1916-1920 Date for "Big Head" Strip Cards

[brianp-beme]

Originally Posted by Spike

I studied this era's strip cards for a few years and propose looking at these "Big Head" cards as an update to W516's checklist for 1921's opening day. It could be in response to complaints that original W516 strips looked dingy or empty.

W516 itself targeted 1920, since it lists Babe Ruth as "Yanks pitcher." He first played for NYY in 1920 _and_ switched to fulltime outfield duty that same year, which soon made "pitcher" out-of-date.

If this matches their approach, art tweaks give each player more space and better highlight faces and uniforms. Based on earlier research in this thread, they still made name/face mistakes and must've focused on Ruth's reputation as "famous slugger who wears Yankee pinstripes" and missed his handedness. Those "+" printing guide marks also appear on W516s with thicker stock, so must've come off similar equipment.

I attached images showing these W516 changes, plus similar tweaks to this company's W529 boxing and Hollywood actor strips. In each case, they removed extraneous text, filled up each card image, and made them more engaging. Too bad they made so few cards in this style!

Nice Matt, I like how the Ruth and Cobb do seem to have utilized/tweaked the W516 images to stress different aspects of their playing, the Ruth (who has the same body positioning and even head tilt) to depict him as batter, and the Cobb (whose body and head lines up almost exactly as it does on his W516) as a runner, even though as depicted he could only be running back to the base as the result of a pickoff throw.

The Ruth reminds me of the Schapira card (shown below, not mine) issued at about the same time frame as the Big Head set that also utilized a Ruth throwing image and converted it into a batting pose to reflect his transition from pitcher to a full-time player, in this case just awkwardly adding a dropped bat.

Brian