[drumback]

I would consider adding Smith to the list of tough ones. Otherwise, It's Myers, Bescher, Bransfield, Paskert, Rhoades, Tenney and Wilson. When I put my set together, the last one I was able to track down with decent eye appeal was Myers.

Also, I'm not totally convinced they weren't all printed in the same quantity. In the advertising, if I recall correctly, the company reserved the right to send an alternate card if they ran out of the one requested by the customer. I believe they may have resorted to this regularly. How else can you explain the fact that there appear to be only three times as many cards of Cobb as there are of your average common?

If a similar promotion were started today, and two of the players were, say, Albert Pujols and Billy Butler, would you only get three times as many requests for Pujols? It would probably be something more like 10 to 1, or 20 to 1. Cobb was at the peak of his career. His ratio over someone like, say, Bill Burns should have been more in the 20 to 1 ratio than the 3 to 1 ratio. Same with Matty, who was probably the most popular player in America in 1911. But according to the PSA population report, which I admit I also haven't seen in over a year, Cobb's ratio over Burns is something like 3 to 1. Matty's is even less than that. Also, consider that since Cobb is much more valuable than Burns, he is likely to get graded at a much higher percentage of his total number of cards printed than Burns. That would make the difference between them even smaller still.

If this is true, the question then becomes, what happened to all of the common cards printed but never requested or shipped out? Most likely, they were destroyed. Otherwise, they would have eventually made their way into the collecting public, and there would be just as many Burns as Cobbs on the market.

Here's a weak scan of my Rhoades (PSA 2).