Newly Discovered Old Judge Player
 

After over 15 years of being on this wonderful forum, this is the first time I am starting a thread. I felt I would need something pretty special to share if I would do so. So here’s the story.

I bought a card from a guy on eBay, managed to make personal contact with him to see if he had anything else I might be interested in, and he sent me a scan of a couple random items from a tobacco card lot he had acquired in Chicago. He’s a stamp collector, not a sports guy. You will see the scan he sent at the end of the thread. Two of the three items were common items of no interest to me. The third was an Old Judge player I had never heard of...Roscoe Coughlin, Chicago Maroons. So I got out the Old Judge book to look him up...and found him NOWHERE. Then I knew this was special. I asked him what he wanted for it and he said he had to do some research, well unfortunately for him, that meant taking it to a dealer. In the meantime I attempted to get in touch with Jay Miller but apparently my message did not get through. I begged him NOT to sell before allowing me the chance to beat his best offer but he was in too much of a rush to sell, and probably cost himself a lot of money (I think he sold it for $4K plus a stamp collection which appealed to him as a stamp collector).

Jay and I have discussed the card since then and he encouraged me to post this along with the image and he will weigh in on it as well. It’s really painful to discuss as this one got away from me but I guess the only joy I will get is introducing a new Old Judge player to the collecting world! My one remaining question would be this...
When was the last discovery of a new OJ player, not a new pose, but a new player? Another question might be...
Does anyone know when the last surviving player from the OJ set died?

This player, Roscoe Coughlin, had a rather short and uneventful career but lived an interesting life according to Wikipedia, living until 1951 and serving in the Spanish American war in the late 1800s.

I think this is a real unique discovery, the kind that I may never find again but wanted to share with you folks!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Best first post ever? Certainly has to be on the list!

Cheers,
Patrick

Looks like he had a long minor league career. Only played in 8 games for the Chicago Maroons.https://www.statscrew.com/minorbaseb...ats/p-a79cc49d

Great find and great first thread post. We've all had the one (ro two) that got away. Also, nice timing of the thread on Thanksgiving. Anyone reading (or writing :)) this has a lot to be thankful for.
As to your questions I will differ to the OJ experts.

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This was an exciting find, at least to the small community of Old Judge collectors. In the Old Judge book we published a list of hypothetical Old Judge cards. These were players who should have had a card issued, but for whom no card had yet been found. Tug Wilson was on the list and after the book was published I identified some cards of Wilson which had been misidentified as Joe Miller by Goodwin. Joe Gonsowski and I did an article about this in Old Cardboard. Coughlin was also on this hypothetical list. So, it is no surprise that it was found. I guess the Wilson was the last new player found, although the cards were known; the player was not. Prior to this, an O'Day was found as part of a large group auctioned off by Christie's about 15-20 years ago. I remember sitting next to Barry Sloate in this live auction and bidding against Don Steinbach, rest his soul. Since the mid-1980s there have been several dozen new players discovered. Hopefully, this puts some perspective on the find.
As to the last surviving player, off the top of my head, I believe Dummy Hoy passed away in 1959.
I was never privy to the negotiations for this card or the timeline of the events till after the fact when Javan emailed me. I appreciate him sharing this information. It is always good to know the history of a card.

I don't collect OJs but this is awesome. A new card discovered all these years later. That's great. I'm excited for those of you who are into OJs for sure.

Jay, do you think the $4k+ price is high or low? As a non-N172 collector, to me the price seems high even for a new discovery given the condition. Are you aware of any recent sales that would be somewhat a comparison (basically, pop 1, similar condition)?

Awesome find. Love to read about stuff like this.

I actually find a $4K price low. I think that it would go for more than that if it were offered in an auction.

It’s really a shame it got away from you.

I always enjoy stories of new cards discovered for the known checklist.

Assuming what Javan says about the structure of the sale is accurate (I have no way of knowing if it is), without knowing what was in the stamp collection it is impossible to say if the purchase price was high or low.

Great stuff!
Thanks for the share.
Happy Thanksgiving.

He may have asked to research anyway, but if you had hit him with a number instead of asking him for one, it might not have gotten away. Just one of the tricks of the trade. Great that you shared the story, thanks!

Sweet discovery!, love seeing a new subject brought to light. I thought the next new player would be California League subject but not surprising to see it be an 1888 Western Association player either (some of those Fb cards are impossible). Thanks for posting Javan, hope the Coughlin found or finds a good home. Perhaps we will see it in an upcoming auction.

Javan, thanks for posting. It's a pretty cool post.

Are you back in the OJ hunt? I hope all has been well.

Circling back to some of the earlier posts . . .

Dummy Hoy was the last surviving player from the OJ set, passing Dec. 15th 1961, at age 99.

This moves the number of subjects in the OJ set to 523, two more than suggested by the OJ book. As Jay mentioned, there was the Tug Wilson discovery (proper identification of three Joseph Miller poses) and now Roscoe Coughlin.

The Maroons were hoarding pitchers. Roscoe makes six Maroon pitchers introduced to the OJ set in 1888 as follows:

95.5 Roscoe Coughlin
139 J. E. Dunn
141 Frank Dwyer
161 Fischer
344 J. W. Nicholson
433 Charlie Sprague

Glad my collecting focus isn't Chicago Maroons.

Jay

Just wondering I know in this set the West coast cards are worth large fortunes and in 12 years have only seen one come up for auction. So just based on rarity alone why would this card not be in the same area of value?

Bobby-The card is worth what someone is willing to pay. California League Old Judges are all extremely rare cards and thus collectors pay up to get a single representative copy. New, non-California League cards may not carry the same desirability. We'll all find out together when it sells, if it does.

Price guide?
 

Not being an Old Judge collector...is there an online price guide somewhere?

Jay, can you share how you guys were able to create a list of hypothetical cards?

Hi Bryan! Basically what we did was to look at the team rosters of teams that were represented in the set and see what players with decent playing time were not yet known. Some teams only appear as team changes, such as Worcester, so we did not look at them, only those teams from the National League, American Association, and Western Association. We didn’t add California League players to the list as there were too many to make it useful. In fact, the whole Stockton team is missing.

Javan,
 

Thanks for sharing this new find

Very exciting!

Thanks for sharing.

To expand a bit on Jay's response, the hypothetical cards largely came from the N173 redemption offer checklists. Here is a look at the 1888 7 panel checklist.

Maybe Dugrahm and Hover will be the next discoveries. Some of these Maroons have proven to be far more difficult than others.

Nice discovery and great info, y'all. It certainly makes sense that all would be possible with multiple poses from the original checklist.

I think it's interesting that a card shop or card show dealer gave him 4K and some stamps. If I walked into a show with this Crogan, I would expect them to offer me $75. A decent place to view an OJ price guide is Bob Lemke's 2006 SCD guide. It will give you a place to start. Rob

I was wondering the same thing. One consideration is that even though it’s 1/1, it’s probably more likely to see another one of these than a second California League.

Jay & Joe -- thanks for the info on how you came up with the possible cards.

I'll follow RC's lead and post a teammate of Coughlin. Here is the 1888 and 1889 re-issue card for George Ruckser (played under the name Rooks).

http://www.net54baseball.com/picture...ictureid=26511

In honor of Coughlin discovery, post a Maroon teammate if you have one.

Really you use a guide that is 13 years old now?

I am unaware of any guide that is worth a poop

Excellent post and discovery! Exciting to see something so old, can still be new. Happy for the OJ collectors out there. Cheers!

Appreciate the slap in the face...

Hey...I paid three poops and a tinkle for mine.:rolleyes:


My apologies for not having enough Old Judge knowledge to legitimately contribute to this great thread.

But, thanks Jay for providing a set-up for my attempt at humor.



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Yes. No wonder I haven't won many recently.

Seriously though, I was not commenting on your site and am not familiar with it. I was responding to the member's question in post #18.

Lemke had commons listed as 600 275 150, which is about what I would pay today. You can throw out the price guides on uncommon OJ's. You just have to bid until the other guy stops.

Thanks for the feedback. Is there a way to search the VCP as price guide for the set, as opposed to searching each player individually? Thanks.

Price guides for OJs will never give a true valuation. There are so many collectors paying crazy amounts for these little beauties. I myself work on the Iowa players, Des Moines, Sioux City and fingers crossed the Burlington Nyce. Take Des Moines, there are 23 players with 82 poses. If I have three of the four Cody poses and the fourth comes up for sale, I have to really pony up if I want to own it. I know of at least two other collectors looking for the same thing as myself and if I'm missing it, bets are their missing it as well.

Just my two cents but prices are all over on OJs.

Now for sale by Dean's Cards for the low, low price of $120,000...

$120k
 

But hey, it's on sale for $150K minus the 20% discount.........

I think "Dugrahm" is most likely a mispelling of Charlie Ingraham, who caught a handful of games with the Maroons in May of 1888, starting on May 5. It could be the name Dugrahm is some mixup of Ingraham with Dugdale, another Maroons catcher.

Amazing how the number of OJ subjects so closely mirrors the number of cards in the T206 “set”...

As I've been researching the Western Association, I did some digging into Fischer, and like others before me, I couldn't find anything. But I just noticed that there is a pitcher from the 1888 Maroons opening day unaccounted for in the n172 set - Arthur "Dad" Clarkson, brother of HOF pitcher John Clarkson. There is a photo of him on Baseball-Reference. The mustache looks like the one on Fischer. Don't know where the photo on Baseball-Reference came from, but could someone who has a better scan of the card take a look... just in case?

http://http://krispaulw.com/baseball...s/Clarkson.jpg

Paul-That’s a good thought. I have two Fischer cards with nice images and the mustaches are very similar. However, it appears that Clarkson had a more pronounced jaw. I’m not positive, but I would think they are different players. In general, teams were photographed for the Old Judge set during spring training. Fischer may have been in camp trying out when the photos were taken and was cut or left on his own before the season started. There are others in the set who never played a regular season game with the team that they are listed with. Keep up the research!

Not Old Judge related, but sometimes photographers took spring training photos of people that were not even players without probably realizing their mistake. About 15 years ago I was checking through microfiches (remember those) of the local paper at the library to try to find some unidentified Salt Lake City players in the 1921 Zeenut issue, and discovered that one of them was identified in a newspaper article of that time period to be a trainer for the team.

Perhaps he was out there practicing in uniform with the club on a day when the photographers were in town, and thus made his way into set and baseball card immortality.

So the Old Judge Fischer mystery has been solved. He was a mustachioed trainer for the Maroon team.

Brian

The weird thing about Fischer is that there is nothing in the newspapers at the time about a player named Fischer with the Whites. There are a few blurbs about Boyd scattered through the newspapers of the time, for example. Swartwood appears as rumors of signing with Des Moines in the papers. Minnesota has a couple of guys - Rhese, Jordan, Sterling - who were barely a blip on the club, and you can still find mention of their signing at some point in the record. Fischer, there's nothing.

He's not the Fisher that later played with Milwaukee and Davenport. That Fisher was an infielder, and he signed with Danville in January of 1888.

The mustachioed trainer theory has roots, I would say. Cheers all!

Paul W.

Paul-Have you checked all TSNs from March-May 1888? I was using a copy of the microfilm from Notre Dame's Library and they are missing some issues from that period. You might also try some period Chicago newspapers if you have access to them (I did not).

I've been working from the set of Sporting News available online through SABR, and it is missing the issues from that time period. I have looked (through newspapers.com) at Chicago papers, papers from Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota (the St. Paul Globe had awesome coverage of the Western Association), Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas... Fischer is such a common name that the searches bring up thousands of hits, so I could be missing some mention in my further filtering. But it is amazing how much baseball news there was in even small local papers of that time - even if it was just a blurb saying "Alcott of New Jersey has been signed by St. Louis of the Western Association". That's why I'm surprised I've seen nothing about a Fischer signing with the Maroons.

Arthur Clarkson was with the Maroon in spring training. The Tribune reported on March 25 that he signed with the Maroons. His first spring start was in mid-April. Boyd's signing shows up in the Sporting News in February, and he shows up in an article about the club in the Chicago Daily News as late as April 11.

Is there any sense of how deep into the summer of 1888 changes were being made to the Old Judge cards that year (new team designations, new players photographed/added)?

Unlike 1889, when updates to cards were common, I can’t recall any updates in 1888. Jake Beckley is listed with both the Whites and the Pittsburgh NL team in 1888, but I have never seen the Pittsburgh card and I believe that this listing may be an error. Off the top of my head, the only player that I recall having cards with two teams in 1888 is Charles Sprague who was shown with the Maroons and the White Stockings in separate images. This, however, was a function of Sprague actually being in two different photo shoots. He began the season with the NL team, was there for the photo shoot, but was released before the season started. He then moved to the neighbor Maroons and had photos taken with them.

Since Schwartwood was mentioned.

I've seen scans of Beckley, identified with Pittsburgh, with a "Copyright Goodwin & Co. 1888" on them. Were those printed in 1889? I've also seen Crooks cards with Omaha. Also printed in 1889? I guess I should read the fine print in the book about how to distinguish 1888 cards from 1889, even if they have a 1888 date on the front.

The copyright date reflects the date when the image was taken. The format of the card, as explained in the book in multiple places, indicate when the card was issued. The copyright date is not a meaningful piece of information.

For reference, a couple more team change updates in 1888 not already mentioned. They are rare but there are several examples. In most cases it appears Goodwin sometimes issued cards based on the early rosters, before player signings were complete, with assumption players would stay with same team as previous year. Players who fall into this category include:

John Clarkson - 1888 OJ with his old team, Chicago, & plenty of cards with the team he would actually collect stats with in 1888, Boston)
Ned Hanlon - Card with Boston, a team he was rumored to sign with during pre-season, but would stay with Detroit
Pa Harkins & Hardie Henderson both have 1888 cards with Brooklyn (team they played for in 1887) but then corrected to Baltimore and Pittsburgh respectively
Patrick O'Connell with Omaha and Des Moines
Joe Quinn with both Des Moines & Boston

My recent acquisition of Barney Gilligan with Detroit is an example of an 1888 team change that occurred after the start of the season, 4/25 signing, and was issued an 1888 OJ with the new team.

One true team update that occurred during 1888 would be Gid Gardner who would collect stats with both Washington and Philadelphia and issued cards with both teams.