Him - 6/8/14

Waiting for a High One - 16/22/38


I believe that a certain amount of the Portrait no/arrows card have not been identified by the two grading companies, which is especially evident by the fact that SGC has zero "no arrows" in their population report.

285 total cards are on the reports. 165 are Portraits (both arrow and non-arrow), which is approximately 58% of the total. In theory this amount should be 50% portraits and 50% of non-portrait cards (total of the 5 non-portrait designs). Perhaps it is reasonable to conjecture that this difference could be accounted for by many kids starting to accumulate the portraits but coming up short.

Also it is interesting that there seems to be two tiers of scarcity among the non-portrait cards, with the "Waiting for a High One" and "Over the Fence" at 38 and 32 each respectively, while the "Cleared the Bags" (20), "Home Run" (16), and "They Passed Him" (14) have significantly lower numbers. In my view, the "Waiting for a High One" and "Over the Fence" cards might have been printed at twice the level as the other three.

Just some thoughts about this interesting, Babe-centric set. Let us hear your thoughts, and perhaps see some of these cards too.

Brian