Good research Todd. I think you may be right about the Moran being an error or outlier. That does seem to have happened occasionally with various early issues. I know with the S74-1 white silks they show two versions of Tony Smith, one with the Superbas (Brooklyn), and the other with the Rustlers (Boston). Except, Tony Smith never played with any Boston team, let alone the Rustlers, in his major league career. Instead, it has been assumed that his Boston Rustlers silk was a mix-up with Harry Smith, who did play with the Boston Doves from 1908 through 1910. Oddly enough, Harry Smith played 70 games in 1910 for the Boston Doves before being placed on waivers. He was then picked up off waivers by the Brooklyn Superbas on 9/21/1910 and became a teammate of Tony Smith. But apparently Harry Smith never actually played in a game for the Superbas before the end of the 1910 season, and then he was out of major league baseball and never played in another major league game anywhere after 1910. So the fact that the two Smiths actually ended up on the same team for even such a brief time could help to explain the possible error and confusion of the white version silk of Tony Smith on the Rustlers. Neither of the Smiths was an everyday star player, and could have easily been mixed up by someone producing the silks who just looked at the last name. And the Smith-Rustlers silk only exists as a white version silk, and as far as I know, only with blue ink on the front of the silk. S74 silks, both white and colored versions, were printed with three different color inks on the front, blue, brown and a sort of red/rust color. The rarity of finding a Smith-Rustlers silk, and the fact that it only seems to have been printed using just blue ink on front, would tend to indicate that the error was quickly caught and corrected, thus making a Smith-Rustlers silk an extreme short print.
Noting that whichever Smith was supposed to have been shown played with a Boston team would seem to indicate that the white silks first came out in 1910, and acknowledge Harry's time with the Boston Doves. But the fact, as you noted, that the Boston team wasn't sold until December of 1910, and not renamed the Rustlers till after that, indicates even more strongly that the S74-1 white version silks probably didn't get produced and issued until 1911, not 1910 or earlier as was previously thought. So that would seem to show that both silk versions, and the T205s, all came out in 1911.
Having said that, it still appears that S74-1 white version silks preceded the S74-2 colored version silks and T205s. The changes between teams and players from the white silks to the T205s and colored silks appears to bear this out. Also as additional evidence, there are known to exist what are considered 5 silk colored "proofs". These are of a colored material, on a plain paper/cardboard backing, that is not the same as the actual satin material used to make the S74-2 colored version silks that were distributed. Also they are smaller in size than both the white and colored silks issued and did not include a tobacco brand and factory number at the top and bottom, but are the exact same images as shown on the white and colored version silks. In fact, these silk "proofs" are the exact same size as the T205 cards. These appear to have been some kind of test samples of what they could have possibly used to produce the colored version silks, but didn't. What seems to make it clear that these were produced after the white silks had already been released, but before the colored silks were produced, is that of the 5 different known "proofs" of Archer, Doyle, Kling, and a double of Phillippe, Archer and Kling only appear in the colored version silks, not at all in the white version silks. Plus, the Kling "proof" shows him on the Cubs and not the Rustlers, and in the colored silks he is only shown as being a Rustler. And since neither Archer nor Kling were ever issued as a white silk, it would seem to make sense that these "proofs" were created after the white silk production had already begun.
What may add a little confusion to the T205 issue is that Kling is only shown as a Cub on his T205 card, just like on his only existing silk "proof", despite being shown only as a Rustler in the S74-2 colored silks issue. This is despite his trade from the Cubs to the Rustlers in June of 1911. This doesn't necessarily provide evidence that the T205 set may have been issued after the S74-1 white version silks, and then before the S74-2 colored silks were issued, either. The fact that Peaches Graham, who is on the other side of that same trade, is shown as both a Cub and a Rustler on two separate T205 cards, may just show that card producers were lax and didn't always pick up all the player/team changes and updates when producing these sets. Which is what then makes it difficult to definitively determine exact issue dates for a lot of these sets based solely on players/team combos shown in them. Also, because of the size similarity between these silk "proofs" and T205 cards, and the single existing "proof" example of Kling with the Cubs and not the Rustlers, I wonder if these "proofs" may have more to do with the T205 issue than the S74-2 issue. You can see images of some of these silk "proofs", including the Kling-Cubs one, on the s74silk.com site, along with other info on the speculated issue dates for the silks. Keep up the great work with your research and be sure to let us know what else you discover.
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