1914 Baltimore News card research...

[Baseball Rarities]

Originally Posted by brian1961

I believe Mr. Mint provided a bit of info on these while describing one of his famous finds in his book, TRUE MINT.

Brian, I bought the book and received it today. It does, in fact, have some information on the Baltimore News cards. Thanks for the heads up.

According to the book, which was written in 1994, Rosen bought the cards along with some T205s and a phenomenal group of early pristine (1911 on) press pins. He refers to them as "Baltimore Sun" cards and claims that the seller's grandfather worked for the Baltimore Sun. Supposedly, there were several Ruth cards in the collection. From my research, the exact number was two - the one that ended up selling in the Sothebys Copeland sale and another that ended up selling in the Sothebys Halper sale. Kind of makes sense - the grandfather kept one of each color. They are both in spectacular condition and may well be the nicest known examples. As an aside, I am pretty sure that the same collector now owns both of these cards, so the are back together again.

From what I can gather, the Baltimore Sun and the Baltimore News were compteting newspapers and were never associated with each other. The Baltimore News folded in 1986 and the Baltimore Sun continues to this day. I assume that the grandfather worked for the Baltimore News and his grandson just got the names confused, but I may be totally wrong.

Anyways, with the inclusion of pristine press pins from the same era as the cards, the story makes sense. Obviously, someone associated with either of the papers would have had access to press pins at the time.