Earliest Collectibles of Baseball Hall of Famers

[novakjr]

Phil. I see that once you removed the press photos from the list, that Larry Macphail came all the way up to the TCMA pc in '73. Let's roll that one back to 1947, with True Comics #65. Although, I do have a "Paps" cartoon of Macphail from the 30's(can't remember what year exactly), it's ultimately just cut out from a newspaper.

[triwak]

Hey Phil. I just won this RPPC in the most recent Hake's, picturing Willie Wells, that purportedly dates to 1925. The auction listing said that it was the earliest image they had ever heard of. From the Richard Merkin collection. Item #1163, if you wanna look it up.

[bcbgcbrcb]

Nice pick-up, Dave, that's an interesting enough item to put on my list.

You are correct, Ken, nice pick-up on that one BTW the 1925 date is correct based on my research as well. I was in the bidding for a while but ended up focusing my limited resources elsewhere. I will make the update on my list.

[cardaholic]

I recently picked up a 1947 wire photo of Robin Roberts and a college teammate (Martin Hansen) - both are pictured in their MI St. uniforms pointing on a map to the minor league cities they had been assigned to, and the accompanying text reflects their signings by the Phillies (Roberts for $25K and Hansen for $12K) and minor league assignments (Roberts to Wilmington of the Eastern League and Hansen to Terre Haute of the Three-I League).
The back has a date stamp of Dec. 10, 1947.
As a non-team press photo, it's probably outside the list, but IMO it's probably his first collectible identifying his as being in professional baseball.

[bcbgcbrcb]

Nick:

I used to own that one. It doesn't really qualify based on the parameters that I used but definitely one of the very earliest Roberts baseball images.