Does anyone know why there are no Play Ball Lefty Grove cards?
 

I'm sure someone here knows.

And if anyone knows why there is no 1939 Gehrig or Foxx, I'd be interested to know that too.

My guess would be contracts.

Yeah there are just so many cards that never happened. 34 Goudey Ruth. Diamond Stars Ruth and Gehrig. 38 Goudey Gehrig (and Grove). On and on and on.

The Play Balls are missing quite a few players. For instance, there's no Feller, Grove, Dean, Mize, Slaughter, Lombardi, Lyons, York, Boudreau, Gordon — and all active Cubs. Curiously, most of the missing players are from Midwest teams, while the Plays Balls were made on the East Coast.

It is stated on multiple web sites that it is "believed" to be due to contractual issues that so many stars are missing, but there is nothing definitive. No Gehrig in 1939, no Ruth in the subset of old-timers in 1940, no Grove, no Foxx, no Feller are glaring omissions. In 1939, Gum, Inc. (later Bowman) also did the missing card from the set trick to boost sales, like Goudey did in 1933. Unlike Goudey, Gum never produced a card later.

Most of these players appear in the 1941 Doubleplay set. I don't have all the details, but I believe they were under contract to Gum Products, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., which produced Doubleplay. Whether these contracts took effect as early as 1939, I do not know.