A couple different friends have asked me recently why it is so hard to find a T206 Portrait of a Hall Of Famer with a rare back. The answer is pretty simple. Most of them were never printed with a truly rare back. For the purposes of this article (and all my other work) “rare backs” refers to Carolina Brights, Broad Leaf 350, Black Lenox, Brown Lenox, Red Hindu, Drum, and Broad Leaf 460*. Let’s get into why.
There are 31 Portraits in the T206 set that feature a Hall of Famer. 23 of them were printed in the 150-350 Series. The rarest backs that were printed in the 150-350 Series are Old Mill and Brown Hindu.
These 23 Hall Of Fame Portraits were printed during the 150-350 Series (along with the rarest back(s) the pose was printed with):
- Bender (Old Mill)
- Bresnahan (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Brown (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Chance Red Background (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Chesbro (Old Mill)
- Clarke (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Cobb Green Background (Old Mill)
- Evers (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Griffith (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Jennings (Old Mill)
- Johnson (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Joss (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Keeler (Old Mill)
- Lajoie (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Mathewson (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- McGraw No Cap (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Plank
- Tinker (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Waddell (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Wagner
- Walsh (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Willis (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
- Young (Brown Hindu & Old Mill)
These 8 Hall of Fame Portraits were printed in later Series (and which rare backs they were printed with):
- Beckley (350 Series – Broad Leaf 350)
- Chance Yellow Background (Super Print – Broad Leaf 350, Carolina Brights, Drum, Lenox, Red Hindu)
- Cobb Red Background (Super Print – Broad Leaf 350, Broad Leaf 460, Carolina Brights, Drum, Lenox, Red Hindu)
- Eddie Collins (350 Series – Broad Leaf 350 & Carolina Brights)
- Jimmy Collins (350 Series – Carolina Brights)
- Huggins (350 Series – Broad Leaf 350)
- Marquard (350 Series – Broad Leaf 350)
- McGraw With Cap (460 Only Series -Lenox, Uzit)
The above 8 poses were printed with various rare backs**. They definitely are not easy to find, but at least they exist. To learn exactly which poses were printed with each back, I recommend perusing the checklists at t206resource.com.
The moral of the story is, if you attempt to own the rarest back for a given Hall of Fame Portrait, you will become very well acquainted with Brown Hindu and Old Mill backs.
* I did not include Blank Backs in this list because they don’t follow the same patterns as all other backs. This is because were not intended to exist.
** They were also printed with various mid-tier backs such as American Beauty, Cycle, EPDG, Piedmont 42, and Tolstoi. I didn’t list each because that is beyond the scope of this article.