I believe they are scarce due to short supply, but I doubt the rare ones were sold at stadiums. If they were, why are all the rare ones I see in great shape, and you can find rusty common pins all day? Again, I suspect they were salesman samples. For the same reason, you can find McAuliffe and KM Pro caps from the 50s through the mid-70s for just about every team — often in great shape — but many teams didn't wear them. My guess is that some east coast company produced the common pins, and never got too far in expanding into the "western" MLB cities of the 1950s, like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis. Those cities are heavily represented among the rare pins.
I have no idea who made pins in the 1950s, but a couple of mine have a very small logo that identically matches ones that are on the common stadium pennants from the same era.
In various baseball card sets, the sudden presence of sharp-corned rare cards generally heralds a discovery of some kind. I would not be surprised if some hordes of rare pins appear in the future, like the rare Dormand post cards of Gil Hodges did a few years ago — or those beautiful but cheap Carl Hubbell pins you see all over eBay.
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Originally Posted by MK
You can say the same thing about several player pins including these two. If it wasn’t short supply, why do you think they are impossible to find today?
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