Leon, do you or any of the other E224 owners have an explanation or educated guess as to why a few of the cards in the set have no backgrounds? Typically, when I've seen cards with large areas "airbrushed out", so to speak, it's been because a player depicted did not authorize the use of their likeness in that particular product. Or, another company held exclusive rights to the player.
Here's the Shoeless Joe Jackson type-1 (image from Beckett):
According to the article in Old Cardboard (issue #7), only Jackson, Jack Coombs and Tris Speaker exhibit this anomaly from the fifty-one known issued cards in the type-1 set. In fifteen card type-2 set, Walter Johnson, Rube Marquard and Honus Wagner (and possibly Connie Mack--no picture of the card was available for the publication, and I cannot find one on Google) exhibit this same lack of a background.
If it were for artistic reasons, one would almost certainly expect to see more than three out of over fifty examples depicted in this manner.
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Building these sets: T206, 1953 Bowman Color, 1975 Topps.
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