Don't think popularity has any relevance here, look at some of the other players in the set. Even so, the papers at the time of the June 1908 deal, called him one of the best young left-handed pitchers of the day, a player hurt by pitching for a pitiful Boston Doves team so it wasn't like he was a nobody.
The W555 set has two Young cards, one showing Irv, one showing Cy, so it was likely corrected.
The e98 card is an unknown distributor, they may have just pulled the image from an earlier card.
For the e97 to have been meant to be Cy Young, the Boston version would've had to have been printed second and made after August 19,1911 when he went to Boston. What you're saying is that they not only got the picture wrong, they got the team wrong too.
Wouldn't it be easier to match up the same players in Boston from the same era and say that neither is wrong and they called him Cy Young on the card, because that is what he was called at the time. Kelley wasn't there after 1908, neither was Sullivan, so the set obviously has strong 1908 ties to it.
The basic point is that I don't think people realized Irv Young was called Cy Young when he played. He is referred to often as either Young Cy, Cy, or Cy the second. If a card pictures him and has his name on it and his team, worse players from his town in the set and it's from the time he played for that team, it's hard to argue that it isn't him. I think people are thrown off by Cy being on the front.
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Last edited by z28jd; 08-20-2012 at 12:07 AM.
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