Rescued from Obscurity
 

Seeing the ATC ads from Sporting Life piques my curiosity about some of these players. A few of the choices seem a little odd, unless these guys were very popular at the time. Bowerman? Nicholls? O'Leary? What happened? Good personality-no hit?

I'm up on the Washington players from that period, because it's what I collect. But let's face it, even if you were a student of the game, if these guys hadn't been on the cards, would you have known who they were?

So here's a challenge:

Tell us about your favorite player who never made it into a mainstream set.

Bill

The choice of players came up in the chat room this morning. It's amazing that Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, or Ty Cobb didn't make it in any of those ads.

Frank Bowerman came up with the end of of the great Baltimore Orioles temas of the late 90's. He is responsible for kicking Fred Clarkes butt (along with Roger Bresnahan) before a key game I believe in 1908 (may have the year wrong there.)

Tabasco
 

Kid Elberfeld was one of the greats, but since he is not in the HOF very few people collect him as an individual player.

Could it be that those were the few sample images they had available to reprint at the time the ad was printed? It is an ad for the very first run of T206's isn't it?