[Baseball Rarities]

PC760 Rose Co. postcards are much rarer than most collectors realize. Finding a type card is easy due to the large number of subjects in the set, but the search for a specific player could take a lifetime.

The Rose Co. produced postcards of 192 different players in the summer of 1908 - exactly 12 subjects for each of the 16 Major League teams. Generally, each team was represented with a player at each position along with four starting pitchers. There are a few variations and several players were added, but the "main" set consists of these 192 cards. All of the major stars from 1908 are included - Cobb, Wagner, Johnson, Mathewson, Young, Lajoie, Plank, etc.

Not to confuse the issue, but they also produced a 14 card set of the Minor League Scranton team, which included Moonlight Graham.

I follow the populations pretty closely (both graded and raw) and my last tally accounted for about 500 total examples of these 192 cards. The individual populations vary quite a bit. Many of the postcards have only a single surviving example. Most of the cards are in the 1-4 range.

Wagner is the most plentiful card. The combined SGC and PSA pop reports show 14 total examples, but I think that there are several duplicates in that number. There are about 10 Mathewsons known. The next easiest cards are Cobb, Lajoie and Chance, all with about 7 known examples. Huggins and Wallace are the scarcest HOFers. I only know of 1 example of each.

Since the collector could pick which player he wanted to purchase. it would make sense that the stars of the days were generally chosen more often than the lesser known players. There are obviously outliers, like Cy Young who is very rare, but, for the most part, it is the obscure players of the time who are extremely rare.

Here is one of my favorite cards, the Major League rookie of Walter Johnson. I believe that there ar 3 or 4 known examples.