[brianp-beme]

Ok, I looked through my collection of D310's and am embarrassed to say I believe I have figured out the the green and gray tinting on these cards. It becomes really obvious if you have a decent amount of D310's and store them based upon the team organized checklist on the back of each card, which I do, and is why I am embarrassed to state that I never noticed this before.

Within each of the six team's checklist the players (twelve per team) are arranged non-alphabetically. For example, San Francisco's list looks like this on the back of the card:

San Francisco

Madden
Browning
Henley
Smith
Holland
Weaver
Tennant
Sutor
Vitt
McArdle
Berry
Mohler

I own 11 of the 12 San Francisco cards (missing the Weaver, for crying out loud). The first six on the list, Madden through Weaver, are all green tinted (which includes the Weaver cards I have seen out there in collector land). The second six, Tennant through Mohler, have gray tints. The same pattern holds true for the next two teams (Oakland and Portland) that are listed vertically beneath San Francisco; the first six players listed on their respective checklists have green tints, while the second six are gray tinted.

The next team, Sacramento, listed on the top right of the backside, mixes things up a little, with the first six players possessing gray tints, and the second six green tints. The final two teams, Los Angeles and Vernon, change things completely by eliminating all gray tints--cards from both of these teams appear in only green tints.

So my theory is that these cards were printed in sheets of 24, or some divisible multiple of 24, and that only 24 cards in the set were printed with the gray tint. If the sheets were 24 cards, then two of the three sheets printed would have been printed green, and the other sheet in gray.

So here is your challenge--check your collections and try to find any D310 that does not fit the following pattern I have discerned. I will list below the 24 cards that I think can only be found with gray tints, and all others not listed should only be found with green tints. I would love to hear back from collectors on what D310's they have (and their tint, of course) so that we can either prove or disprove my theory.

D310 list of Gray Tint only cards:

San Francisco

Tennant
Sutor
Vitt
McArdle
Berry
Mohler

Oakland

Hoffman
Cutshaw
Maggart
Wolverton
Pyfl
Tiedeman

Portland

Steen
Ryan
Murray
McCredie
Rapps
Chadbourne

Sacramento

LaLonge
Heister
Danzig
Van Buren
Fitzgerald
Lewis


Brian (no team affiliation, but green is my favorite color)