In honor of the Tubby Spencer Piedmont 350 in a SGC 40 holder that sold for $2,839 on June 11, 2018, it’s time for the next exciting episode of Pulled From T206 Production Early! Spencer is one of the 11 players who were pulled from T206 production very early into the “350” portion of the 150-350 print run. This group of players are known as the “Elite Eleven” among T206 collectors. The term was coined by Ted Zanidakis in this Net54 thread, which was published in June of 2013.
Tubby Spencer was a light-hitting backup Catcher for the St. Louis Browns from 1905 to 1908. He averaged just 68 games played in those four seasons, which makes it a little surprising that he was included in the set in the first place. In 1909, he appeared in just 28 games with the Boston Red Sox, which presumably made the decision to pull him from the set a fairly straight-forward one. He spent most of 1910 and 1911 with the St. Paul Saints of the American Association, and then had an 11-game cup of coffee with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1911.
For the next five years, he bounced around the Minor Leagues before catching on with the Detroit Tigers. In 1916 he played 19 games, and followed it up with 70 in 1917 and 66 in 1918 before returning to the minors for good.
I’m not sure exactly why, but it seems that backup catchers got a lot more love in the deadfall era than they do now. Spencer’s inclusion in the T206 set seems a little surprising based on his lack of playing time offensive output. What’s really shocking is that he was chosen to be included in Philadelphia Caramel’s 30-card set (e96) released in 1910, about the same time that he was being pulled from T206 production.
Spencer is considered by most T206 back collectors to be the scarcest of the “Elite Eleven” *. The recent sale I mentioned above resulted in a few messages from friends, all of which sounded something like, “Did you see what the P350 Spencer just sold for???? What the (heck)???” Going into the auction I was asked by a couple friends what I thought the card would sell for. I did give a range that I thought it might fall in (which was way off, sorry guys) but I told them that I didn’t have a great feel for where it might end up.
At the moment it seems that these tough Piedmont 350s are among the most volatile T206s in terms of what they will sell for on the open market. It makes some sense. We have near perfect information about many front/back combos, but the “Elite Eleven” Piedmont 350s are still a gray area. It’s hard to know how many of each player are out there, and even tougher to guess what they’ll sell for when they hit the open market.
* This seems to be the consensus among the collectors I talk to. If not the toughest, Spencer is certainly in the top three in terms of scarcity