Infamous/favorite card mispellings

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Posted By: brian parker

Thought I would bring up a topic with all the appeal of a spelling bee, but with less memorization. The vintage baseball cards we collect are all very cool, but the producers of these issues were quite often pretty slack in the proof-reading and fact checking department when it came to getting the player's name correct on their card. An example would be Ty Cobb's card in I believe the E120 set that is spelled "Ty Cob". How could they have missed this one? My all-time favorite has to be in the E220 National Caramel set which has Jim Bagby as "Jim Bagbyk". I can think of a few more but will let others chime in before I spill the beans.

Brian

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Posted By: Dan Mathewson

...was spelled incorrectly on several card issues. They liked to add an additional "t" to get the Matthewson spelling variation you'll see on some cards.

Our last name gets spelled wrong a lot, but the double-t is the only variation I've seen on any of Christy's cards...

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Posted By: brian parker

Being that spelling seems to be a fairly unpopular topic, thought I would throw in a few more and call it a night. Certain players have had their name misspelled for most of their careers--Rogers Hornsby's first name comes to mind. Another, even more prevalent mispelling is that of Ross Youngs. It appears that he labored his whole career as Ross Young. I don't remember seeing a single card of his with his last name correct. I assume contempary newspapers had it spelled wrong too.

Zeenuts are also rife with misspellings--over the 28 year run there were probably somewhere around 100 players with their last name spelled incorrectly at least once (a big name example would be the DiMaggio brothers all spelled 'DeMaggio'). More than a dozen players had their name mispelled wrong in two different ways, and one poor sap by the name of George Wisterzil had his last name spelled wrong in three different ways (Wisterzill, Westerzil, and Westersil), and never once correct in his four card Zeenut career.

Class dismissed.

Brian

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Posted By: Jay Miller

The Old Judge set is filled with spelling errors and, in fact, this is an interesting area to collect. Sid Farrar had his last name spelled Farrer, Faraer and Arrar. Poor John Messitt was called Massett, Massitt and Wassitt. HOFers Comiskey, Connor, Keefe, McCarthy, Nichols, Rusie and Welch all have spelling variations.

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Posted By: jay behrens

my favorite OJ misspelling is Genins misspelled as Genius. Now I just need to get a Brain card to go with my Genius

Jay

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

and Old Judge got it right, while Mayo got it wrong...