My last post about my new Ed Killian Tolstoi made me think about an aspect of my collecting approach that I don’t hear talked about much. Whenever possible, I prefer to add T206s that feature star players over players who had a short MLB career, or were career Minor Leaguers. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, just a preference. I have a number of Minor Leaguers and Major Leaguers with nondescript careers in my collection that I love as well.
I’m not sure how many other T206 collectors share this collecting philosophy with me. I know many people collect the entire set without much regard to how good each player was (or wasn’t). And of course you have your Hall of Fame collectors. It makes sense that collecting star players who are not Hall of Famers would be a less common approach. Finding out which players were stars of the day takes some work, whether it be scouring Baseball Reference, or reading books about the Deadball Era.
It took me a little while to arrive at this approach. When I first started collection T206, I was in love with the artwork and colors and I just wanted one of each front for my set. I knew about almost all of the Hall of Famers from reading about them as a kid, but I didn’t know anything about the players who were not enshrined.
I collected the set without knowing much about the players for about three years before deciding I wanted to know everything I could learn about not only the T206 set, but baseball from 1909-1911 specifically, and the Deadball Era in general. Baseball-reference.com was a great resource, and the one I used mostly. I also have really enjoyed a couple of books that were released by SABR: Deadball Stars of the American League, and Deadball Stars of the National League.
Nowadays, I get almost as much enjoyment from finding a card of an “almost Hall of Famer” as I do a Hall of Famer. I love that I can get a star like Doc White, Sherry Magee, George Mullin, or Larry Doyle at the same price of a fringe player like Herbie Moran. To me, that feels like a huge spot of inefficiency in the market.
Obviously, supply and demand dictates the market price for the cards we collect. I hope that I can continue to find cards of my favorite players at “common” prices. I’m curious if any other collectors use a similar approach when looking to add new cards to their collections.
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