[Kenmarks]

Shane/Collectorsince62--Obviously as you guys have found out, if you are a team collector and looking for 62 Jell-Os, you are going to be hard pressed to ever get the three Cardinals you are looking for. They are tough, tough, tough. In fact the Grammas card was the last one I found to complete my set (and the same with two other collectors I know). Maybe I can give you a bit more background.

In the 1962 Jell-O set, there were 18 teams with players in this set, with 9 of the teams impacted by these 21 listed player cards (and thus 9 teams with no players on this list). The Cardinals along with the Yankees and the Pirates lead the way with each having 3 players among the 21 toughies. And you occasionally see Yankee collectors lament the same difficulty you guys have experienced, only with Skowron, Richardson, and Stafford.

Related to the flavors of Jell-O the Cardinal players appeared on, it is pretty murky, as it is with really with the entire set. Absolutely none of them appeared additionally on pudding flavors as about 30% of the set did making those players very much more available. But after that, little is known about the flavors these 21 players appeared on except for 5 players I am aware of. Four of the players appeared on Black Raspberry flavor including one of your missing Cardinal players Alex Grammas. Related to Flood and Simmons, I am not aware of any absolute known tie to a specific Jell-O flavor. There is no company distribution list tying players to the Jell-O flavors they appeared on. But some of us do try to track when we see cards/boxes that allow us to know the flavor a player was on. And when you look at this tracking, one thing is pretty evident. It would look that when players were assigned their Jell-O flavor(s) to appear on, it was not totally random. You can see a ton of instances players with consecutive numbers were on the same flavor/size boxes. For example 12 Blanchard and 13 Arroyo were both on 3 oz. Blackberry; 19 Aspromonte and 20 Kaline both on 3 oz. Strawberry, 22 Lary and 23 Mossi both on 3 oz. Lime and so forth. This this goes throughout the set and I am certain to a much larger extent than we know for sure given the limited information on all the different player assignments to Jell-O flavors. In fact if one was to bet, one might have a strong position to say this pattern was utilize completely throughout the entire set. When you look at the toughest 21, there are a lot of consecutive numbers on that list (and in fact toughies 156 Maye and 157 Spangler both were on Black Raspberry). One of the last things in this discussion area relates to why you see some "stand-alone" toughies without a corresponding toughie immediately before or after. Best example might be Duke Snider #114. He is in the middle of a toughie streak of numbers running from 112 thru 116. While Snider can be a bit tough to find, the reason he is not listed as a toughie is that he was also on a pudding box (chocolate) making him considerably easier to find. However if you do have a Snider, it is most likely from a pudding box (one can tell by color and gloss) as the gelatin flavor Snider card is extremely hard to find and he may have only been on an Apple flavor gelatin box. Also because some players appeared on multiple flavors of Jell-O gelatin boxes, that could screw up the consecutive numbers idea thus making it less obvious given the available information today.

OK, so after all this background, back to the question of which flavors of Jell-O were the Cardinal players on. Grammas is known as he was on Black Raspberry. I would bet that Simmons was also Black Raspberry for sure given the distribution information above related to consecutive numbers. Less certain of Flood, although I guess I would go with Black Raspberry too, but would mean three numbers in a row on that which the company may not have done. Also it seems Flood is a touch easier to find than other Black Raspberry cards, so that goes against three in a row. I guess with Flood it is a TBD situation.

Soooo, maybe way too much info. Know Mike Skiles and Gelvert Meyer also are big into researching these cards (others too I am sure), so would love to hear your takes too.