Category: Pre-war Gum Cards

Author’s note: This is the seventh in a series of pieces that will offer a mix of facts, unknowns, and speculation on one of the Hobby’s most iconic brands. This installment examines the chronology of the 1934 set.

UPDATE: This article was updated in November 2021 to include reflect dates of birth from the 1933 edition of “Who’s Who in Major League Baseball” thanks to an eBay purchase from an ex-major leaguer!

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If you are just now jumping into this series, this post will probably stand on its own. However, you may wish to skim the second, third, and sixth installments first in order to have a richer context.

Briefly, we have already covered the 1934 Goudey set as a 96-card set printed as follows–

• Sheet 1 – Cards 1-24 in order, featuring repeated players and artwork from the 1933 set.
• Sheet 2 – Cards 25-48 in order, with almost entirely new players.
• Sheet 3 – Cards 49-72 in order, with almost entirely new players.
• Sheet 4 – Cards 73-96, with almost entirely new players, and an extra “1933” Napoleon Lajoie card

I have spilled a ton of ink examining the chronology of the 1933 release but none thus far on the timing of its sequel. Were all 96 cards simply released all at once? Were the cards released in sets of 24 (or perhaps 48), from the start of the baseball season to the end? Or were these 96 cards all released fairly early in the season, with potential future releases halted due to poor sales or other business reasons?

Here are some clues, though as with previous articles not all will prove definitive or even useful.

SHEET 1 (CARDS 1-24)

The card backs from the first series do not reference any in-season events or even list any player ages. Recalling that all 24 players (and their artwork) were recycled from the 1933 set, this release could have been prepared and finalized quite early. In fact, the decision to reuse prior players and artwork was likely made specifically to shorten production time and ensure cards would hit shelves by Opening Day.

However, we can establish an earliest possible date for finalization based on the Red Sox card of Lefty Grove and the Tigers card of Mickey Cochrane. Each of these cards reflect trades made on December 12, 1933.

An additional team update reflected in this release was Chuck Klein (Phillies to Cubs, November 21) while a non-update was Alvin “General” Crowder’s trade from the Senators to the Tigers on August 4.

Overall then, the clues suggest a finalization window from December 12 to August 3. Obviously that’s quite broad, and we can narrow it quite a bit by assuming cards would have been on shelves for Opening Day.

SHEET 2 (CARDS 25-48)

The first card to include a player age or any clue at all is that of Julius Solters, card 30 in the set. Notably, “Moose” did not make his Red Sox debut until Opening Day (April 17) of the 1934 season. His card bio identifies him as “one of the newcomers to the Boston Red Sox…” These clues seemingly point to his card being finalized after Opening Day.

Meanwhile, the card bio indicates Moose’s age as 25. Though Baseball-Reference lists his date of birth as March 22, 1906, contemporary sources identified his birth year as 1908, as is seen on his 1938 Goudey card.

A 1908 birthdate would make Solters his 1934 Goudey age until March 21, 1934, i.e., the preseason.

This leaves us with two possibilities–

• The card was finalized during Spring Training even though Solters was not yet a sure thing to make the team.
• The card was finalized after Spring Training and the age assigned to Solters was simply out of date.

I favor the latter of these two options, mainly because I don’t think Goudey would have included Solters on the checklist and created artwork for the card until his Major League status was assured. (Unlike the 1933 set, the 1934 set did not include any minor leaguers.)

Immediately after Solters in the set was card 31, Baxter Jordan, who Goudey lists as 27 years old. According to Baseball-Reference, Jordan was born on January 16, 1907, which would have made him 27 for the entire 1934 baseball season. As such, his age and birthdate offer no useful hint as to when cards 25-48 were released other than simply “January or later.”

No other cards on the sheet include ages, but we can look at two team changes that the cards reflected as well as two that the cards did not. Here they are in chronological order.

• George Earnshaw #41 – Traded from Athletics to White Sox on December 12. Shown on card with White Sox.
• John Stone #40 – Traded from Tigers to Senators on December 20. Shown on card with Senators.
• Dick Porter #43 – Traded from Indians to Red Sox on May 25. Shown on card with Indians.
• Don Hurst #33 – Traded from Phillies to Cubs on June 11. Shown on card with Phillies.

The teams these four players are shown with suggests cards that were finalized between December 20 and May 24. Factoring in the Solters card as well, we end up at April 17-May 24, though the foundations supporting such a conclusion are somewhat shaky.

SHEET 3 (CARDS 49-72)

The first card of interest on the third sheet is that of George Watkins, number 53 in the set.

Watkins is shown with the New York Giants, reflecting a March 24 trade from the Cardinals, so we know the card was finalized in late March at the earliest, hardly a surprise since we are now in the set’s penultimate release.

However, Watkins is also noted as “one of [New York’s] most dependable hitters.” This characterization might help date the card since Watkins was anything but dependable in the first part of the season.

At the end of April, Watkins was batting a paltry .091. When the sun rose on May 20, Watkins was batting a meager .194. A hot finish to May boosted his average above .250 for the first time on May 31, on its way to a high of .276 on July 3. (He would finish the season batting .247.) As usual there is room for wiggle, but I’ll take May 31 as the earliest the description of Watkins would have applied.

Further pointing to finalization of Sheet 3 in or after late May is the card of Wesley Schulmerich, whose bio notes a recent trade from the Phillies to the Reds. According to Baseball-Reference, the trade occurred on May 16.

Possibly bounding the window for the sheet on the other side is the card of Ed Holley. He was traded from the Phillies to the Pirates on July 12, but his card still shows him with Philadelphia. This suggests (but of course does not guarantee) that the sheet was finalized earlier than mid-July.

The first card on the third sheet to indicate an age is that of Mark Koenig, who Goudey lists as 29 years old, which would have been his age until July 18, 1934. (For completeness, I’ll note he is also on his new team, Cincinnati, which he joined back on December 20.)

Three cards after Koenig in the set was card 59, Joe Mowry, whose card gives us two clues. First, he is listed as 24 years old. However, an April 6 birthday meant his Goudey age would be correct the entire season, so this isn’t a very helpful clue.

The second clue comes from the last line of Mowry’s bio, which tells us that “in May, 1934, Mowry was transferred to the Albany Team of the International League.” This transaction occurred on May 24, placing the card in or after the end of May, consistent with the Watkins and Schulmerich cards already reviewed.

Six cards after Mowry in the set was card 65, Cliff Bolton, who Goudey lists as 26 years old. According to Baseball-Reference and the Who’s Who guide, Bolton was born on April 10, 1907, which would have made him 26 only until April 9, 1934. In other words, either the card was finalized quite early or the age was incorrect at the time the card was finalized.

Two cards after Bolton in the set was card 67, Bob Weiland, who Goudey lists as 27 years old. According to the Who’s Who guide, Weiland was born on December 14, 1906, which means his Goudey age was accurate the entire season.

However, the final sentence of Weiland’s bio provides a second clue, noting a May 1934 transfer to the Cleveland Indians. Researching the transaction further, we can date it more precisely as May 25. This makes the Weiland card the fourth so far to place Sheet 3 at or after the end of May.

Two cards later we get another age, this time John Marcum who Goudey notes as 23. According to Baseball-Reference, Marcum had the numerologically fantastic birthdate 09-09-09, which makes his Goudey age incompatible with any stretch of the 1934 season.

No other cards of Marcum indicate a birthdate. However, this article from August 1933 supports 1909 as Marcum’s birth year as understood at the time.

An event not mentioned in Marcum’s bio is his halting of Schoolboy Rowe’s 16 game winning streak on August 29, 1934. One might be tempted to take the omission as an indication that the bio was finalized before August 29, but it is more typical than atypical to omit highlights from the season in progress.

Closing out Sheet 3 is Arndt Jorgens, who Goudey notes as 27 years old. Based on his then understood birthdate of May 18, 1906, Jorgens would have been his Goudey age until May 18, 1934.

All told, the cards on the set’s third sheet offer a surplus of clues compared to earlier sheets, even if some (as is common) prove mutually exclusive. There are several cards definitively placing the sheet around or after the end of May, and there are at least a couple cards suggesting finalization before mid-July. Broadly then, we might land on June, give or take a week or two.

SHEET 4 (CARDS 73-92)

Bob Boken’s card 74 doesn’t mention his age but does note that he “was secured by the White Sox from Washington during the present season,” a transaction that occurred on May 12. We can therefore conclude that his card and its sheet were finalized (unsurprisingly) sometime after that date.

Next up is Pinky Higgins, who Goudey notes as 24 years old. Higgins was born on May 27, 1909, which meant he was his Goudey age through May 26, 1934. Again we have the conundrum that the card (and sheet) were either finalized quite early, or the Goudey age was simply outdated by the time the cards were finalized.

The very next card in the set is Eddie Durham, who Goudey notes as 25 years old. Per the Who’s Who guide, Durham would have been this age until August 17.

However, the card back offers a second clue as to timing. The end of the first paragraph notes that Eddie began the season rehabbing a “lame arm” at home in South Carolina but was “expected to be back with the White Sox before the close of the season.” (Spoiler alert: He didn’t make it back.) Pursuing this lead further, here are some notable dates relevant to Durham’s pitching status:

• May 26 (Chicago Tribune and numerous other outlets) – Durham petitions Commissioner Landis to be placed on the voluntary retired list.
• August 1 (Chicago Tribune) – Focus of rehab is to return for the 1935 season.

From this we might assume that Durham’s card was finalized earlier than May 26 or simply conclude that the Goudey biographers weren’t completely up on the news.

The very next card in the set is that of Marty McManus, who Goudey describes as “born in Chicago 33 years ago.” According to Baseball-Reference and the Who’s Who guide, McManus was born on March 14, 1900, meaning his card age would have been incorrect the entire season.

Notably, McManus didn’t age a bit between the first sheet of 1933 (!) and the final sheet of 1934 as his 1933 card also has him “born in Chicago 33 years ago.”

My conclusion then is that Goudey simply recycled the text from the year before, meaning it adds no significance to our understanding of the 1934 set. There is also little to read into McManus appearing on his new team, the Red Sox, since the transaction took place way back on April 11.

What of Bob Brown, who appears next in the set? The second sentence of his bio reads: “He was sent to Albany this Spring by the Braves, but was returned to the Boston club because of poor control.”

Ignoring the misplaced modifier (or were the Braves simply tanking ahead of their time!), we can use game logs to help date the card. His Spring demotion evidently took place in May, and his return appears to have taken place just ahead of July 1.

Two cards past Brown was the card of Jim Mooney, who Goudey notes as 27 years old. According to Baseball-Reference and the Who’s Who guide, Mooney was born on September 4, 1906, meaning he was his Goudey age through September 3, 1934. Assuming Goudey was current and correct with this age, we could infer Mooney’s card was finalized by that date.

Like Bob Brown’s card earlier, the card of Lloyd Johnson describes some minor league back and forth. “The Giants secured Johnson from the Mission Club of the Pacific Coast League, but recently sent him back to the minors.”

A review of Johnson’s 1934 record shows that he pitched only a single Major League game in 1934, which took place on April 21. (Never mind that it was for the Pirates, not the Giants.) Further research shows that Johnson’s release date was May 8, meaning his card was finalized on or after that date. The word “recently” suggests May or June as a likely timeframe.

Another demotion, this time not noted, comes with the set’s very next card, George Darrow.

Darrow was traded by the Phillies to Baltimore (Int’l League) on July 5 but is nonetheless described as the “new left-handed pitcher with the Philadelphia Phillies.” The implication is that the card was probably finalized before July 5.

We encounter yet another demotion card in the person of Homer Peel, card 88 in the set. (And in case you’re wondering, Peel lived up to his name exactly twice in his career.)

According to the card’s final paragraph, “[Peel] was recently released to Nashville.” According to Baseball-Reference, Peel’s last game with the Giants was June 25. Were the release truly recent, we might suppose Peel’s card was finalized in July, if not very late June.

Card 89 in the set belongs to switch-hitting Lonny Frey, who Goudey lists as 21 years old. According to contemporary sources, Frey was born on August 23, 1913, which makes his Goudey age accurate through August 22..

Dolph Camilli’s card 91 has two clues worthy of pursuit. The first is that “during the present season he was traded to the Phillies,” a transaction that occurred June 11.

The second clue is Dolph’s age, given as 26 on the card. Contemporary sources use April 23, 1908, as Camilli’s birthdate, which means he would have been his card age virtually the entire season.

Card 92 is interesting in that it features the bespectacled Steve Larkin, who pitched only two games for the Tigers in 1934, one on May 6 and one on May 9.

The May 17 Sporting News reported on Larkin’s demotion to the minors, but this is not noted on the card. Either it was overlooked by Goudey or the card was finalized ahead of the transaction.

Next is Fred Ostermueller, who Goudey lists as 26 years old. Ostermueller was born on September 15, 1907, making him his Goudey age through September 14, 1934, or very nearly the entire baseball season.

Our penultimate player of interest is Myril Hoag. Goudey leads off his biography with the fact that Hoag took the place of Babe Ruth “on a number of occasions this season.” This happened for the first time on June 6, and Hoag certainly rose to the occasion, going 6 for 6 at the plate in game one of a doubleheader against Boston. By June 9, Hoag had replaced Ruth three times, which I’ll non-scientifically take as the minimum threshold for “a number of occasions.” As such, I believe we can point to Hoag’s card being finalized no earlier than mid-June.

Last up is Yankee pitcher Jim DeShong, who Goudey lists as 23 years old. According to contemporary sources, DeShong was born on November 30, 1910, meaning his Goudey age would have been correct the entire season.

Again, we have a sheet with a lot of information, not all of which can be true at the same time. The most definitive clues come from player transactions, the latest of these we can assign a precise date to is the June 25 demotion of Homer Peel. Allowing time for printing, cutting, packing, and distribution, it would be hard to imagine these cards hitting shelves any earlier than late July.

Age data are much more dodgy, but we might perhaps infer from the cards of Mooney and Ostermueller that the cards in this sheet were finalized before September, a position that also makes sense from a business perspective as well.

Summary

A review of teams, transactions, and other clues has presented us with the following reasonable guesses for the finalization of the set’s four sheets.

• Sheet 1 – December 12 to April 17
• Sheet 2 – April 17 – May 24
• Sheet 3 – May 31 – July 12
• Sheet 4 – June 25 – August 31

Ideally, we would have windows for each sheet that were narrower and better substantiated. Still, this is much more than what we started with.

I hope you enjoyed the article. Tune in next time for the eighth installment in the series where I finally provide the “proof” you’ve been waiting for!

Author’s note: This is the sixth in a series of pieces that will offer a mix of facts, unknowns, and speculation on one of the Hobby’s most iconic brands. This installment returns to the timing of the 1933 set’s various releases.

UPDATE: This article was updated in November 2021 to include reflect dates of birth from the 1933 edition of “Who’s Who in Major League Baseball” thanks to an eBay purchase from an ex-major leaguer!

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Toward the end of my third article, covering the 1933 Goudey set’s release schedule, I hinted at the fact that more information was yet to come. My quick spoiler alert is that the overall impact of the information is negligible. Still, we’re here for overanalysis, so the main requirement of these posts is not relevance but length. 😊

I’ll use Carl Hubbell’s two cards in the set to give a preview of what’s to come. First, here is his Sheet 9 card, one of the most picturesque of the entire set.

Of course, it’s the card’s reverse that’s more germane to our study.

That scoreless innings record from July 13-August 1 is from the (then) current year, 1933! In truth, this tidbit tells us fairly little about the Sheet 9 release since none of our earlier estimates pointed to the finalization of these cards before August 1. The larger point is that player bios offer at least a potential source of information beyond what was previously examined.

Case in point, Carl Hubbell’s other card in the set, his World Series card from Sheet 10. In particular, read the first sentence of the bio.

In our earlier analysis, we treated the end of the World Series, October 7, as the earliest finalization date for Sheet 10. However, Hubbell’s card now extends that marker by at least 3 days since the results of the 1933 NL MVP vote were not announced until October 10.

Fellow National League ace Dizzy Dean also offers some timing clues in his bio. Here is his “looker” from Sheet 9.

It’s a bit hard to read, but the first paragraph ends with “set a modern league strikeout record when he fanned 17 Cubs in a game on July 30, 1933.” As with the Sheet 9 Hubbell card, this fact fails to move the needle beyond simply affirming Sheet 9 as one that was finalized pretty late in the season. Still, great job, Goudey, staying current like that!

Ah, but there is one more clue on the card, a much more mundane one but the type of clue we will find across nearly a third of the set. At the end of the second paragraph we learn that Dean is 22 years old.

Given that Dean was born on January 16, 1910, this statement now strikes us as incorrect regardless of when Sheet 9 came out. However, the statement makes more sense when we consider the birthdate Goudey had on file for Dean, as evidenced by his card the next year.

If you aren’t yet dizzy from the data, you may now be thinking, “So what!” And you’d be correct. However, some birthdays are more interesting than others.

Of particular note is the card of Bluege, who has two cards in the set. The first is from Sheet 6 and notes his age as 32. The second is from Sheet 10 and notes his age as 33.

A plausible assumption, therefore, is that Bluege must have turned 33 sometime after his Sheet 6 card was drafted (or slated for release) but before his Sheet 10 card was finalized. Interestingly, his birthday was October 24.

Let’s pause for a second and see where we are.

• We’ve long known Sheet 10 was finalized after the World Series, hence no earlier than October 7.
• The Hubbell MVP card further adjusts this date to October 10.
• The Bluege card may suggest cards were still being finalized through at least October 24!

Now may is italicized for a couple reasons. One, we’ll see soon enough that ages and birthdays aren’t totally reliable in the Goudey set. Two, perhaps the bio writers completed their work by October 10 but simply took into account that cards would still take a few weeks to land on shelves. I sure won’t counter either of these points, but I will note that a finalization date for the sheet after October 24 makes the US Copyright Office publication date of December 23 look a lot less crazy.

Are there more?

By my count, there are 75 cards in the set that state the subject’s age and a handful more that–like Hubbell and Dean–reference 1933 events we can date precisely. As you can tell from the position of the scroll bar, I reviewed every single one.

Much to my chagrin but probably not your surprise, a lot of the ages were very wrong, and some might say so wrong as to make the entire endeavor an exercise in futility.

For example, here is Leo Mangum (Sheet 6), who Goudey portrays as 32 years old. With an actual birthday of May 24, 1896, Mangum would have turned 32 in 1928!

Then again, the Who’s Who guide lists Mangum’s date of birth as May 24, 1900, which would have Mangum as 32 years old from May 24, 1932, through May, 24, 1933. Problem solved! Still, even with the Guide, other cards proved problematic.

Here is Gus Mancuso (Sheet 10), who Goudey portrays as 33 years old. With an actual birthday of December 5, 1905, Mancuso wouldn’t turn 33 until 1938!

With Mancuso being one of the 18 repeated players on the World Series sheet, we don’t have to look far to see what birthday Goudey had on file for him. Here is his card 41 (Sheet 3), which shows…1905 also! This 1905 date of birth similarly occurs in the Guide, so about all we can do here is regard the “33 years old” bio as a math error or typo.

I wish I could say Mancuso presented the only unresolved issue in the data, but such was not the case. In all, about two dozen players had an age in their bio that was completely incompatible with their Baseball Reference date of birth. Many were “fixed” by the 1933 Who’s Who guide, but several persisted.

Sheet 1

The first sheet in the set includes 12 cards with ages. Four of them (Bartell, Lazzeri, Cohen, Brickell) fall into the Mancuso category of ages incompatible with the 1933 release. As for the other eight, do they offer any useful information?

Indeed, all eight of the other ages would have all been correct from March 21, 1933, through August 27, 1933. This range is fairly broad but certainly compatible with our previous knowledge of the sheet one cards.

Sheet 2

The second sheet also included 11 cards with ages on the back. Only one, Hank Johnson’s, has an age incompatible with the 1933 release.

Even ignoring Hank Johnson, the data are trouble since there is no window that would make all ten ages correct. We also see two cards, Harris and Ford, whose data clashes strongly with our assumed window for sheet two based on prior articles. Were we to ignore these cards as well, something far more pragmatic than rigorous, the window we’d arrive at would be April 22, 1933, through June 5, 1933. This checks out nicely but of course comes from some cherry picking of the data.

Sheet 3

The next sheet included five cards with ages.

If we conveniently ignore the Grimes card, the window where the other ages are correct is December 2, 1932, through April 5, 1933. This matches well with earlier evidence of these cards being prepared during the preseason. Still, we only arrive at this by discarding a conflicting data point. Either way, don’t get too comfortable. By the end of this article, we will present definitive evidence that this sheet was still being worked on during the season!

Sheet 4

The next sheet in the set included seven cards with ages. As in my 1934 Diamond Stars article, Rabbit Maranville was a definite problem, though he was not the only problem.

It’s hard to know what to make of the Heathcote card. By itself it would point to the sheet having been prepared several months before Opening Day, something many students of the set might assume reasonable. On the other hand, the same sheet includes two players who didn’t turn their card ages until April (Cantwell) or May (Combs). To make matters worse, even if we ignore Maranville and Heathcote, there is still no single window where all ages would be correct.

Sheet 5

Our next sheet features three very wrong ages to go along with two aging hurlers, whose card ages coincided on only four days out of the year: July 22-25.

Interestingly the US Copyright Office publication date for Sheet 5 is July 14, which is not terribly different.

Sheet 6

The eight cards with ages on the set’s sixth sheet fit the 1933 baseball season well.

That said, the first and last card listed are mutually incompatible, with MacFayden not turning his card age until June but Leo Mangum aging out in May. Were we to cast MacFayden aside the window where all (other) ages were correct would be March 16, 1933, through May 23, 1933. Conversely, the window minus Mangum would be June 10 through July 26. This latter window matches earlier estimates for the sheet, but of course we have only attained it by ignoring one of the cards.

Incidentally, this is a great time to highlight a fun story about Babe Ruth. We now know his birthday today to be February 6, 1895. However, it was known at the time–even to the Babe himself–as February 6, 1894. The result was that the Babe literally celebrated two fortieth birthdays! [Sources: Brooklyn Eagle (February 7, 1934) and Boston Globe (February 7, 1935)]

Sheet 7

Sheet 7 included seven cards with ages but two were readily ignored.

Three of the players (High, Hargrave, Jamieson) were their card ages the entire baseball season. Meanwhile Walberg was his card age only through July 26 while Warner did not attain his card age until August 29. As such, there was no window where both were their card ages at the same time.

Were I forced to choose which card were more correct I’d choose Warner for the reason that Walberg was a repeat from the sixth sheet. Even with the bios different across his two cards I can see someone grabbing the age from the first one without thinking too hard about whether it might be outdated.

If we do reject Walberg (and Schulte and Holm!), the window for the sheet is August 29 to November 20, which matches up nicely with the September 1 publication date on file with the US Copyright Office.

Sheet 8

The next sheet includes three cards with ages, though the Mahaffey card falls far outside the 1933 release.

Two of the cards, Bridges and Suhr, had ages that held for the entire 1933 baseball season. The other card, Urbanski, pointed to finalization or release by June 4, which is far earlier than previous clues have suggested. Therefore, this sheet is not only worthless in helping refine the timing of the set but it calls this entire analysis into question. Still, I’ll keep going.

Sheet 9

Seven ages hit card backs on Sheet 9, all of which held for just about the entire baseball season (Klein turned 28 the final day of the World Series) other than that of Russ Van Atta.

The ages on this sheet, therefore, point to a window from June 21 through October 6, which fits but does not improve upon earlier estimates for this sheet.

Sheet 10

We got a sneak preview of this sheet from Ossie Bluege much earlier in the article. Notably, his age isn’t the only one that suggests a bio finalized after the World Series. Joe Cronin, with an October 12 birthday, joins him as well.

Two cards, Moore and Mancuso, have ages wholly incompatible with the set’s 1933 release. Meanwhile the Weaver card simply clashes with this sheet having come out after the World Series. Abandoning these three data points, we obtain a window of October 24, 1933, through January 4, 1934.

Other events in the bios

In addition to all the cards covered thus far, there were a handful of others that alluded to in-season events. I’ll provide them here, both for completeness and because the final one adds genuinely new information to the mix.

The first sentence of Gehringer’s bio indicates that “no selection of an American League All-Star team would be complete” with him, and of course the Mechanical Man was the starter in the 1933 Midsummer Classic. That said, the wording of the sentence is such that it could have been written before or after the All-Star Game, and even a read of “after” tells us nothing we didn’t already know about the timing of Sheet 9.

Other cards (e.g., Hornsby, O’Doul, Durocher) refer to team changes during the season, and this information has of course already been used exhaustively in my previous article.

One card refers to an injury and loss of playing time, and opens the door to a bit more research.

“Has been out of the game part of 1933 season owing to injuries” most likely refers to July 5-25 when Alexander missed 19 straight games. Given that all prior estimates for Sheet 9 were well after July, this information is interesting but not useful.

The final 1933 event noted in a player bio is the long win streak boasted by Alvin Crowder from 1932-33.

Both of the General’s cards (Sheet 3, Sheet 10) reference a 15-game win streak from 1932 that was extended into the 1933 season prior to an early season loss to the Red Sox, which game logs show to be on April 17.

Unlike much of the data we’ve reviewed, I definitely treat the Crowder bio as significant and exciting. It presents our first evidence that Goudey was still working on Sheet 3 even after the season had started. It also provides at least some basis for speculation that the same was true for Sheet 4.

Conclusions

Throughout this series I have done my best to present “all the data” whether it supports or challenges various working theories of the set. While I do believe Goudey intended for player ages to be correct at the time of each card’s release, a position corroborated by the sole correction made in the set, I have no real information on what Goudey’s source data was, and there is ample evidence that birthdates as “known” in 1933 differ frequently from those deemed correct today. Therefore, any incompatibilities I highlight could be typos, could be the result of bad math, or could simply be the result of discrepant sources.

Ultimately, of course, it’s a fool’s errand to put ages on cards that, whenever they’re released, are intended to be enjoyed all season. Goudey included ages far less frequently in the 1934 set, opting more often for precise dates of birth or evergreen statements like “Bob was born in Maryville, Ill., in 1909.” By the 1938 set, full dates of birth were used exclusively, perhaps indicating a lesson learned.

Interestingly, National Chicle may have learned similar lessons with their Diamond Stars set but solved the problem in an altogether different way. Their one series of new cards in 1936 consisted solely of players who remained their card age the entire season!

As a final note, when I first wrote this article I did not yet have access to the 1933 edition of Who’s Who, which provided my revision with important contemporary birthdates I previously lacked. As messy as some of the data in this article are, earlier readers may recall it was even worse before! This offers me at least some hope that other contemporary sources might further clean up the data and potentially lead to more consistent results.

I hope you enjoyed the article that I promised would be “one for the ages!” Tune in next time for the seventh installment in this series in which I apply similar analysis to the 1934 Goudey release.

Author’s note: This is the fifth in a series of pieces that will offer a mix of facts, unknowns, and speculation on one of the Hobby’s most iconic brands. This installment takes a closer look at player selection.

One of the topics that fascinates me as a collector is how a set’s checklist comes to be. In particular, how are the players/subjects chosen, and how is their numbering/ordering within the set determined?

When I first started collecting in the late 1970s, it either was the case or simply appeared that way to an 8-year-old that pretty much all players were selected and that order was random, other than top players occupying cards 1, 50, 100, etc. Exceptions came in 1981 when Fleer arrived on the scene and ordered cards by team (and later alphabetically within team) and Donruss reintroduced team clumps not altogether different from the old days of 1951 Bowman and 1940 Play Ball.

For a set like 1933 Goudey, we already know the set did not include all the players. Just doing some quick math, 240 cards for 16 Major League teams would mean an average of 15 cards per team. Because the set also includes minor leaguers and several repeated players, the true average per MLB team is more like 13-14.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the size of the set is therefore just about perfect for featuring the starting lineup, pitching rotation, and top 1-2 subs/relievers per team. The question you might be asking, therefore, is whether that’s how Goudey approached the set.

Rather than just show the final tally for the set, I’ll break it down chronologically as well, according to the set’s various releases.

Sheets 1-4

Through a combination of research and guesswork, I believe the set’s first 96 cards were prepared and finalized together prior to the start of the 1933 season. Overall, they don’t reflect an attempt to balance cards by team, at least in any exact way (i.e., six cards per team), but we also see there was no effort (probably for good reason!) to withhold any teams from the sets earliest releases.

I won’t go through this exercise every time, but just to give an idea what the “+” column is about, here are the extra players at each position among the set’s first four sheets worth of cards.

Chicago White Sox

Two first basemen are included, Red Kress and Lew Fonseca. Kress played a variety of positions for the White Sox in 1932, primarily outfield and shortstop. However, he took over as the Sox starting first baseman in 1933.

Fonseca, meanwhile, was at the tail end of his career but still saw limited action as a pinch-hitter and occasional backup first baseman. Based on the limited role Fonseca had already adopted in 1932, his card’s inclusion may have been more due to his role as Sox manager than erstwhile batting champion (1929).

St. Louis Browns

Two catchers are included, Benny Bengough and Muddy Ruel, though neither handled the bulk of the catching duties for the Browns in 1933. Bengough, known more for leading off the set with card #1, saw only limited action in 1932 and was off the team by 1933. Ruel, meanwhile, signed with the Browns in December 1932 but went on to serve as backstop for only 29 games in 1933.

In truth, even a set much larger than 240 cards would have been just fine without either of these players, at least for 1933, so the inclusion of both catchers begs the question of whether the set’s composition was driven at least partly by whatever photos Goudey happened to have around.

St. Louis Cardinals

The Cards had two second basemen, neither of whom needs any introduction, among the set’s earliest 96 cards. Frisch had been the club’s starting second baseman since 1927 and would ultimately take over as manager mid-season.

The Rajah was still an able hitter but hadn’t played a full season since 1929. When he rejoined the Cards for a second stint in 1933 he saw only limited action before departing midseason to take over the reins of the crosstown Browns, at which time Goudey saw fit to issue him a brand new trading card.

In addition to the duplication at second base, the Cardinals also had two catchers among the set’s first 96 cards.

Jimmie Wilson was the team’s primary backstop and would participate in the 1933 inaugural All-Star Game. O’Farrell, lauded on the card’s reverse more for past roles than future promise, was an able backup, seeing action behind the plate in 50 games in 1933.

None of the Above

Though I don’t imagine any of you counted up my tallies in the table, had you done it you would have found four cards unaccounted for.

Eddie Collins cracks the set as a Red Sox executive, his card identifying him as the team’s vice president and business manager. On one hand his inclusion in the set is unusual and unnecessary. On the other hand, he’s Eddie Collins.

Lafayette “Fresco” Thompson had a cup of coffee with Brooklyn in 1932 but no game action with the Bums in 1933. That said, he was with the Dodgers in Spring Training and (I believe) spent on month riding the bench with the big club before ultimately being sold off. I perhaps could have included him in my tally as a Brooklyn second baseman, though I think you’ll see soon the “big picture” of the set will hardly swing on Fresco.

Andy Cohen makes the Goudey set as a New York Giant, but in truth he had been out of the big leagues since 1929. His card back even notes that “he is playing with the Minneapolis Club in the American Association this year.” From what I can tell (paywall) Cohen had joined the Minneapolis Millers in June 1932 and was not at all expected to return to the Giants for 1933, though he was still making headlines in New York in 1933.

I lump Cohen’s inclusion in the set in with my “pictures Goudey had around” theory, though one might wonder if Goudey was looking to appeal to Jewish gum chewers the same way Baseball magnates were looking to appeal to Jewish fans. Then again, Hank Greenberg, who would enjoy a fine rookie campaign in Detroit, was nowhere to be found in packs.

Even then, why include Cohen as a Giant rather than a Minneapolis Miller, as was done with International League teammate Jess Petty? (We’ll come back to this in our study of Sheet 5.)

The final player excluded from by tally was Cliff Heathcote, whose MLB career ended in 1932.

Heathcote had been a fixture in Big League clubhouses since 1918, mainly with the Cards and Cubs. As his card back notes, “he doesn’t break down any fences with his wallops, but he’s a pretty dependable fellow to have on a ball club.” We might therefore attribute his inclusion in the set as a tribute to his dependability, or we might adopt one of two other theories. Either he was expected to continue with the Phils in 1933, or his picture just happened to be around. Take your pick!

Sheet 5

If you read the first article in this series, you may recall this sheet had two unusual properties. One was that its 24 card numbers filled the 24 gaps generated by Sheets 1-3. The other was that it included 9 minor leaguers.

The numbering of the minor leaguers (57, 68, 70, 85-90), particularly that last run of six straight, suggests these weren’t simply unexpectedly demoted major leaguers whose team names were updated at the eleventh hour. Rather, at least some if not all of these players were included intentionally as minor leaguers, perhaps to appeal to a broader geography than a pure “Big League Chewing Gum” release would have or perhaps for a reason I’ll offer in my review of Sheet 7.

At any rate, the large number of non-MLBers means our original table only adds 15 new tallies, highlighted in yellow below.

As before, the additions don’t reflect any intentional evening out of the set’s composition. However, they do fill gaps in each team’s lineup and starting rotation very nicely. This is particularly true for the Yankees where Babe Ruth joins the outfield.

Sheet 6

You may also recall from the first article in this series that the set’s first duplicate players were introduced in Sheet 6, including two new Babe Ruth cards. While an outfield of Ruth-Ruth-Ruth is hard to pass up, my tallying for this sheet and subsequent ones will omit duplicated subjects unless due to team change. (For example, Lefty O’Doul will count as an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants.) As such, only 16 new tallies are added to the table.

Here the new additions fill gaps in the team lineups much less efficiently than with Sheet 5. Nonetheless, some “rosters” are starting to fill out nicely, such as the Yankees who are now only a shortstop away from a starting lineup and full pitching rotation.

Sheet 7

For team collectors looking to fill out their lineups, Sheet 7 was anything but good news. Not only did this sheet include Goudey’s second tranche of minor leaguers–six this time, at 174-177, 180, and 182–but also five repeats (Ruth, Cronin, Manush, Walberg, Hornsby) and four ostensible major leaguers no longer playing big league ball. Add to that a non-optimal filling of holes, and the result is that only 5 of the sheet’s 24 cards made a dent in roster completion.

The four “major leaguers” who were no longer major leaguers deserve special mention.

First up is Fred Leach, gone from the league following the 1932 season but in the Goudey set as a Boston Brave. The second paragraph of Leach’s bio is notable: “Leach is not now in organized baseball, as he retired after playing with Boston in 1932.” A fair question, then, is why put him in the set? More on this later.

Next up is Johnny Schulte, who also hung up his spikes following spot duty in 1932. Interestingly, he is in the set as its lone coach! Personally I’m a huge fan of coach cards, but I must admit were I to choose even ten coaches for the set, Schulte would not have cracked my “college of coaches.”

Third up is Charlie Jamieson, whose playing career similarly ended in 1932. Not even a coach (!), though his bio does position him as something of a pinch-hitting legend. Oh, and I do love the artwork on this card.

The final mystery guest on Sheet 7 is Roscoe (Watty) Holm, also out of the big leagues after the 1932 season but in the Goudey set as a Cardinal.

Similar to Leach, the bio here lets us know that Holm “is not playing professional ball this year.”

The idea that the Goudey set would include retired players is not surprising by itself. What is interesting is the clustering of these players. My sense of this sheet (and to an extent Sheet 5 with its minor leaguers) is that Goudey ran out of “A-listers” and was essentially stuffing its set with filler material: duplicate players, former players, and minor leaguers.

“That’s ridiculous!” you say, knowing that Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell, and other top stars are still unaccounted for in the set. Fair point. In my imagination (hardly a rigorous place) I imagine Goudey having built the first 70% of their set from 1-2 collections of photographs that had most but not all of the players one would ideally want to include in a set of 240.

Sheets 8 and 9

Perhaps reinforcing my speculation above, the artwork and design take an abrupt turn in the set’s next two sheets.

Along with this new look, 48 brand new major leaguers are added to the set. No repeats, no retirees, no minor leaguers…just genuine big league ballplayers.

Sheet 10

The final sheet in the set, known as the World Series sheet, consisted solely of New York Giants and Washington Senators, hence would be of little use to most team collectors still hoping to round out their rosters, least of all Tigers fans still waiting on a single outfielder!

Any suspense, therefore, was limited to questions like would the Giants finally secure a shortstop or Washington a first baseman? Well, first the bad news. Of the 24 players featured, 18 are repeats! And now the good news, at least for fans of the pennant winners…the new additions did a decent job filling gaps.

There’s even more good news for Giants fans. Though first-string shortstop Blondy Ryan never did crack the set, his card was right around the corner in the 1934 release. What’s more, Travis Jackson, somewhat arbitrarily in my tally as the club’s backup third baseman behind Johnny Vergez, is of course able to slide over to short and complete the lineup card.

Conclusion?

I’m not totally sure I have a conclusion here, other than saying, “Yep, this definitely counts as overanalysis.” Beyond that, I’ll simply note what may have been evident from my very first tally chart. Despite the set size being perfectly suited to a near-perfect representation of each team’s starting lineup, pitching rotation, and top subs, the set’s actual composition suggests neither an effort to fill out rosters nor effort to represent the 16 MLB teams equally.

What’s more, even where a team appears complete in my tally, it is often the case that tallies correspond to backup players rather than starters. The catcher slot for the St. Louis Browns is a good example, recalling that Benny Bengough and Muddy Ruel make the set while starter Merv Shea is nowhere to be found.

Overall then, what we have is a set that’s hardly optimal in terms of player selection but clearly provides better coverage of prominent players than would “240 random cards.” For my part, I tend to reconcile the intentional but imperfect effort as the set’s creators doing their best to cover the bases while relying on whatever initial photographs were at their disposal. My “cardboard crosswalk” from 2019 may provide additional support.

Fortunately for the team collectors of yesteryear, Goudey’s 1934 sequel did a great job filling the holes left by the 1933 set. Taking Detroit as an example, they entered 1933 lacking a catcher…

A first baseman…

And three outfielders.

I said THREE outfielders! Ah, but I forgot how collectors used to do things back in the day. No need for Goudey to waste a slot on the checklist when kids could make that third outfielder card on their own!

Tune in next time for the sixth installment in the series, which I truly believe will be one for the ages!

Author’s note: This is the fourth in a series of pieces that will offer a mix of facts, unknowns, and speculation on one of the Hobby’s most iconic brands. This installment examines the relative scarcity of the various cards.

Unlike Topps Project 2020 or Topps Now, where print runs are published directly on the Topps website, older sets generally come with little to no information as to quantities produced. Yes, there are exceptions, such as the 1914 Cracker Jack set…

…where the card’s reverse tells us, correct or not, that “Our first issue is 10,000,000 pictures.” In most cases, however, we simply make educated guesses or leave the topic alone entirely.

In this article, I’ll share my own educated guess at the 1933 Goudey set, but perhaps more importantly I’ll “show my work” and by doing so offer a framework that collectors might find applicable to several other sets.

Population report – Fact or fiction?

Despite the various limitations and distortions inherent, I’ll begin with the PSA Population Report for 1933 Goudey, pulled on November 10, 2020. If you’re not familiar with such reports, what they show is the number of times the grading company has assigned a particular grade to a card in the set.

We can see (or not see, if you’re reading this on your phone) from the report, for example, that PSA has assigned a grade of 8 to Dazzy Vance twelve times. We can similarly see (with a little math) that PSA has graded Dazzy Vance cards 441 times in all, including half grades and qualifiers. Move down the list to Hugh Critz and we find his card graded 323 times.

We avoid the conclusion that Hugh Critz’s card (POP 323) is more scarce than Dazzy Vance (POP 441) since it is common knowledge that Hall of Famers are more likely to be submitted for grading than common players. In reality, both Critz and Vance belonged to the same printing sheet and therefore were very likely produced in identical quantities.

The question, then, is whether we can conclude anything at all from population reports, given their inclination to distort reality.

Order amid chaos

This graph shows the PSA population for each card, 1-240, in the 1933 Goudey set. Good chance you can pick out the Ruth and Gehrig cards, not to mention Napoleon Lajoie.

Here is a look at the same data, this time sorted first by sheet number and next by population. For example, the first 24 cards graphed correspond to cards 1-5, 25-35, and 45-52 (i.e., Sheet 1), and the most frequently graded subject from the sheet, Jimmie Foxx, is shown first. For lack of a better spot, I put the Lajoie card, printed in 1934, at the very end of the graph.

There are now three discernible patterns of interest.

• Each sheet in the set includes several players whose cards are graded disproportionately often. You’d be correct to imagine Hall of Famers and stars here, along with Benny Bengough and Moe Berg.
• Each sheet in the set includes a large number of cards (“generic players”) graded much less frequently: the Hugh Critzes, Ed Morgans, and Leo Magnums of the set.
• Within a sheet, the population for generic players is relatively uniform.

Here is a closer look at Sheet 4, where the tall bars correspond to seven Hall of Famers and the short bars correspond to far less sought after players.

A final property of interest, true for all sheets and not just this one, is that the star player populations cover a very wide range (744 – 476 = 268) while the generic player populations cover a much narrower one (334 – 283 = 51). Another measure of the same thing is that the standard deviation is 96 for the first group and 18 for the second group.

Estimating relative scarcity

We know, therefore, that while a graph like this one might be interesting it may not be telling us anything real about relative scarcity. Perhaps all it’s really showing us is which sheets have the best players.

The standard deviations corresponding to each bar (130, 100, 238, 116, 162, 293, 190, 109, 126, and 109) sound further alarms for treating our data as clean or uniform.

To arrive at data that are meaningful and useful we need to eliminate the undue impact of star players. There are many ways this can be accomplished. The one I’ve chosen is to restrict my data set to the bottom eight players per sheet. In the case of Sheet 4, that would mean the players in the orange rows below.

Examining the sheet’s entire roster, you might wonder why I limited myself to the bottom eight when even the bottom 17 would seem to have worked. The main reason is that some of the other sheets in the set have far more stars than this one. Also, 8 from 24 gave me a nice simple fraction, the bottom third, that I wouldn’t have if I’d used the bottom 9 or 10 players.

At any rate, here is what happens when we restrict our interest to the “bottom eight” on each sheet. I’ll also mention that standard deviations are now 13, 12, 18, 5, 6, 12, 10, 12, 11, and 12, which tell us the data has almost no variability within a given sheet.

Mostly just for fun, here are the two preceding graphs plotted together.

At first glance, perhaps the data aren’t all that different after all. However, there are at least a few instances where the shift from the full data set to the bottom third is instructive–

• Sheets 1 and 2 – Our original graph suggested Sheet 1 cards were more plentiful than Sheet 2 cards. However, our new data suggests cards from each sheet are equally plentiful.
• Sheet 6 – Our original graph suggested Sheet 6 cards were quite common. Our new data suggests Sheet 6 cards are among the more scarce in the set.

YOU REALLY TRUST THIS?

If all we had were these graphs, then it would be reasonable to worry that random variation was the biggest factor behind the differences from one bar to the next. However, the very small standard deviations associated with each data set convince me that the differences here are real. That said, I’d be either crazy or lazy (and have been accused of both!) not to corroborate my results against other sources.

SGC data

Second only to the PSA population report the next largest source of 1933 Goudey data comes from rival grader SGC’s population report. Across the Goudey set, SGC has graded between 25 and 30% as many cards as PSA, hence more than enough to be of interest. The graph below shows “bottom eight” numbers from SGC alongside the PSA numbers.

Multiplying the PSA data by 0.27 (or any number in the vicinity) puts the numbers on roughly the same scale and facilitates at-a-glance comparison.

As you can see there is very little difference between the PSA and SGC data. This is further evidence to me that the numbers are genuinely meaningful.

Other ways to remove the effects of stars

I mentioned earlier that I landed on a “bottom eight” approach to be sure I didn’t accidentally include any star players from some of the more loaded sheets. Still, it’s worth looking to see how robust the patterns in the data are against other methods.

Since the PSA and SGC data were quite consistent I’ll use this new graph that adds the two as my new baseline for comparisons against other methods.

Bottom half

Here are the sheet averages when restricted to the bottom twelve cards per sheet. There is virtually no change to the data.

Medians

Another approach that eliminates the impact of stars is to take the median. An advantage is that this approach also avoids any outliers at the bottom of each data set. As long as the number of star cards on all sheets is less than 12, it may be that the median will reflect the true card populations better than anything I’ve used thus far. Here I will revert to using PSA data only since the PSA and SGC counts are too different to produce a meaningful median. (It would often end up being the average of the least graded PSA card and the most graded SGC card.)

Again, the relative ordering of the bars remains nearly identical. A careful look will show that Sheets 5 and 6 have flip-flopped, but the differences are small enough to regard the two sheets as virtually tied under either measure.

Conclusions

While population reports can be misleading on the whole, I believe they can offer reliable data on the relative scarcity of cards in the set provided disproportionately graded cards can be removed from the analysis in a systematic way.

Where a set is issued in multiple releases or series, the “bottom third” approach offers a methodology that does not require any card-by-card judgments be made, though a global judgement that the set has enough generic players to support the approach would still be required. As has been seen, the bottom third approach could likely be replaced by a bottom half or median without impacting results unduly.

Examples of sets that should be amenable to the same approaches used here include the various Topps flagship sets from 1952-73, though care would need to be taken where a particular series is already known to be particularly tough. For example, the final series of 1967 Topps is so famously difficult that it’s easy to imagine even its common players being disproportionately graded.

While I’ve (mostly) opted for objective data over speculation in this series of articles, I’ll nonetheless close with the reasons this analysis is most interesting to me personally.

As important as the 1933 Goudey set is to the history of the Hobby, it is surrounded by unknowns. It is my hope that various high-effort-low-yield attempts to learn more about the set will ultimately fit together into a coherent and more complete narrative than what we have today.

While population information may be of interest to some collectors on its own–perhaps some of you will head to eBay and start buying up Sheet 9 cards as a result of this article!–I believe it also offers hints at other topics of interest such as the set’s chronology. For example, a conjecture of mine is that the first two sheets of the set comprised a single 48-card release. Such a conjecture is strengthened by the two sheets having nearly identical population data. Meanwhile, the likelihood that Sheets 3 and 4 formed paired releases appears unsupported by population data.

Interesting outlier

I’ll end with a mini-mystery unrelated to the “big picture” of the set but instead confined to a single card. In reviewing population numbers for literally 240 different cards there was one card that stood out. Maybe you can spot it among the PSA populations for Sheet 2.

In addition to having at least “minor star” status, Jimmy Dykes also has the only known significant variation in the set. (I’m ignoring proof cards, print defects, and copyright cards here.) In case you’re not familiar, Goudey corrected his age from 26 to 36 at the start of the third bio paragraph.

As tends to happen when an error is corrected, both the original error version and the corrected version each acquire relative rarity within the set. As such, I would expect both versions of the card to be disproportionately graded, and I would certainly expect to see a lot more Dykes cards graded than George Blaeholders!

My own conclusion is that the Dykes card is genuinely rarer than the rest of the cards on Sheet 2. Given that the cards were printed together, my personal theory is that Goudey didn’t simply swap in the new Dykes for the old one at some point but instead pulled Dykes entirely during some portion of the interim.

Of course an alternate theory is simply that Dykes no longer gets the Hobby love he once did and that the card’s variations are largely off the radar. Either way, I hope the example illustrates yet another potential use of the population data to tell a larger story about the set.

The next article in this series examines the player selection of the 1933 Goudey set.

Author’s note: This is the third in a series of pieces that will offer a mix of facts, unknowns, and speculation on one of the Hobby’s most iconic brands. This installment examines the chronology of the 1933 release based on three different sources.

When did the cards come out?

When did 1933 Goudey come out? On one hand, the question is like asking who’s buried in Grant’s tomb. Lajoie card notwithstanding, isn’t the answer 1933? (Or Grant, if you’re still stuck on the other question.) Okay, but when in 1933?

I’m not aware of any exact answers to the question, but there are at least three different sources that I believe, separately or taken together, offer a richer and more complete picture of the release.

First-hand account

The November 1970 issue of “The Ballcard Collector” (great name, by the way!) featured a terrific first-person account, “Only One for a Penny? No Doubles, Please!” from Elwood Scharf, who in 1933 collected the cards at the age of 13. As we’ll see later, his memory of the release calendar had some errors, but I’d have no article (some would say “no articles PLURAL”) if rigor were my primary requirement.

Not having any back issues of “The Ballcard Collector” at my disposal, I first encountered Mr. Scharf’s article in the Net54 Baseball forum. (Net54 Baseball members can read the entire article here, but I don’t believe non-members will be able to view the scans.) The overall article, worth a read in its entirety, offered a vivid picture of what it was like to collect the Goudey cards in real time, but I’ll settle here for excerpting only the portions most pertinent to the set’s release schedule.

• “Big League Baseball [1933 Goudey] hit like a bombshell in the early spring of 1933 and was an instant success.”
• “They were released in series of 24 cards, and the first two series, through number 48, appeared in quick order.”

• “After that, Goudey began to get a little tricky and started to skip numbers. The third series included numbers 49 to 52, 58 to 67 and 75 to 79 and 92 to 96…”

• “…and the fourth series jumped way up to include number 141.”

• “The first seven series of 167 cards were distributed by early July and are easily identified by the BIG LEAGUE CHEWING GUM panel across the bottom of the picture.”

• “There was a long wait after the early panel cards, and we began to think that our town had been passed over. The first series of the final three, numbers 190 to 213 finally arrived in mid-August…”

• “…and was followed by the second series in September.”

• “Another long wait ensued. The baseball season ended, the World Series became history and still those empty spaces were there. With footballs in the air we were certain that this time we had been forgotten. However, Goudey was busy that October and it wasn’t until the end of the month that the tail-enders reached our neighborhood grocery.”

Analysis

Right off the bat, this recollection challenges a tacit assumption I’d made in the first installment of this series. According to Mr. Scharf, the first two series consisted of cards 1-48. Meanwhile, we know that the first two sheets included the less orderly selection of cards shown below. (Sheet 1 shown in blue and Sheet 2 shown in yellow.)

While it’s possible that Mr. Scharf’s memory is inaccurate on this point, it’s also possible that the Goudey releases didn’t correspond exactly to the uncut sheets. For example, Goudey could have printed the first several sheets up front and then pulled from them just the ones they wanted for packs. More work, yes, but certainly possible.

Something I don’t want to ignore in this he said sheet said is that Mr. Scharf offered two distinct memories on this point. One was that the first two series ran through card 48, and the other was that the skip numbering began after the second series. Barring any new information, I’d probably put my money on Mr. Scharf having it right. However, we will see one piece of information at the end of this article that may tip the scales in the reverse direction.

Either way, let’s take “early spring,” hence late March through late April, as the window for the first 48 cards, whether this means Sheets 1-2 or a 48-card combination built from most of Sheet 1, all of Sheet 2, and some of Sheet 3.

From there we have no specific information regarding sheets 3-6, but Mr. Scharf identifies early July for the release of Sheet 7, mid-August for Sheet 8, September for Sheet 9, and the end of October for Sheet 10.

We can plot the information on this 1933 calendar, which we will add to as we examine other sources. As additional context, Opening Day was April 12, and the final game of the World Series was October 7.

While the overall picture seems logical and plausible enough, I believe there are three questions that arise.

• Are the memories correct? If not, which ones are wrong?
• Is any further refinement possible, particularly with Sheets 3-6?
• Did Goudey really crank out the World Series cards that fast??

Even as we look to other hints at the set’s release schedule, there is a certain fuzziness that will be left in our answers to each of these questions. Still, I think we will know more than we do now.

Team changes

An entirely different set of chronology clues we will examine comes from players who changed teams just before or during the 1933 season. To illustrate how this approach will be useful, let’s take a quick look at the Rajah.

Hornsby’s first card comes from Sheet 4 and depicts him with the St. Louis Cardinals. Meanwhile, his second card, from Sheet 7, depicts him with the St. Louis Browns.

As this transaction occurred on July 27, 1933, we can draw the following conclusions.

• Sheet 7 could not have been finalized until at least July 27.
• Assuming at least 3 more weeks to get cards on shelves, the earliest possible release would have been mid-August. (In contrast, Mr. Scharf recalled early July for this release.)

There is only one other player in the set, Lefty O’Doul, who appears on two different teams. (As a totally unrelated aside, he and Hornsby also have the two highest career batting averages among players in the set.)

Lefty’s first card comes from Sheet 3 and depicts him the Brooklyn Dodgers. His second card comes from the World Series sheet and has him with the New York Giants. The transaction took place on June 16 and ultimately tells us very little. Assuming Goudey tried its hardest to remain up to the minute on team changes, hardly an airtight assumption, all we can conclude is:

• Sheet 3 was finalized on or before June 16.
• Sheet 10 was finalized on or after June 16.

Neither of these findings is an eye-opener. The first probably would have been assumed absent any evidence, and the second is obvious simply by virtue of being the World Series sheet.

Coming up empty will be a common theme in examining team changes, but I’ll go through all of them for completeness. Fortunately, as with Hornsby, at least some of them will produce a payoff.

Sheet 1

Sheet 1 features two players who changed teams in 1933.

That Vance’s card shows him as a Cardinal indicates that Sheet 1 was finalized after February 8. If there’s anything to be learned here, it’s simply that Goudey hadn’t finalized the set’s early cards too far ahead of Opening Day. The McManus transaction provides us with nothing at all as there was never any doubt that Sheet 1 was released before October!

As a minor footnote, a collector alerted me to the fact that the Vance card still shows the hurler donning a Brooklyn cap. A possible implication is that the card’s artwork was finalized before February 8 while the card back was finalized after that date.

Sheet 2

Sheet 2 includes numerous players who changed teams in or just before 1933, including Fresco Thompson and Taylor Douthit who moved twice.

If we assume Goudey tried to keep cards current with team changes, then the data suggest Sheet 2 would have been finalized before April 29. Otherwise Douthit would have been shown as a Cub. This is consistent with Mr. Scharf’s reporting, which more than likely would have required the cards to be finalized a good month or more earlier than that.

Sheet 3

Sheet 3 featured several more team changes, collectively involving four players, with a takeaway similar to that of Sheet 2.

The Hoyt card on the Pirates indicates the sheet was finalized after January 21 while the Jack Quinn card on the Dodgers suggests the sheet was finalized before April 29.

Sheet 4

Sheet 4 is also rich in players who changed teams but the timing of the most of the changes offers relatively little insight.

The exception is George Uhle, who moved from the Tigers to the Giants on April 21. That his card shows him on the Tigers suggests the card was likely finalized before April 21. We’ll use this later.

Sheet 5

Sheet 5 includes only one player who changed teams, and the timing is uninteresting.

The Dodgers card of Carroll indicates the sheet was finalized after February 8, and there is no hint as to how late the sheet could have been finalized.

Sheet 6

Sheet 6 features four players who changed teams, including the first in-season transaction to be reflected in the set.

Leo the Lip began the season as a Red but moved to the Cardinals on May 7. His Goudey card not only puts him with St. Louis but even notes the move in his bio. (“Traded by Yankees to Cincinnati 3 years ago and remained with Reds until traded to St. Louis Cardinals this season.”)

This Cardinals card of Durocher guarantees Sheet 6 was finalized after May 7. Meanwhile the Dodgers card of Joe Judge suggests the sheet was finalized before July 25.

Sheet 7

Sheet 7, the same sheet that included Hornsby’s crosstown move, reflected three other transactions that same month.

The final transaction, that of Bob Smith, pushes the finalization of this sheet four days past what we already had from the Hornsby card.

Sheet 8

Sheet 8 includes two players who changed teams in early May, both of which are shown with their new teams in the Goudey set.

Given that Sheet 7 has already taken us to the end of July, these transactions offer no new information.

Sheet 9

None of the 24 players on Sheet 9 changed teams during the season, so there are no clues as to chronology.

Sheet 10

Sheet 10 features two players who changed teams: Lefty O’Doul and Luke Sewell.

Because we already know these cards were produced after the World Series, the team changes themselves provide no new information. What I will share, however, is the fact that Luke Sewell’s World Series card, according to Sewell himself, shows Steve O’Neill!

Summary of Team Changes

We’ll use the same style of calendar as before to summarize the team change data, noting that one major difference is that now each band indicates the potential window for the finalization of a sheet as opposed to when cards would have been available in stores.

On its own, this calendar would not do much for us, but now let’s see what the calendar looks like if we further assume that the sheets were finalized in order.

The overall picture is improved but still only partially useful when attempting to answer a question such as “When did Sheet 6, the one with all those Babe Ruth cards, come out?”

Really all we know with certainty is that those 23 (!) cards were finalized on or after May 7 (Durocher team change). Beyond that we might conjecture that the cards were finalized before July 25 (Joe Judge non-update). Of course, even if correct, the overall window is quite wide. Futhermore, remember that knowing (or surmising) when cards were finalized is not the same as knowing when they were on store shelves.

Provided Goudey were in a rush (and soon is good in business), we might add three weeks and presume the cards hit shelves between the end of May and late August. However, there is also the possibility that Goudey sat on the cards rather than releasing them right away, in which case our answer would be sometime between the end of May and who knows when.

Thankfully, there is at least one other set of clues to investigate.

U.S. Copyright info

One last bit of Goudey history comes to us courtesy of “copyright cards” originally filed with the U.S. Copyright Office. The one shown below corresponds to Babe Ruth’s card 53 in the set.

These copyright cards include three dates–

• Date of Publication
• Copies Received
• Affidavit Received (generally same as Copies Received date)

Of these dates, the Date of Publication is of greatest interest since it refers to when the cards were made available to the public. Therefore, if the copyright cards were completed accurately, we’d be staring right at the Goudey release schedule with both certainty and precision. The question, then, is “Were these cards completed accurately?”

If I simply list the Dates of Publication for each of the 30 copyright cards I’ve seen, the result is somewhat chaotic.

However, if we sort by Sheet rather than card number, a much more orderly progression emerges. All cards (from my research sample) from a given sheet carry identical Publication Dates on their copyright cards.

We’re now in a position to match up these Dates of Publications with each of the two calendars already derived in this artice.

First, here is the Scharf calendar, with “C” added to denote Copyright Office dates.

The several “C” markers that fall outside the blue bands represent incompatibilities between Mr. Scharf’s memory and the copyright cards. In general, the copyright cards suggest Mr. Scharf remembered the second half of the set coming out much earlier than it did, something the Hornsby card on the Browns reinforces.

Furthermore, the copyright cards may provide a tiebreaker on an earlier matter we looked at, namely whether the set’s first two releases corresponded to cards 1-48 as Scharf recalled or to the first two printing sheets (i.e., 1-40 +45-52). The copyright dates for cards 44 and 49 in the table suggest the latter, though it’s again important to note that this is only true if the cards were filled out correctly.

We’ll turn now to the Team Change calendar, again using “C” to signify the Copyright Office dates.

Recalling that the bands on this calendar correspond to theorized finalization (rather than release) dates for each sheet of cards, there are no conflicts in the data. At most the gaps indicate that Goudey may well have sat a bit on some releases rather than rushing them onto shelves.

So are the copyright cards correct?

I would love to offer a resounding YES! but there are a few things that give me pause–

• The December 23 date for the World Series cards feels very late.
• The separation between Sheet 3 (May 19) and Sheet 4 (May 24) seems odd.
• Ditto for Sheet 7 (September 1) and Sheet 8 (September 5).

And of course, as soon as you start to doubt some of the cards, you wonder if you can trust any of them!

WHERE ARE WE?

Though we’ll see some new clues (!) in “part six” of this series of articles, the picture we’re left with from the clues reviewed so far is akin to how different witnesses might describe a car crash. The individual accounts might all have their own errors and omissions, but the accounts taken together–even when contradictory–present at least a reasonable approximation of a reality perhaps unknowable otherwise.

At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. If you’ve got a different one, put it in the comments or tell it to the judge!

In the next installment of the series, I’ll offer some methods for estimating the relative scarcity of cards in the set.

Author’s note: This is the second in a series of pieces that will offer a mix of facts, unknowns, and speculation on one of the Hobby’s most iconic brands. This installment looks primarily at the 1933 set’s sequel and how the two sets might fit together.

1934 Goudey Basics

We’ll start with some basic information about the 1934 Goudey set.

• The set included 96 cards, a significant drop in the size from the previous year’s 240-card offering.
• While the set included two cards of Lou Gehrig and single cards of several Hall of Famers, Babe Ruth is conspicuously absent from the set.
• Cards 1-79 and 92-96 feature a blue “Lou Gehrig says…” banner while cards 80-91, all National Leaguers, feature a red “Chuck Klein says…” banner.

With that background out of the way, we’ll jump into the checklist.

1934 Goudey Checklist

Just as the 1933 set was produced on sheets of 24, the 1934 set used at least three sheets of 24 and a fourth sheet of 25. “That’s 97 cards,” you say, and indeed it is! A careful look at the sheet of 25 will reveal a card not formally considered part of the set: the “1933” Napoleon Lajoie.

I don’t know if all copies of the 1934 set’s final sheet were 5 x 5 and included the Lajoie, or if some/most copies were 6 x 4 and minus the Lajoie. (As always, let me know in the comments if you have information on this.)

Sheet 1

The first sheet in the 1934 set was by far the most star-studded, highlighted by Grove, Dean, Foxx, Hubbell, and others. In fact, 13 of the set’s 20 Hall of Fame cards reside among the set’s first 24 cards.

Unlike the 1933 set, cards on Sheet 1 bear the numbers 1-24 (no skips), though the numbering within the sheet is so random even I have literally zero to say about it.

The most salient (but not immediately evident) characteristic of the set’s first sheet is that every single one of the cards is recycled from the 1933 set, artwork and all.

First, here are cards 1-6 from the 1934 set…

And their counterparts from 1933.

And here are the next six cards, 7-12, in the 1934 set…

…along with their 1933 doppelgängers.

And finally we round things out with cards 13-24.

And once again…

Study the artwork carefully enough and you’ll spot some changes. One of the more notable updates is the coloring of Lefty Grove’s hat to reflect his move from the A’s to the Red Sox.

Add Ruth and Gehrig and this sheet would be nothing more than “1933 Goudey’s Greatest Hits!” Care to guess how many of the next 72 cards in the 1934 set reuse their 1933 images? [Cue “Jeopardy theme” while reader thinks.] Zero! This first sheet provides the only instances in the entire set and does so by going a perfect 24 for 24.

Sheet 2

Given the star power of Sheet 1, it’s no surprise that the second sheet has far fewer luminaries. Appling, Hafey, Lombardi, and Gehrig are the sheet’s lone Hall of Famers, but oh what a Gehrig! The next sheet will feature a Gehrig as well, but this yellow one, Card 37, seems to be the one nearly everybody likes best.

Cards are numbered 25-48 but again are scrambled randomly within the sheet. But hey, since it’s what I do, I’ll offer at least one thing not random about the numbering. Cards 25-36 are in the top two rows and cards 37-48 are in the bottom two rows.

Feel free to read a much earlier post on 1934 Canadian Goudey for more detail, but this is as good a time as any to note that its crazy hodgepodge of a checklist corresponds exactly to this sheet (numbered more sensibly), the preceding sheet, and Sheets 4 and 5 from the 1933 U.S. set.

Sheet 3

Reminiscent of the early 1933 sheets, we now encounter a sheet arranged by color, this time progressing from yellow to green to red to blue. We are down to only two cards of Hall of Famers, though they represent two of the three top cards in the entire set: the Hank Greenberg rookie card and the green Gehrig. This second Gehrig marks the only instance of a repeated player in the set.

Cards on this third sheet are numbered 49-72 but again in no particular order. A bit of trivia is that the mini-Gehrig icon that lived in the “Lou Gehrig says…” banner on Sheets 1-2 has now been updated to a new mini-Gehrig icon. The Coleman (Sheet 2) and Bolton (Sheet 3) cards below show the change at a size you can maybe even see on your phone.

Sheet 4

I started off the post with a picture of this final sheet, which not only includes cards 73-96 but the famous “1933” Lajoie as well.

If every instance of Sheet 4 looked like this, then we are forced to conclude that, at least off the press, the Lajoie card was no more rare than, say, Lloyd Johnson. Of course, very few Lajoie cards (I’ve seen estimates around 100) ever made it to collectors, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that a gigantic pile of these cards were simply thrown away…either that or will make for one helluva find someday!

What kind of set is it?

I’ll introduce a concept here that’s not really new but perhaps under-discussed with respect to older sets. We are of course accustomed these days to Topps putting out a new set each year. If last year’s set had 600+ players, this year’s probably will also. Most players in last year’s set will also be in this year’s. Perhaps the biggest difference from year to year, rather than size or composition, will simply be the design or appearance of the cards. I’ll call such sets sequels.

Contrasting with the sequel is a second type of set I’ll call an extension. A simple example is the 1981 or 1982 Topps Traded set. Compared with their predecessors (i.e., the 1981 and 1982 Topps flagship sets), they are obviously much smaller and include very different compositions of players. In particular, the Topps Traded sets of the 1980s were where we would find rookies not in the main set (or at least not yet on solo cards) and players who changed teams.

Returning to Goudey, my belief is that the 1934 release was more an extension than it was a sequel. Yes, the first 24 cards repeated players from the prior year, a quality we’d normally find in a sequel. However, I believe this was more about expedience than anything else. Go beyond cards 1-24 and 64 of the remaining 72 cards feature brand new players, often rookies not around in 1933 or players of secondary status who didn’t make the cut the first time around.

Now how about the other eight cards, the players repeated from the 1933 set? Two were the Gehrig cards already identified. With Gehrig the pitchman for the set, his two cards make sense, even if they “ruin” the clean run of nearly all new players.

Another repeated player is Mark Koenig, whose new card shows his move from the Cubs to the Reds. In other words, Koenig is here as a “Traded” card.

Next up is Marty McManus, whose new card shows his move from one Boston club to the other (by way of Brooklyn). Another traded card.

Finally, Adam Comorosky’s new card, yet another traded card, shows his move from the Pirates to the Reds.

This still leaves three players (Cuyler, Bridges, Hallahan) we wouldn’t expect to see in an extension/update of the 1933 set, and I offer no explanation for them. Still, three out of 72 is not a very big number.

If we think of 1934 Goudey as a sequel, it’s an underwhelming one indeed. Less than half the number of cards and almost no star power in the final three series. Conversely, if we regard 1934 Goudey as an extension of 1933, nearly all of its peculiar features make sense.

• Why so much smaller? It’s a traded set!
• Why so many no-names? It’s a traded set!
• Why no Ruth? He didn’t get traded! (More likely, Ruth/Gehrig super-agent Christy Walsh wanted the set’s marquee player to be Gehrig, favoring even grander plans for the Bambino. As a final note, Walsh also represented Chuck Klein, which explains the dozen “Chuck Klein says…” cards toward the end of the set.)

See, all your questions answered! That’s what I’m here for, right?

In the next installment of the series, following up on a question from Nick, I’ll examine the chronology of the 1933 release based on three different sources.

Author’s note: This is the first in a series of pieces that will offer a mix of facts, unknowns, and speculation on one of the Hobby’s most iconic brands. This installment looks primarily at the inaugural set’s unusual numbering scheme.

Founded in 1919, the Goudey Gum Company produced baseball cards from 1933 to 1941. Much like the Wallflowers, Counting Crows, and N.W.A., nearly all their greatest hits were packed into their debut offering. For those who not only collect cards but research them and write about them as well, the 1933 Goudey set provides near endless opportunity for inspiration, speculation, and frustration, much of which I intend to share in what is about to become a very long series of very long posts, even by Jason standards.

The basics

Before plunging into the deep end, I’ll start with some basics about the 1933 Goudey set, designated as R319 in Jefferson Burdick’s American Card Catalog.

• The set officially includes 240 cards. Of these, 239 were produced and distributed in packs in 1933. The set’s final card, a very scarce Napoleon Lajoie, was produced in late 1934.

• The set includes four cards of Babe Ruth, along with multiple cards of Gehrig, Foxx, and many other Hall of Famers.

• The majority of the cards in the set are instantly recognizable from the red “Big League Chewing Gum” banner along the bottom of the card fronts. However, nearly a third of the set omits the banner, in my opinion yielding some of the most attractive trading cards ever made.

the missing banners

The banner-less cards in the set stirred my initial interest in 1933 Goudey as an object of research. It felt odd to me that Goudey would arbitrarily omit their advertising banner at all, let alone across a random (so I thought) scattering of cards across their checklist, indicated by the yellow cells below. (The blue cell is the Lajoie card, which lives in a category all its own.)

Were the only cards missing a banner to be found at the very end of the checklist, I might have supposed Goudey simply forgot (!) the banner, ran low on red ink, or made an intentional decision that the cards looked better without a banner. But then what of these oddball occurrences like 97-99 or 142? Was I asking too much that there be some rhyme or reason to the approach?

mystery solved

I should emphasize here that for serious students of the Goudey set there never was a mystery. They already knew what I did not. Namely, the set was produced on printing sheets of 24 cards each, numbered rather haphazardly. (Source: Kevin Glew/PSA.)

For example, here is the set’s fifth production sheet, with card numbers 53-57, 68-74, and 80-91.

Those random yellow cells of banner-less cards in my table then? They simply reflect Sheets 8-10!

While we still don’t know the why we at least have a better understanding of the which.

much, much, much, much more on the sheets

If you’ve been reading my posts for long, you know there is little I love more than wholly frivolous analyses of checklist patterns. Imposing order, however forced, on randomness is kind of my thing, at least when it comes to baseball cards. (As for the rest of my life, I’m more inclined to the opposite.) Therefore, is it any surprise that the oddball numbering patterns of the Goudey sheets captured my attention immensely?

In the eleven sections that follow, I’ll offer a description of each sheet (one of them twice!), along with a mini-analysis of numbering.

Sheet 1

For veteran Goudey collectors, the first sheet is quickly identified by “leadoff man” Benny Bengough in the top left position. Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and several other Hall of Famers are easy to spot as well. The sheet also features an orderly background progression from red to yellow to green to blue, a feature that will characterize early sheets in the set but not later ones.

The chart below shows the card numbers for the 24 cards on the sheet.

About the most notable feature of the numbering here is that it’s not 1-24. The cards themselves cluster into three separate streaks of 5, 11, and 8 while leaving two sizeable gaps: one from 6-24 and one from 36-44.

My personal theory, based on separate research, is that these 24 cards were not released as a single series but released concurrently with the second sheet.

Sheet 2

The second sheet is a little lighter in star power but still pretty loaded. This is 1933 Goudey after all! Aesthetically, I particularly like the purple-brown backgrounds in the sheet’s third row.

The card numbers on the second sheet (yellow cells) completely fill one of the major gaps from the first sheet and partially fill the other gap.

Compulsive set collectors of the era, who likely had no idea the cards were produced in sheets of 24, might have found themselves buying more and more packs in hopes of landing the elusive run of cards from 41-44. And if so, they would have been disappointed, just not for long.

Sheet 3

The third sheet introduces the set’s first landscape card (top left) but more importantly includes Lou Gehrig. Retired great Eddie Collins, in the set as an executive, seems a mysterious choice for inclusion, but he will soon enough be joined by another retired great, not even counting the Nap Lajoie card that will complete the set the following year. We also have some rich dark blue backgrounds to add to our growing color palette.

Numerically, that eyesore of a gap from 41-44 is finally closed, but four new gaps are created.

Sheet 5

Yes, I skipped Sheet 4, though we will come to it soon. Sheet 5, which I wanted to show first, includes the yellow Ruth (card 53) as well as the second retired great (Tris Speaker). Perhaps surprisingly, nine minor leaguers (counting Speaker, who appears with the Kansas City Blues) are included as well.

The reason I bumped this sheet ahead of Sheet 4 is the numbering of its 24 cards. Here’s how they fall in the checklist.

Sure enough, the addition of Sheet 5 to Sheets 1-3 provides for a clean run of cards, 1-96, uninterrupted. It would be possible (and perhaps even correct!) to read nothing of significance into this fact, but I prefer to believe that this collection of cards represented a possible stopping point in the set.

Yes, the card backs from the very beginning promised 240 cards, but it was not uncommon at that time for a large set to span multiple years. Goudey’s 216-card Indian Gum set that debuted the very same year was such an example, though in fairness its card backs did not initially promise all 216 cards.

Could there have been a “Plan A” to cap the initial release at 96 cards, or was this a “Plan B” to invoke only if sales proved low? Or is the way the numbering of the fifth sheet fills the holes from the first three sheets merely interesting but insignificant? Either way, “merely interesting” is still interesting.

Sheet 4

Instead, Sheets 1-3 were followed by (of course!) Sheet 4. Whatever good news this sheet brought to young collectors was probably overshadowed by the fact that they’d now been buying gum cards for months and still hadn’t pulled a Bambino. “Could it be he wasn’t even in the set,” they might have wondered.

As preposterous a proposition that might have seemed, it applied perfectly well to several other sets of the period including 1933 DeLong, 1933 George Miller, 1934 Goudey, and 1934-36 Diamond Stars.

Still, at least for the collectors keeping count, the numbering of these new cards offered comfort that there were still more cards to come. Just look at all these gaps!

Sheet 5 (again)

I’ve already introduced this sheet once, but now I can give you its actual impact on the Goudey checklist.

I’ll also show what might have been an explicit attempt to offset collecting mutiny. “Kids, we promise! Babe Ruth is in the set. We repeat: Babe Ruth is in the set.”

Finally, I’ll point out a somewhat overlooked feature of the set’s first 120 cards (i.e., Sheets 1-5). All 120 subjects to this point are different. Though a hallmark feature of the 1933 Goudey set is its multiple cards of top stars, they would all come in the set’s second half.

Sheet 6

If Sheet 5, particularly if issued out of sequence, would have tidied up the release, Sheet 6 is the one that blew it up. Still, if there was a time to buy Goudey cards, this was sure it! Just look at the sheet’s last column: Ruth, Ruth, Foxx, and Gehrig. You’ve also no doubt spotted a third Ruth on the sheet, and perhaps you even spied that Moe Berg!

Now let’s see where these 24 cards fell on the checklist.

Much like Sheet 4, this sheet filled none of the gaps left by prior releases. The numbering for this sheet is consecutive (143-165), something we had not seen earlier though we will see it again with Sheets 7 and 8. Most notably, however, the sheet includes only 23 card numbers. The two Ruth cards in the second row are both numbered 144 and represent the set’s only double-print. Much more on this later.

As the Ruth cards make immediately evident, the Goudey set now includes multiple cards of select players.

• Lou Gehrig – Card 160 identical to card 92 (Sheet 3)
• Jimmie Foxx – Card 154 identical to card 29 (Sheet 1)
• Babe Ruth – Cards 144 and 149 both different from card 53 (Sheet 5), though all three came from the same Charles Conlon image

Feel free to read a much earlier post on 1933 Canadian Goudey for more detail, but this is as good a time as any to note that its crazy hodgepodge of a checklist corresponds exactly to Sheets 1, 2, 3, and 6 from the U.S. set.

Sheet 7

It wouldn’t. Yes, there is a fourth Ruth, card 181, and yes, that is the great Charlie Berry in the lower left hand corner. And yes, we even get the set’s first “traded card” in the person of Rogers Hornsby (Cardinals infielder to Browns manager) along with new poses of star players Joe Cronin and Heinie Manush…

But we also get six cards of minor leaguers and a (barely) image variation of a player I can’t imagine kids really wanted or needed. On the left I present George Walberg’s card 145 from Sheet 6; on the right, his card 183 from Sheet 7. “Why two,” you might wonder. Fair question. (Also see Al Corwin, 1953 Bowman.)

My own guess is it was a mistake, plain and simple. The cards are similar enough to constitute an image variation of the dullest degree but different enough to require actual work. I’d even hazard a guess that the cards were made by two different artists. Plus, if this was just Goudey being lazy, why go with two different bios!

Now truth be told, Walberg was hardly the only non-superstar to earn two cards in the set. However, as we’ll see on Sheet 10, the other ones all had a very logical explanation.

As for the checklist, Sheet 7 simply picked up where Sheet 6 left off, annoying any set collectors hoping to finally rubber band the set’s first 100. Goshdarnit, Goudey! Where the heck are cards 97-99?!

Unlike Sheet 6, in which the numbering of the cards within the sheet was a bit haphazard, Sheet 7 is numbered in perfect sequence.

Sheet 7 also marked the end of one of the set’s most defining features, the Big League Chewing Gum banner. As such, the remaining cards in the set are less iconic but more attractive.

Sheet 8

Mel Ott’s first (but not lowest numbered) card in the set appears in this release, also highlighted by Hall of Famers Gabby Hartnett, Hack Wilson, Earl Averill, and Rick Ferrell. I’m a particular fan of the card of Tigers ace Tommy Bridges, which itself is part of a Goudey mini-mystery I will return to later in this series of articles.

The Ott card, among other cards on this and later sheets, should also put to rest any theory that the “Big League Chewing Gum” banner was omitted to save on red ink.

While the new card design is easy to spot, a more overlooked property of the sheet is that all 24 players are brand new additions to the set, reversing a trend toward duplication in the prior two sheets.

Rather than fill any checklist gaps, Sheet 8 kept the foot on the gas and brought the checklist well into the 200s.

Sheet 9

The next sheet in the set brought 24 more beauties–again all new players–and the end of the regular season releases. If I had to guess, I’d also assign the lowest production run of the set to these 24 cards. Too bad.

There was still room on the checklist for this sheet to rattle off the next 24 slots. However, for the first time in a while, some early gaps were at least partially filled. For the set collectors out there, it must have been particularly satisfying to finally kill off cards 97-99 and 142.

Sheet 10

The final release of the 1933 Goudey set is known as the “World Series sheet” and features the top stars from that year’s Fall Classic between the Giants and Senators. Note that I didn’t say the previous year’s Fall Classic. This was a real-time, ToppsNow-like look at the World Series that just happened.

I can’t say I like these cards as much as the previous 48, possibly the result of some “hurry up” to get the cards out before the interests of kids moved on from baseball to other things. Though the sheet included several players already featured earlier in the set, Goudey nonetheless went the extra mile by producing genuinely new artwork for 23 of the players. The only duplication came with Joe Cronin, whose card 109 (Sheet 10) was very similar to his earlier card 189 (Sheet 7).

This final collection of 24 cards not only added new art to the set but new bios as well, updated to reflect the results of the World Series.

“Led the Senators to the American League championship in his first season as manager of the club, although his club was beaten in the World Series with the Giants…”

At this point there is little suspense as to how the final 24 cards filled the checklist. Still, here it is for completeness. Only one hole remained, card 106, along with the question of why.

chase card?

Conventional Hobby wisdom tells us that the omission of card 106, later filled by Napoleon Lajoie, was intentional, a tactic designed to keep youngsters buying gum in their futile pursuit of a complete set. In modern parlance, card 106 was a chase card.

My own take differs.

For one thing, the Goudey set was very large. Completing the set, even assuming no duplicates, would require averaging a pack a day from Opening Day through Christmas. I’m not sure how many kids could manage this level of collecting in Depression-era America, even ignoring the competition from other gum cards on the market. True, the more compulsive collectors out there could augment their sets by cajoling or pilfering away the cards of their friends, but I still don’t see too many able to go 240 or bust.

Second, at what point in the set’s release would collectors even notice that card 106 was missing? Had the cards been released in numerical order, the missing card would have been evident mid-release–i.e., when the most complete collections out there looked like this.

Instead, set numbering was so haphazard that the hole at 106 was largely undetectable* until the release of Sheet 10, a good month or so after the World Series ended. By then, even if collectors wanted to embark upon buying sprees, it’s unclear how much longer fresh packs would keep hitting shelves.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe the haphazard numbering and gaps in the set, evident from the very first release, were an intentional tactic to boost sales. I just don’t believe card 106 itself played any outsized role.

*Clarifying a point above, I say “largely undetectable until the release of Sheet 10″ since the omission could have been spotted as early as Sheet 6. Potentially, the most diligent collectors might have noticed that all prior releases contained 24 or 48 cards while the latest one only included 23. If so, their chase would have commenced that much sooner. Then again, maybe they weren’t the suckers Goudey was counting on. Here is Elwood Scharf, who we will hear more from in part three, remembering what it was like to collect these cards in his youth:

They were packaged in a semi-transparent wapper and, by holding this wrapper tight, we could make out the name of the players on the face of the card… Eager hands would then go through the packs of cards, selecting only those that were needed.

“The Ballcard Collector” (November 1970)

APPENDIX

In the body of the article, I presented the card-by-card numbering of Sheets 6 and 7. In case it’s useful, here are all ten sheets.

Sheet 1

Subject to the skips in the checklist, numbering is perfectly sequential.

Sheet 2

Total chaos! (And this is from a guy that LOVES bizarre numbering schemes.)

Sheet 3

A little less random than Sheet 2 but no discernible pattern.

Sheet 4

Similar to Sheet 3. Some clustering of neighboring/nearby numbers, but no evident pattern.

Sheet 5

Another random one!

Sheet 6

Not much* would have to change for the numbers to be in order here. Provided you’re okay with right to left (or flipping the sheet over), there is already a perfectly sequential run from 152-165.

*The only changes needed to produce a fully sequential sheet (143-165) would involve “rotating” the upper right trio of cards and eliminating the the Ruth between 151 and 152..

Sheet 7

Hallelujah! A completely sequential sheet!

Sheet 8

Nice! Another one in perfect sequence! How long can our luck continue?

Sheet 9

Don’t let the skips in the top row fool you. It’s another sequential sheet.

Sheet 10

And once again, sequential numbering from start to finish!

In the next installment of the series, I’ll offer a similar sheet-by-sheet analysis of the 1934 Goudey set (thankfully much smaller!) and highlight an easily overlooked connection between the 1933 and 1934 issues.