Px7 disk, P2 pins, and S74 silks question–Rustlers

[BobC]

Originally Posted by RCMcKenzie

I was looking at all the s74's in Hunt's the other day. I bid on the Red Suns and was the underbidder. I just assumed T205's came first, and T202 and S74 and Art stamps came later.

You would think so, but the evidence of the T205s coming later, at least after the S74-1 white silks anyway, seems pretty convincing. But there always seems to be new info coming out. For example, you mentioned the Red Sun silks in the Hunt's auction. Well many people consider Lew Lipset's Encyclopedia of Baseball Cards as a definitive guide to vintage, pre-war cards, which it truly is. The copyright date I believe is 1983, which isn't really that long ago. Yet, when Lew wrote about S74 silks in volume 3 of his encyclopedia, he only mentioned them issued with three different different tobacco brands, Turkey Red and Old Mill, the most common, and the extremely rare Helmar. There was no mention of Red Sun silks at all, which seems really odd that no one, especially Lew, knew of them as recently as 1983. Obviously many examples of Red Sun silks have come into the market and been made known since then. In fact, they have now been proven to be much more abundant than Helmar silks, for which I believe only a handful of white silks with Helmar backs still attached are known to exist.

Now I am not as familiar with the T202s and Piedmont Art Stamps as I am with the S74 silks and T205s, so I wouldn't definitively say exactly when those other two issues were first produced and issued in relation to the silks and T205s. It would just seem natural that the images would have been produced for a popular card set first, and then copied and carried over to other oddball sets like silks, stamps, and triple-fold cards. The SCD catalog always showed the T202s as being issued in 1912, and the Piedmont Art Stamps in 1914, which would seem logical. However, just looking at T202 card #32 - Clarke Hikes For Home, with Al Bridwell and Johnny Kling on the end panels, both Kling and Bridwell are shown on the panels as Rustlers. This is despite the death of owner William Hepburn Russell on 11/21/1911, whose last name sportswriters of the time kind of turned into the Rustlers team name. Much like the prior team name of the Doves was derived from the last name of the Dovey brothers that owned the team before Russell. Right after his death, Russell's shares in the team were bought up by a group including an alleged Tammany Hall politician, that put future HOFer John Ward in as President. I found a Boston Globe article online dated 12/21/1911 where Ward came out and said he wanted the team to going forward be called the Boston Braves.

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/2455...-boston-globe/

This was a veiled reference to New York's Tammany Hall political machine. Jim Gaffney, one of the new Braves owners, was a New York alderman and alleged member of the Tammany Hall machine. And politicians who were affiliated with Tammany Hall were often referred to as "braves" because the Tammany Society, as the political group was officially incorporated, was originally named after a Delaware Indian chief. So if as early as 12/21/1911 the President of the club was saying in the Boston Globe that they were changing the team's name to the Braves, why would they still be using the Rustlers team name for T202 cards supposedly not issued till 1912? Unless the producers of the T202 cards just didn't care they were wrong, or had already started production of them for the upcoming 1912 season when the ownership and name change took place and just didn't want to incur the time or expense to make the changes.

As for the 1914 issue for the Piedmont Art Stamps, this issue date does seem accurate as to my knowledge there are no Boston Rustlers in the set, and it also includes some of the Federal League players, which was a rival major league that was formed early in 2013 and lasted as a rival to the National and American leagues until the end of the 1915 season. So the Art Stamps were clearly issued after the silks, T202s, and T205s.

Until/unless some tobacco company documents can ever be found that note exact dates to start the distribution of various sets and issues that we are looking at, we'll never be 100% sure when they exactly started to be issued, but it can be fun trying to figure it out.