New here: collecting postcards/ephemera (all sports) & boxing cards; ID'ing RPPCs

[ericm79]

Hey all, I'm new and posted this last night in the postcard thread, but Leon kindly suggested I start a new thread here:

Hi, I'm new here — I found Net54 while digging into the 1970s evolution of the hobby, as I was doing some research (characteristic over-reporting) to inform this piece I did for the Atlantic about the rise of breaking and the unexpected turns the contemporary card world has taken:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...-weird/598345/

All of that deep-dive history necessarily had to get cut for space — I had 2,000 words to work with, and a general-interest audience — but I relished getting lost in the scans of old issues of The Trader Speaks and the Card Collectors' Co. newsletter. What a great resource to find that stuff scanned here!

I was part of the "junk wax" demographic bubble, and collected most intensively as a middle schooler (1990-93), drifted away in the mid-90s, and just came back to modern/contemporary sports cards recently. But I've always had the collecting bug/gene, and always been interested in history; I've been an antique postcard collector for 20 years, and have a few thousand cards, including several hundred RPPCs, many of them vernacular images of baseball and other sports from the early 1900s. ... So I'm really excited to find this thread in particular, and wonder if any of you might bring more insight or expertise to bear on cards I haven't been able to ID.

Here's one I picked up recently, for just a few dollars. The building in the background (and non-stadium setting for an in-uniform pic) makes me think these aren't major leaguers, but there's a crispness and polish to the players that made this card stand out to me from the usual bedraggled look of amateur/town/factory teams on RPPCs. Somebody wrote "Tom and ----" above the heads of the two players, though it's pretty faint now. The second name looks like it ends "-try." It's possible it says "Autry," though it looks like there's a dot for an "i" above the name — making it possible also that someone was trying to write "Christy" but scrambled the letters and put an "r" between the "t" and the "y." Anyone, curious if anyone can make anything of it. Thanks in advance!