How to approach the T206 spreadsheet

[FrankWakefield]

I think I bought my first few white border tobacco cards about 35 years ago.
'Bitten by the bug' seems an understatement for self proclaimed T206 collectors, it's more like the bite of an alligator, or maybe a monster.

At some point, after picking up a few dozen T206s, collectors might develop some degree of a planned assault on the cards. Collectors might go for a team, or HOFers, or... they'd see the alphabetical listing in the early Beckett books. Collectors would feel like starting at the beginning seemed sensible, or maybe reflexive. Collectors would gravitate to the A's. I know the first time I tried accumulating these cards (I got to 512 or 516, something like that) I reached a point where I started pushing on filling in the blank spaces and that started with the A's. Contemporaneous with this was the change in card sources. The evolution went something like this: face to face with friends and acquaintances, through the mail with correspondence and mailing cards, through the mail with catalogs and mailing lists, small to large scale meets and conventions, and then came the internet with eBay and online businesses. With eBay and all, I think there's more buying pressure on the players with names at the beginning of the alphabet. Some collectors' passion for a rapid chase of the cards has them collecting alphabetically, A-Z. (Similarly, it seems to me that after the Cubs won their recent World Championship that the bidding prices on the white border Cubs seemed a bit higher.) Someone on the board said something along the line that most all of the T206's except for a few rarities were most always available on eBay for a price, if you're willing to pay. I agree with that.

There was a time when some seller would describe a T206 card to me with a number. Usually a Beckett number. But sometimes it would be from a different numbering system. I disliked the uncertainty. Evidently others did, too; because now the description might say cap or no cap, glove or no glove, batting or fielding, a description. Nowadays, seldom does a seller list an un-numbered tobacco card with a number.

Binders... that's where I'm headed. I dislike cards in grading slabs. I've not broken all of my graded cards out, but most of the time if I get a card in a slab it gets broken out within a day or so.

The kids who collected these cards 110 years ago bunched them by team. Look at the lists of the old collectors. those lists sorted the players by team, then alphabetically within the team. Look at the lists in one of Bert Sugar's book, The Sports Collectors Bible (even today a quite useful resource for identifying and understanding old cards, look for one on ABEbooks). That book lists the subjects in T205, T206, T207, T209, T210 and T211 by teams. So this time as I chase the white border cards I'm going with 15 pocket sheets in binders, with the cards sorted by team. Seeing the cards sorted into teams is really neat. First time I was chasing these cards hard the Cubs were the first team I completed. I took a photo or two of all of them, slightly overlapping. A few guys expressed thanks for that photo and said they were using it as a screensaver photo. If you look at a complete team of T206s, you can see the uniform changes for the players with multiple cards. You can see the changes as the cards move from the 150 series, to the 350 series, and the 460 series. This series evolution isn't as obvious in an A-Z sorting of the cards. And you'll notice that some of the cards that maybe look slightly more worn on the front, with corners a bit more worn, that those cards are more likely 150 series cards. The kids of a century ago were wearing and tearing those cards for maybe 2 or 3 years in a kid's pocket, while series 460 cards usually look slightly less worn. (That is from a consideration of all cards out there, not slabbed cards; because people wanting to slab a card generally want to slab less worn cards.)

When collecting, there's a bit of a sense of reward or accomplishment in steps of completion. Completing an alphabet letter, A, or B, of F... that's not quite as satisfying as collecting all of the Cubs, or Cardinals, or Giants or the Washington Senators... That's what I've found. So I really suggest sorting these guys by team. That's how they were collected generations ago. And it's neat to see that most of the portraits are in the earlier series, and see the changes in poses and uniforms.