M101-5 vs. M101-4

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

I don't necessarily think one was released to the public "AFTER" the other set...

but very likely ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!!

The April 16, 1916 advertisement for the M101-4 set means that this set was ALREADY printed and READY TO SHIP by that time.

OPENING DAY for the 1916 season was April 12th!!!!

From Baseball Almanac: "Did you know that the Opening Day (April 12, 1916) pitcher for the Boston Red Sox was Babe Ruth? He pitched 8.2 innings, allowed one run, and won 2-1 versus the Philadelphia Athletics."

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Thus, it is PROVEN that they started PRINTING the M101-5 set AFTER the February 1916 trades of those former Federal League players...

and it is PROVEN that the M101-4 set was printed and already being ADVERTISED by April 1916.

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SO... while it still seems obvious that the M101-5 set was PRINTED first (early March?)...

the M101-4 set was ALSO probably printed in late March...

and BOTH of them were probably RELEASED to the public right around the same time (OPENING DAY)!!!

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This is CONSISTENT with the LACK of ANY OTHER advertisements for these cards PRIOR to opening day in any publications!!!!

It just seems to make a lot of sense that they started printing the set... realized that there were some mistakes and immediately started printing NEW cards...

but WAITED to distribute the cards AT ALL until they were ALL printed.

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Think about it: When they started printing the M101-5 set, they probably already had orders from a lot of stores who wanted to distribute the cards, so they probably planned on printing (just a guess) 200,000 sets of the cards.

BUT... they soon found some mistakes, so they simply STOPPED after printing 100,000 sets... CHANGED a few things... and then FINISHED printing the other 100,000 sets.

In other words... if there had NOT been any mistakes in the M101-5 set... they would have just printed 200,000 of that set and we would NEVER have even seen an M101-4 set.