I've started the monster, sort of!

T206Collector · #8 10-26-2012, 12:52 PM

I would say that there are several hundred out there. I believe that there are a lot in private collections, which never come up for sale -- or at least haven't come up for sale in over 10 years -- and may never be cataloged.

Most of what you see on the market now were signed after the publication of Larry Ritter's book "The Glory of Their Times," which drove up a lot of interest in the guys featured in there, like Rube Marquard and Fred Snodgrass. In fact, Rube lived until 1980 and signed a ton of autographs. There are currently 76 autographs of Rube on ebay, just to give some idea of how easy it was to get his autograph in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of his letters back to autograph seekers plugged Ritter's book, because the players received royalty checks for each sale.

If you eliminate Marquard, Livingston, Doyle, Leifield, Snograss and McBride, the population of autographed T206s drops precipitously.

The next level of difficulty would include Wheat, Flick, Meyers, Davy Jones, Leach, and Fred Parent.

Then I'd put Crawford, Carrigan, Barbeau, Bridwell, and Rucker.

After that, there may be more out there, but I've only seen one or two of the following:

Clarke, Warhop, Blackburne, Fiene, Hoblitzell, Knabe, Chance, Bresnahan (though Phil Marks once estimated that there were dozens of Bresnahan's out there), Speaker, Lajoie, Cicotte, Walsh, Phillippe, Bush, Cravath, Lobert, Zimmerman, Wiltse. Someone on Net54 claims to have a signed Boss Schmidt.

My Walter Johnson and Cy Young signed T206s are likely one of a kind.

There are actually quite a few, relatively speaking, signed T206 Cobb cards out there. Sadly, they rarely come up for sale, and when they do, people break the bank to land them.

There are a few others out there (e.g., McGraw and Jennings) that I do not believe are real, and I have not seen either PSA/DNA or JSA authenticate one.

Finally, if Harry Pattee lived until July 1971, and Al Shaw lived until December 1974, how come we don't ever see those? I often think about possible reasons behind their total absence from this sub-collection.

So, if you want to add a signed T206, you should be able to do so without too much hassle. But to grow a collection beyond a few different subjects would be extremely challenging, particularly now since so many other collectors seem to have caught the bug that has possessed me for nearly 10 years now.

All we can do is hope that another find like Morey's sale in 2001 or the Great Pittsburgh Find of 2007 walks into a show, or onto ebay, or an auction house. Until then, we'll all be buying, selling, and trading from the same general population.

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