Butterfinger – SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee

The Case of the Missing Cubs

When researching the 1934-36 National Chicle “Batter Up” set I came across the curious fact the set’s first series, cards 1-80, included no Chicago Cubs. At first this seemed like a quirk unique to the set. However, further research revealed that the lack of Cubs was fairly common among the gum and candy cards of the era. Here is a chronology of the major sets from 1933-49 along with the status of their Cubs cards or lack thereof.

GOUDEY GUM

The 240-card set in 1933 included 17 Cubs cards, including at least one in each of its first 9 series, which is about what you’d expect. I’ve mainly included this set because A) it’s THE gum set of the 1930s, and B) it’s the last set before things got weird.

The 96-card follow-up set in 1934 included 6 Cubs cards, which by itself doesn’t suggest anything anomalous. However, the distribution of Cubs in the set is worth a quick note. Series one included three Cubs, but all were repeated from the 1933 set, artwork and all. (This was true of all 24 cards in 1934 series one.)

When the set did issue its first series of new players, none were Cubs. It wasn’t until the set’s third series that new Cubs (Lynn Nelson, Lyle Tinning) finally appeared. (The fourth series brought back another Cub, Kiki Cuyler, from the 1933 set but with new artwork. And as Matthew notes in the comments, the twelve “Chuck Klein says” cards also add to the Cubs fourth series presence.)

The 1935 Goudey set primarily relied on recycled artwork and players from their 1933 and 1934 releases. Of the 144 “cards” (really, quarters of cards) in the set, there are only 11 new players. None are Cubs. Overall, the Cubs are tied with the Phillies for fewest cards in the set: either one or four, depending how you choose to count.

The small 25-card set in 1936 included one Cubs player, Chuck Klein.

Subsequent Goudey sets seemed to be fairly normal with respect to Cubs players.

NATIONAL CHICLE

National Chicle debuted two significant multi-year sets in 1934. One was the Batter Up set, whose 80 cards that year have already been noted to have avoided the Cubs entirely. The other set, Diamond Stars, was equally devoid of Cubs among its 24-card offering that year.

Diamond Stars continued in 1935 with 60 new players, and this time there were three Cubs, two of whom were repeated with identical artwork in the 1936 release.

Meanwhile, series two of Batter Up, which I place entirely in 1936, exploded from zero to 11 Cubs among the final 112 cards in the set.

GUM, INC.

Gum, Inc., is best known to collectors for two different offerings: Play Ball (1939-41) and Bowman (1948-55). The three years of Play Ball cards included 473 different cards. Believe it or not, none were active Cubs players! The 161-card 1939 set and 72-card 1941 set included no Cubs at all while the 240-card 1940 set included three retired greats and one coach card.

The Gum, Inc., shutout continued into their debut Bowman offering that included 48 cards but no Cubs. Beginning in 1949, however, the Bowman sets had about the number of Cubs cards one would expect.

OTHER BRANDS

1934 Butterfinger Premiums

This set included 65 cards. None were Cubs.

1937 O-Pee-Chee Batter Up

This 40-card set had no Cubs, but it’s a bit of a special case as only American League teams were represented.

1941 Double Play

This set had 75 cards (150 if cut in half) including five (or ten) Cubs cards, among them the first card (or two cards) in the set.

1948 Swell “Sport Thrills”

This highlights set included only 20 cards, none of which were Cubs. Then again, there were five other teams that didn’t make the checklist either. Still, you’re gonna tell me this was a bigger thrill than the Homer in the Gloamin?’

1949 Leaf

Chicago-based Leaf Candy introduced a 98-card set (likely intended to be larger) in 1949, and 11 of the cards were Cubs.

* * * * *

I posted some key elements of this article to the SABR Baseball Cards readers on Twitter as well as the collectors on the Net54 Baseball forum. Leading theories on the omission or delayed inclusion of Cubs in the various sets tended to relate to the Cubs being owned by the Wrigley family. Why help the competition, right?

Of course Cubs did ultimately crack the checklists, even if it took ten years in the case of Gum, Inc. One wonders, therefore, what made the difference. Did the rival gum and candy makers make P.K. Wrigley an offer he couldn’t refuse? Did the players break from official or unofficial team policy to sign with rival confectioneries? Did Wrigley ultimately decide that Cub-less baseball card sets would hurt the popularity of his franchise?

Whatever prompted the return of Cubs cards, I can’t even imagine being a Cubs fan from 1939-41, buying pack after pack of Play Ball, and not pulling a single Cubs player. I guess the closest I can come is being a Dodger fan in 2021 and not finding packs to open at all.

An Unnecessary Premium

I’ve been selling my pre-war cards. Most of them anyway (there’s a few that I want around). In recent years my collecting has shifted, in ways that bring me great pleasure and, while it’s slightly odd selling off cards that are one of a kind in my collection (selling doubles is so much easier on the emotions), I’ve gotten enormous pleasure from the turnover.

I’m not sure why I have one 1934 Butterfinger Premium, (R310s for you scoring at home) let alone two. The Lloyd Waner made sense at the time, and in retrospect. I was looking for cards of Hall of Famers from their playing days. (Now that I have another “Little Poison,” a 1936 Goudey Wide Pen Type 1, I can let the R310 go).

1934 Butterfinger Waner front253

Bob O’Farrell? I have no idea.

1934 Butterfinger O'Farrell front251

These premiums really aren’t even cards. Large, 7 ¾” X 9 ¾”, paper thin (though there are cardboard backed displays with red ad copy letting a bunch of Dead End Kids and Little Rascals of the decade know they could get their very own Lew Fonseca with the purchase of a nickel candy bar),

s-l1600

and fragile, they’re more like posters (which often make it into the Standard Catalog anyway). The checklist is a nice representation of the player pool, from Ruth, Gehrig and Foxx (spelled both “Fox” and “Foxx”) to Al Spohrer and Ralph Boyle.

1934-r310-butterfinger-premiums-babe-ruth-lou-gehrig

Curtiss Candy Company Ralph Boyle, from the Butterfinger series (R310) issued by the Curtiss Candy Company to promote Butterfinger Candy Bars, 1934 American, Photolithograph; Sheet: 9 7/16 × 7 3/4 in. (24 × 19.7 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick (Burdick 324, R310.10) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/706325

The cardboard displays are rarer, selling, according to one Standard Catalog, at four times the paper. There’s even a Canadian version, smaller in size, at 6 ½” X 8 ½”, and checklist, less than 60. (These are given a different designation, V94).

They’re nice items, perfect for team and type collectors, and not very expensive, depending, of course, on condition. A lot of them have suffered paper loss from various tuckings and gluings into albums. You can even get a low grade Al Spohrer for $10!

But the biggest mystery to me is why anyone needs a premium to buy a Butterfinger. They’re delicious and worth each of those five pennies.

Solving the border crisis

A common complaint among vintage collectors who run across newer issues is that we miss the good old days when baseball cards had borders. Looking at cards like these 2017 Astros leaves us feeling (ahem!)…cheated.

The borders we overlooked as kids have come to symbolize all that was right about baseball cards. Joni Mitchell had us pegged. You really DON’T know what you’ve got till it’s gone. No, we’d never pave Paradise to put up a parking lot, but we sure wouldn’t mind a thin cement edge around it.

The borders on our cards have taken on almost a spiritual significance with “meaning of life” level implications. We ponder koans such as, “Is a card without a border even a card?”

The sages teach us that without nothing there could be no something. Cardboardismically speaking, the border is the yin to the image’s yang. Form needs outline.

The vintage collector therefore must find “border in the chaos,” else risk serenity and sanity alike. Should he even consider collecting cards post-2015, his best, nay ONLY, option is Heritage!

Whatever you hear on TV, friends, THIS is the real border crisis, but fear not…

Tengo un plan para eso…and it won’t even raise your taxes! (Checks new eBay policy. “Okay, so maybe a little.”)

Add just THREE CARDS to your collection and you’re gonna win on borders so much you’ll be tired of winning on borders.

1960 Fleer ted williams

Let’s start with Ted Williams. Compare his 1960 Fleer card with that of Hack Wilson or any other player in the set. That’s some serious border! Where some perfectly centered cards are said to have 50-50 centering, Teddy Ballgame comes in at 150-150!

Back in the day you might have found this card an eyesore, but that was then. Now you probably look at the card and wish the borders were even bigger!

1936-37 World wide gum Lou Gehrig

The second must-have for the border hoarder is the 1936-37 World Wide Gum card of Lou Gehrig. (Note that this issue is catalogued as 1936, but Matthew Glidden makes a compelling case that 1936-37 is more correct.)

At first you may shrug away Larrupin’ Lou’s border as nothing special, no different than that of teammate Dickey. Look closer though and you’ll see that Gehrig’s image comes to a refreshing end more than a quarter inch from the card edge. After unremarkable offerings in 1933 and 1934, World Wide Gum definitely put the Border in “North of the Border!”

1934 Butterfinger Paul Waner

Finally we come to the 1934 Butterfinger card of Paul Waner, the card that I believe sets the standard when it comes to border-to-image ratio.

While the Dizzy Dean image from the same issue flirts tantalizingly close to the card edge, the Waner card has more margin than Gould selling hammers to the Pentagon. If the card had any more border we might forget it was a baseball card altogether and assume it was a Home Depot paint sample for Gotham Gray. If Big Poison were any smaller on the card he would have been Little Poison.

Teddy Ballgame, the Iron Horse, and Big Poison. Three players who made the Hall of Fame by a wide margin, but even more importantly, three cards who made the wide margin Hall of Fame. Border crisis averted, at least for now.

Diamond Stars fails its background check

INTRODUCTION

I’m not shy about proclaiming National Chicle’s 1934-36 Diamond Stars as one of my favorite sets ever. The set’s bright colors and period backgrounds seem to hint at the Golden Age of comics just on the horizon (1938-1956), and the set is loaded with action in contrast to the more austere (mostly) portrait-centered design of its 1934 Goudey competition.

Much of the action was posed and, stylistic backgrounds aside, would fit right in with the Topps sets of 1957, 1967, or even 1977: baseball players pretending to do baseball things on baseball fields.

Other cards, however, took the action a step further and put the players right into the game.

Other cards fell short of in-game action but still managed to have interesting things going on in the background. (Click here for a fun Twitter thread on the Medwick card in particular.)

Perhaps inspired by the recent discovery of a Joe Jackson cameo in the T202 set, I liked to imagine that the batter in the distance behind Rick Ferrell wasn’t just anybody holding a bat!

And who says there’s no Lou Gehrig in the Diamond Stars set? Who’s that handsome fellow holding a bat behind the Crow?

And come to think of it, even the guy in the dugout looks familiar!😊

Unfortunately, a funny thing happens when you submit the Diamond Star cameos to a full background check. You come up empty!

SOURCE PHOTOS

Some readers may remember an earlier post that matched the 1933-34 Goudey cards with Charles Conlon source images. Such a massive undertaking was too ambitious for the couple hours I had today, but I did manage to compare 1934-36 Diamond Stars against the 65 premiums that make up the 1934 Butterfinger (R310) set.

I chose the Butterfinger set for three reasons:

The premiums used photographs, including authentic backgrounds.
The set was contemporary with Diamond Stars, hence included many of the same players.
The Butterfinger photos had known overlap with other card sets of the era. Here are other uses of the Dizzy Dean photo, for example.

Overall, the 108-card Diamond Stars set (of 96 different players) had 31 players in common with 1934 Butterfinger. Of these 31, there were 9 positive image matches and one other I’ll put in the “maybe but probably not” category.

positive matches

The Diamond Stars Blondy Ryan features what I imagine to be a hustling outfielder, charging in to back up the play. However, “imagine” is the key word here because really there’s noboby there!

Next up is Gus Suhr, who makes the grab at first base several steps ahead of the…wait a minute…I swear there was a runner there!

Next up is Jim Bottomley, throwing a ball around while imaginary teammates check out the bat selection.

The good news on this one is that Joe Vosmik didn’t really take such a half-hearted hack at a real pitch. He’s just smiling (okay, maybe not) for the camera.

Our next batter is Master Melvin, whose Diamond Stars card is actually quite faithful to the photo. (The same Ott image makes an appearance 0n one of his two 1933 Goudey cards as well.)

Ditto for Oscar Melillo, whose card transforms rather drab stadium scene into a vibrant cityscape but otherwise introduces no false action.

While many collectors prefer the purity of black and white photography over bright cartoons, the Butterfinger card of Paul Waner may pose a challenge to their orthodoxy. I can almost picture the scene on the field: “Hurry, take his picture before the elevator doors close!”

It’s fair to say Diamond Stars really made the most of what they had to work with here. (I’m not suggesting Diamond Stars used the Butterfingers as their source, but I am assuming the source photo for Waner is the tightly cropped image we see in the Butterfinger.) As a side note, I believe Waner’s is the only Diamond Stars card to show a uniform number for a cameo player, offering us the rare chance to see who it is! Let’s see, let’s see…#28 on the Pirates in the early 1930s was…nobody!

One of the more exciting matches in the sets is Yankees ace, Red Ruffing, who appears to be joined by Hall of Fame second baseman Tony Lazzeri. As you might have guessed though, it’s nobody at all.

At first glance you may wonder why I am calling this one a match. In truth, I almost missed it myself.

But take a look. All I did was adjust the size–not even any rotation required.

CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR…

The images of General Crowder from Diamond Stars and Butterfinger bear a strong resemblance, but there are hints that the Diamond Stars comes from a different photo. I’ll leave the clues for you to find unless anyone asks me in the Comments.

CONCLUSION

Upon review it is evident that the Diamond Stars artists simply improvised backgrounds, either to make cards more interesting or to give the illusion of game action. That said, this gimmick was hardly invented at National Chicle, as demonstrated by this 1933 Goudey card of Jimmy Dykes where the action is magically transported from outside the dugout to the batter’s box.

So no, Diamond Stars hardly invented the illusion of game action. However, seeing as the Goudey image has neither catcher nor umpire, I do think Diamond Stars improved considerably on the work of their main competitor, if not perfected the mirage. (Just don’t ask yourself how Lopez had time to toss his mask off in the tenth of a second it took the ball to spring off the bat.)