[Leon]

Great info....thanks for sharing!!

Originally Posted by Zach Wheat

Hey guys,

Thanks for the heads up. Cliff, if I ever sell my T201 cards i know where to go with the Factory 30 Kling Cole.

When I was writing the article there were à number of interesting events and other facets of T cards that I wanted to discuss but ultimately they didn't make it in the final cut. I think many of the sets we now collect were targeted towards a specific tobacco market...but due to time, the association has been lost.

The tobacco industry in the late 1800s to early 1900s was markedly different than the tobacco industry as we know it today. In addition, changes in the way various companies that ultimately made up the ATC as well as the manner and method in which each brand was segmented, I believe, ultimately played a role in player selection for sets like the T201 set.

Cigarettes were becoming more popular than other forms of tobacco production (ie read relative to pipes and chew) with the New York market becoming one of the fastest growing markets for cigarettes at that time. The ATC was in the midst of moving one of their factories, which manufactured the Mecca brand to Brooklyn, NY (that area ultimately became known as the House of Mecca) and the ATC and successor companies were trying to figure out how to target each of the different brands towards different sets of consumers. Keep in mind they were trying to move away from using women in provocative poses, etc as a means of advertising. That was actually an important change, I feel, that led the tobacco companies into using "base ball" players as an advertising premium in their packs.

So player selection for the T201 set...and others as well... was most certainly influenced by the fact that 1) Mecca was moving to Brooklyn; 2) cigarettes were not the dominant means but an increasingly popular method of distributing tobacco and 3) this brand in particular was targeted towards New York...one of the largest and most important markets for cigarettes at the time.

Combine that with managements efforts to brand various forms of tobacco towards a particular niche and you can see why I feel there was certainly a bias towards "base ball", the New York market and its association with the T201 set. I think one day some other piece of evidence will pop up which conclusively links the T201 set to the minor league teams in and around NYC. Just don't know what that is though....

Z