HOF Rookies from 1886

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

There are 6 HOF rookies featured in the N167 Old Judge set:

Connor, Ewing, Keefe, O'Rourke, Ward and Welch.

On the back of those cards, it says that their images were: "Copied from Photo by "J. Wood, 208 Bowery, NY."

Logically, this is proof that the actual "J.Wood photos" had to PRE-DATE the creation of the 1886 Old Judge cards.

SO... does that make THIS a "rookie card" for those 6 players:

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Posted By: Andy Baran

Hal,

It depends if you consider an "unissued" cabinet card to be a card or not.

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

At this point ... I no longer have a choice.

I have to count it!

Tell me what you know about "unissued"?

Do you mean that it was not distributed to the public but only available at the studio?

If so, then I am sure you are correct that this was the case.

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Posted By: Jay Miller

Andy--I'm with Hal, why do you consider that cabinet card to be unissued? I consider it the same as any other cabinet. BTW Hal, many of those images are the same as those in the Kalamazoo Bats set.

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

That's true, Jay, which is why I think we decided a while ago that certain K-Bats (NY Giants head shot photos) were from 1886...

while the others (outdoor action photos) were from 1887, right?

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Posted By: Andy Baran

By unissued, I mean that it was not readily available to collectors around the country. I would guess that the Wood Cabinets were not readily available. This isn't my definition, but I know that it is important to Hal, since he has mentioned it before. Hal has also mentioned in the past that he does not consider Cabinets to be true "cards".

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

Then again, I never considered "Exhibit" cards to be real cards either because of their large size... but everyone said I was crazy.

I may have to reevaluate my position on these cards that are larger than today's "standard-sized" cards.

Just because someone started making cards 2-1/2" x 3-1/2" in the 1950's does NOT mean that anything BIGGER than this should be "unacceptable," right?

I can't accept something 8" x 10" (like a magazine insert) as being a baseball "card"...

but anything 4" x 6" (like most exhibits) or less should probably count.

Yes, this represents a "change of heart," but only after years of collecting modern cards and never really grasping the different sizes that existed BEFORE Topps came into being!

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Posted By: Julie

on the M101-2s are so good, most of them. ButI have no interest at all in things cut off of a Wheaties Box, a Post cereal Box or a jello Box.

I think it's silly to say that a mounted photo of more than 4" by6" is less of a card than one that's 4"x6.". 19th century photos are neat, and of course they're all mounted--so they're CARDS, damnit! You go NUTS over an issued baseball card that's one-of-a-kind (like the Just So Burkett), but a photo, mounted, which is also 1-of-a-kind is just a photo.

Love those Harpers woodcuts, too!~

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Posted By: Andy Baran

Hal,

Cabinets are great, but very often it is impossible to determine what year they were produced. The Wood Cabinets don't fall into this category.

Be careful what you ask for. There are known Cabinets of several 19th Century players in your collection that were produced prior to their "rookie card". You may need to rethink your entire collection.

Also, wouldn't the NY Team Cabinet technically have to be produced after the individual cabinets, since it is essentially just a photo of the individual photos?

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Posted By: Andy Baran

I believe that I have seen advertising on the back of some Cabinets (for the photography studio) that "Duplicates can be had at any time". How do you know if the Cabinet was even produced in a given year, or reproduced over several years?

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Posted By: Joe P.

Andy:
"By unissued, I mean that it was not readily available to collectors around the country".
*
*
I have a problem with the above logic, but first let me see if I understand it correctly.
Are you saying that if it's a regional item, and it isn't readily available to the rest of the country, it dosen't count?

Let's go one step further.
What about cards of Negro Leaguers?
Rookie cards of HOF's only found in sets put out by Cuba, or other regional Islands, do they count?

Just a thought - just a question on Unissued.
Joe

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Unless it has advertising on it or it is known to have been offered commercially to the general public (premium, suppliment, sold in store, etc), a CDV or cabinet card is not catalogued as a trading card ... In the 1800s, some CDVs and cabinets of famous people (Abe Lincoln, Queen Victoria, actresses) were made for and sold to the public. Mathew Brady and Napoleon Sarony were two well known photographers who sold CDVs directly to the public. Bur for most baseball team cabinets, it's impossible to know and not worth worrying about.

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Posted By: Paul

I thought just about everyone agreed that team cards aren't the rookie card of any individual player.

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Posted By: barrysloate

Andy is exactly right. In order to photograph a composite cabinet, the individual portraits had to be reshot. So each individual player by definition predates the composite.

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

Barry is correct.

The only thing that predates this Cabinet are the PROOFS of the individual players that were laid out and used to shoot this big composite.

Tery Knouse (TIK & TIK) HAS those proofs and they are for sale for a pretty penny.

BUT... here is my distinction.

Those pictures are clearly PROOFS and NOT "cards" that were distriubuted to ANYONE anywhere.

In fact, they were THEN used to create the J. Wood INDIVIDUAL player cabinet cards... which were THEN used as the basis for the N167 Old Judge drawings.

The PROOFS that TIK has are ONLY the photographs of the players mounted on hard backs with ZERO BORDER.

The mounts on the REAL J. Wood individual player cabinet cards that were given to the public are JUST LIKE the mounts on my J. Wood team cabinet.

-----------------------

SO... saying that the J. Wood cabinet cards of each INDIVIDUAL player from J. Wood PRE-DATE my team cabinet is not provable.

Yes, the proofs predate it ... but I don't collect proofs.

Furthermore, if we DO start counting proofs... then NOTHING we ever bought at the store would be a rookie card ... only the proof that someone had to steal from the factory. Not a good slope to slip down.

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

And by the way, if you haven't noticed from my website...

I am now trying to ADD to my HOF rookie card collection:

At least one card of every HOF that is a REAL PICTURE and not a drawing or painting of some sort. I want people to see for themselves what every HOF'er REALLY LOOKED LIKE!!!

So, the 1886 NY Giant team cabinet was a great way of doing this for me because of the age and rarity of it!!

Nobody ever said that I wasn't still looking for N167's of these guys, did they?

You don't see me offering up my N167 Connor card, do you?



But hey...it isn't MY FAULT that Old JUdge decided to DRAW the dumb things and FORCE me to still go out and get "real picture" cards of these guys, is it?

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Posted By: Jay Miller

I hope this isn't starting a trend but I have to agree with Hal again. There is no way of knowing whether the N.Y. composite cabinet or the individual player cabinets came first or whether they were produced concurrently. Also, based on the reasoning here, the first photographic rookies of many Giant players would be their Kalamazoo Bats cards which have the same images as Hal's cabinet. BTW Hal, I have that same composite cabinet which, to complete the circle, I purchased from Barry many years ago. I've always thought it was one of the best cabinets I had ever seen. I think Lew has one in his current auction.

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

I love the cabinet!!

It is perfect for my collection in that it is CHOCK FULL of HOF'ers!

NOTE:

The one currently for sale in Lew's auction has a genuine photograph...

but as you can see from the picture, it has been removed from the original backing and RE-MOUNTED on a plain piece of cardboard with no lettering on front or back.

One can only surmise that the photo was also "cleaned and stabilized" when it was separated from the original mount.

Nothing wrong with this... if they had just stuck the photo BACK on the original mount.

There must have been something terribly wrong with the original "J.Wood" mount... which leads me to wonder if perhaps the photo itself was not torn at one time and then "repaired" by an expert.

Lew's is cool and someone will grab it and love it... but I just wanted one with the original mount.

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Posted By: Hal Lewis

Now that I look at Lews' more closely... I notice a FEW DIFFERENCES:






1) The players on Lew's do NOT have the caps drawn on their heads.

JAY: DON'T THEY HAVE CAPS IN YOURS???


2) The players are in different positions, with O'Rourke moving over to the left side of the card.

JAY: WHERE IS HE ON YOURS??

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Posted By: davidcycleback

A photographer like John Wood could make the same or similar cabinet card over a period of time, and he could also make 'singles' at different times in the year. So it can be difficult at best to say which particular photo came first first. Though there are instances where there are the "proofs" or "original art" that the cabinet cards were made from, and, obviously, the proofs would have come first.

Most catalog a rookie card by year, not by month or time of day or which one came first by ten seconds. So, any genuine trading card from the appropriate year should be considered a rookie. If there are ten different rookie cards for a player, so be it.

Besides, no one has convinced me that any of these any of these John Wood photos are trading cards. I'm not saying they aren't, but no one has shown me that they are. I start with the question about Hal's cabinet: Why was it made and how was it distributed?

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Posted By: Gilbert Maines

When is a player's first card not his rookie card, you may ask.

My answer is when the card does not depict him anywhere near the way he appeared when he was a rookie. A good example of this would be a card of O'Rourke from the mid '80s, when he was a rookie in the early '70s. Heck, he was about 35 years old when his Old Judge was issued.

Similarly, Connor, Ewing, Keefe, and Welch began their careers in 1880.

There are no rookie cards for these players, IMO.

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Posted By: Jay Miller

Hal--Mine is in the bank but I'm almost certain that it is the same as yours. You are very observant--must be the sign of a great lawyer.