[Archive]

Posted By: Al C.risafulli

Scott, what you're saying makes perfect sense to me. As much as I find it hard to believe that these cards have fooled so many experts (I simply don't think it's possible to make a faithful duplication of a card in 1950 that's impossible to distinguish from the original), I also agree that it's a weird anomaly that the cards would have Piedmont backs. Not being a T206 expert, I'll also defer to Scott and Ted on the "Piedmont First" issue.

Given that there are only two or three of them, I'd think that they probably never made it into circulation. As someone who does a significant amount of printing in his career, I don't find anything strange about that - there are tons of proofs and actual prints that never see the light of day, and there could be a million reasons for that. When you go on press and the printer runs that first sheet, you evaluate it for everything - color, registration, stray marks, errors, etc. Often you'll go through the process of running one sheet half a dozen times before you're ready to mass produce. Sometimes the sheets go in the trash, and sometimes they don't. I have plenty of sheets in my files from jobs that were changed before the final sheets were run.

There could be dozens of different reasons why that card had a Piedmont back, and one of them could simply be that it was an error. Since there's no markings on the back of a T206 that would identify the player, one might not even notice it on another card that's less scarce than the Wagner. For example, if a Rube Waddell portrait was printed with a Piedmont back but the sheet was supposed to have a Sweet Cap back, you'd never know it was an error. Certainly, nobody gives it a second thought when they see a 1977 Topps Elliott Maddox with Greg Luzinski's stats on the back - happens all the time.

In my mind (and we've already established that Scott and I have respectfully agreed to disagree), there are many plausible reasons why the Wagners would be authentic, and only one theory as to whytheyt wouldn't. And that theory is, in my opinion, nearly impossible to have happened.

-Al