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Posted By: William Heitman

Ah--Doyle. The T206 Doyle, N.Y. American, card. This card was always a mystery. Why would that be the only card that carried no league desgnation in cities where there were both a National League and American League team? From the time I started hoarding T206, that question has been repeatedly discussed among those of us who cared about the set, or sets. I must say that I expected to one day find a Doyle that carried the American League designation. But after having hundreds of thousands of these cards in my hands, I had kind of given up. Back when I first developed my checklist which was in late 1978 through early 1979, I sent a blank one to Larry Fritsch who mailed it back to me with the cards checked off that he had. He made no mention, at that time, of a no. 105 Doyle with any league identification. It would seem that, at that time, Larry went through his cards pretty thoroughly. He did check off about 4000 cards.

If an error was made early on and the Doyle, by mistake, was listed in the National League, why not correct it if the error was caught? Sherry Magee was corrected. Just leaving the league off of the Doyle card is not consistent with what the card proofers did with T206. To me, the no. 105 Doyle with the National League designation is a mystery, but I would say the failure to correct it is a bigger mystery.

As has been said, it seems the makers of T206 were pretty meticulous about the accuracy of the cards, but it is just as obvious to me that quality control was awfully bad in the printing of the cards. Poor printing and poor quality control accounts for so much in T206 that is being discussed as errors and variations. The orange background discussion and the miscuts discussion come to mind.

In the June 14, 1959, issue of "The Card Collector", there was an article on T206 Wagner. It stated that only 6 examples were known and two were not in circulation. I was still four months shy of 10 years old. At the time I wrote The Monster, there were somewhere between 40 and 50 known. Irv Lerner and I once at a show made a count of just the ones he and I knew of. That number was at 42 if I remember correctly. More have been found since. So the one thing I can guarantee is that if the Doyles found to date are real, there will be more and more found over the years.

I only had one brief look at one of these Doyle cards that have been "found". It was brief and I couldn't draw any conclusions from it. I would have liked to compare it to the seven different no. 105's I had checked off my checklist. I would have to say that, at the time of the "discovery", I had had in my possession at least 150 examples of that card, and maybe as many as 250. And I dealt with quite a few old time T206 collectors who combed through many, many no. 105's trying to find one that had the league designation on it. Of course those numbers sound astounding, but remember that lots of us have had the very same cards as others at one time or another.