First, Joe McGinnity's T206 card shows him with Newark. He pitched and managed there. Look at his minor league records in Baseball Reference. 1909-1912, 4 years, he won 87 ball games. That is hardly someone who "stopped playing." McGinnity pitched for several years more.
I think most of us here grew up with Topps cards, maybe Bowman, too. Those companies had some idea of what they'd done with cards the year before, and with some thought to what they'd do next year. I don't think that sort of planning or continuity was part of the thought process for T206s, then T205s, then T207s. Golly, collectors would go nuts if 2022 Topps cards continued on into mid season 2023, and THEN they changed to a new series of cards.
I kinda think that they wanted a flashier new card, and that became the gold border cards, much fancier than those white border cards. And before they could get around to cranking out gold border cards for most of the players of the day, they decided to change, again... what kind of thinking would get that done? The kind of thinking that gave us those brown border T207s.
I'm a believer in the idea that T206 American Beauty cards are slimmer to accomodate the AB cigarette packages. But have any of you wondered why they didn't similarly trim gold border American Beauty cards?
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