Tag: Piedmont Factory 42

T206 Piedmont Factory 42: Light Blue v.s. Dark Blue Backs

Charley O’Leary with dark blue Piedmont Factory 42 back

This is an article I’ve had in the works for quite a while.  Almost a year ago, I began writing and researching, but then ran into a bit of a snag.

If you look at enough Piedmont Factory 42 backs, you’ll notice that the blue ink tends to be either very light or very dark.  I’d read a few threads on the subject on net54, but beyond the observation that the ink level varied, I didn’t recall seeing any conclusions drawn.  It’s a minor variation, and maybe not worth spending too much time on.  But then again, at one point Sovereign 350 Green Apple backs were thought to be just a slight color variant of the Forest Green Subset.

So, a few months ago I decided to look into the Piedmont Factory 42 subset to see if I could find any patterns with regard to the dark ink v.s. light ink phenomenon.  I asked a couple friends to help me research.  Adam Goldenberg was nice enough to send me scans of his collection of Piedmont 42s, and Pat Romolo offered to dig through scans on Card Target for me.  Going into the research phase, I was hoping there might be some sort of pattern we’d be able to discern.  Specifically, I was wondering if certain players were printed with only one of the two back types.

The graphic below shows the difference between the light blue and dark blue backs.

The “research phase” was over almost before it started.  I got an email from Pat saying that he had begun to look at scans and he didn’t think there was a pattern.  I meant to take a look for myself, but never got around to it.  Some time passed, and I completely forgot I had started working on this article.  A few weeks back I found it while cleaning up the drafts on my site and decided I should finish it.  After all, even if there is no pattern, that still answers some questions.

So, I delved into the scans that Adam had sent me and past sales on cardtarget.com.  What I was looking for was simple.  I wanted to find one pose that was printed with both a light blue and dark blue back.  I did find that, but I found something else as well.  I went into the project thinking that the backs were almost always either dark blue or light blue.  However, after scrolling through dozens of these backs, I realized that the intensity of the blue actually varies quite a bit.

Below is the “smoking gun” of my research.  One Reulbach with a dark blue back and one with a light blue back (and another that’s somewhere in the middle).  This proves there is no easy pattern where one pose always has either a light blue or a dark blue back.

Reulbach PSA 5 with dark blue Piedmont Factory 42 back

After looking at a bunch of scans, I’m left with a couple thoughts.  First, the darkness v.s. lightness of ink varies quite a bit more than I expected (and more than you’d think from reading the net54 threads).  In my opinion, there are light blue Piedmont Factory 42 backs, dark blue backs, and every shade and variant of blue in between.  Secondly, the fact that I never found any consensus online about the dark blue backs v.s. light blue backs makes a lot of sense.  I’m sure other collectors have looked into this topic in the past, and just never posted anything about it, because they didn’t find any interesting patterns.

Reulbach PSA 5 (mk) with light blue Piedmont Factory 42 back
Ruelbach PSA 5 with a Piedmont Factory 42 back that is neither light blue nor dark blue, but rather somewhere in the middle

Despite the fact that I don’t have any exciting news to report, I figured this topic was still worth posting.  I’m sure I won’t be the last person to notice the differences between the light blue and dark blue backs and wonder if there is a pattern.  Hopefully, I can save some of those people some time.

Sources:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=137166
http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=128227

Cycle 460: Overlooked and Undervalued (Part One)

It seems to me that Cycle 460s don’t get the respect they deserve.  Over the last few years, I’ve felt that I was seeing Cycle 460s less often than the other “mid-tier” backs such as Hindu, Piedmont Factory 42, and American Beauty 350 No Frame.  So I decided to do some research to see if my observations were supported by the Pop Reports.

In this series, I’ll be focusing on the scarcest of the “Mid-Tier Backs”, that is:

Tier 1 Backs:
  • American Beauty 460
  • Cycle 460
  • Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42*
Tier 2 Backs:
  • American Beauty 350 No Frame
  • Brown Hindu

In my opinion, there is a clear divide between these 5 backs** and the backs above and below them in terms of scarcity.  There is a large gap in scarcity and value between any of these 5 backs and Carolina Brights, which is significantly scarcer and more valuable.  Likewise, I feel there is a gap below these 5 backs before you get to Tolstoi and Sovereign 460.

A couple of weeks back, I published a two-part article which gave an overview of the “Mid-Tier” Backs, which can be read by clicking the links below:

A Look at the “Mid-Tier” T206 Backs: Tier 1

A Look at the “Mid-Tier” T206 Backs: Tiers 2 & 3

Here are the back scarcity rankings from T206resource.com.  This is a really well put together list, and it’s a great place to start.  I think collectors as a whole have overlooked Cycle 460 and it’s my contention that it needs to move up four or five rungs on this list (and others like it).  I’d also move Sovereign 460 down a couple rungs, but I agree with the vast majority of this list.

Before I get into the research, there are a couple of points I want to address:

First, not all of the mid-tier backs are easy to analyze.  American Beauty 460 is an odd subset because there are 12 poses that are quite easy to find, while the rest of the poses range from tough-to-find to near impossible.  This makes is hard to compare American Beauty 460 to Cycle 460 backs, which have a much more even distribution.  American Beauty 350 No Frame offers a different challenge in terms of comparison.  The AB 350nf subset contains only 37 cards, which is 34% the size of the Cycle 460 checklist (109 cards).

In an aggregate sense, the two backs may have similar scarcity.   However, when looking at specific poses, there will typically be two or three times as many cards with AB350nf backs in the Pop Report than Cycle 460s of the same pose.  This makes it tough to compare Cycle 460 and AB350nf, but I tackle that challenge anyway in Part Three of this series.  In addition, Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42 backs have not been catalogued very well by PSA or SGC over the years, so neither Pop Report is of much use in researching this back.

Secondly, the way the PSA and SGC Pop Reports are set up makes it easy to research certain things but difficult to research others.  For instance it’s difficult to get accurate PSA Pop numbers for a Cycle 460 Chance Yellow Portrait, because PSA used a generic “Cycle” label for a few years, so it’s impossible to know which of those are Cycle 350 and which are Cycle 460.  You run into the same problem for all the poses that have both AB350nf and AB460 backs.  The SGC Pop Report presents a different challenge.  It is easy to tell an AB350nf from an AB460 because the former will be labeled “1910” and the latter “1911”.  However, if a player has two different poses and one was printed with American Beauty 350 With Frame and the other was printed with American Beauty 350 No Frame, it will often be impossible to differentiate between the two in the SGC Pop Report.

Using Pop Reports in an attempt to prove hypotheses can be a little problematic because not all cards in existence have been slabbed, and not all slabbed cards correctly indicate the back.  However, I feel that if you compare two like subject groups and the sample size is large enough, Pop Report data can be very accurate and useful.  You’ll see in Part Two of this series how I use just PSA Pop Report Data and I am able to prove my hypothesis without any doubt due to the sample size and the results of my research.

In this series, I am attempting to answer the following questions:

  • “Which of the Mid-Tier backs is the scarcest?”
  • “What is the order of scarcity for these 5 Mid-Tier backs we are looking at?”

Please stay tuned for the rest of this series:

  • Part Two:  Cycle 460 v.s. Brown Hindu
  • Part Three:  Cycle 460 v.s. American Beauty 350 no frame
  • Part Four:  Cycle 460 v.s. American Beauty 460

*Ideally there would be a Part Five, where I compare Cycle 460 to Piedmont Factory 42, but the lack of Pop Report Data available for Piedmont Factory 42 means I have no way to present any meaningful findings with regard to that back.

**I also think Sweet Caporal 350-460 Factory 25 belongs somewhere in this conversation, but the lack of data available makes that impossible.  Additionally, the fact that collectors don’t care too much about this back makes them fly under the radar even more.

A Look at the “Mid-Tier” T206 Backs: Tier 1

There is a lot of confusion and misinformation out there about what exactly constitutes a “T206 Rare Back”.  If you do an eBay search for T206s right now, you’ll find dozens of listings using the word “Rare” to promote a card that really isn’t.  If you’ve been collecting T206s for a number of years, you probably have a pretty good handle on the respective scarcities of the various T206 backs.  Like most aspects of the set, the best way to learn the intricacies of the different backs is by handling a bunch of cards and spending a little bit of time most days looking at online listings and auctions.  For me it took 4 or 5 years before I felt like I had a good understanding of aggregate and relative back scarcity.

This two-part article will be more helpful to new collectors than seasoned ones, but I think there is a little something for even the most advanced collectors.  For collectors who are just becoming interested in the rare and mid-tier backs, the Back Scarcity Rankings that can be found online can be very helpful, but they only tell part of the story.  These lists are designed to show you which backs are the scarcest, in an aggregate sense.  For the most part, they deliver very useful information.  For instance, it’s very important to know how rare a Uzit or Lenox back is, so that if you happen to find one, you will know that you should try to pick it up because it might be years before you have another shot at one.

However, those types of scenarios are more pipe dream than reality.  The more likely scenario is something like this:  Someone posts a bunch of T206s on ebay.  Most of them have a Piedmont back, but one has an American Beauty 460 back and another has a Tolstoi back.  Going by the Back Scarcity Rankings, you’d assume that the American Beauty 460 would be the card to acquire (assuming you can’t get both).  But in reality, it could go either way.  There are common American Beauty 460s and rare Tolstois.  In this article, I’ll attempt to shed some light on relative scarcity and scarcity within each back subset.

These are the “Rare Backs” of the T206 set:

  • Brown Old Mill
  • Brown Lenox
  • Broad Leaf 460
  • Drum
  • Uzit
  • Red Hindu
  • Black Lenox
  • Broad Leaf 350
  • Blank Back
  • Carolina Brights

There is a pretty big gap between the rarity of Carolina Brights and the next rarest back.  I believe Cycle 460 is the next rarest back (and I will delve further into this in a couple weeks) but you could argue for American Beauty 460 as well.

Here are the “Mid-Tier” backs, separated into three tiers based on rarity.  Within each tier, they are listed in alphabetical order:

Tier 1:

American Beauty 460
Cycle 460
Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42

Tier 2:

American Beauty 350 No Frame
Brown Hindu
Sweet Caporal 350-460 Factory 25

Tier 3:

American Beauty 350 with frame
Cycle 350
El Principe de Gales
Old Mill (Base Ball Subjects)
Sovereign 150
Sovereign 350 Green Apple
Sovereign 460
Tolstoi

Tier 1:

American Beauty 460

There are either 74 or 75 cards in the American Beauty 460 Subset*.  The subset is comprised of poses from the 350-460 Series as well as the 460 Only Series.  In an aggregate sense, AB460 is one of the three scarcest Mid-Tier backs, but the individual distribution has an odd twist to it.  12 of the poses are pretty easy to find, while the others range from scarce to near impossible-to-find.  These 12 poses are plentiful in comparison to the others:

-Crandall with cap
-Devore
-Duffy
-Ford
-Gandil
-Geyer
-Hummel
-McGraw glove at hip
-Pfeffer
-Sheckard glove showing
-Tannehill on front
-Wheat

These 12 poses tend to sell for less than other American Beauty 460 poses.  There are some AB460 poses that haven’t come to market in a number of years,  Prices can be very strong for the rarest front/back combos.

Cycle 460

There are 109 poses in the Cycle 460 Subset.  This is in my opinion the scarcest of all the Mid-Tier backs.  This article is meant to set the stage for a number of more research intensive pieces that will be published in the near future.  Look for an in-depth series on Cycle 460s to come in the next few weeks, entitled “T206 Cycle 460 Backs: Overlooked and Undervalued”.  In this series, I will show in detail, why I believe Cycle 460 to be the rarest of all Mid-Tier backs, slotting in just behind Carolina Brights on the overall Back Scarcity Rankings.

Cycle 460 backs appear to follow a normal distribution.  That is, some poses are more plentiful than others, but it is likely just due to chance and the randomness of which cards survived all these years.

Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42

This is clearly one of the scarcest Mid-Tier backs, but it is hard to study them because the grading companies have not recorded them until recently.  Someone who has been collecting backs and paying attention to the market for the last 20 years would have a much better idea of their aggregate scarcity than I do.  My strengths lie in analyzing the data that is available to us, mainly in the form of Population Reports.  I feel that Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42 backs are slightly scarcer than Brown Hindu, but it’s probably very close either way.  Piedmont Factory 42 is the least scarce of the Tier 1 backs, and Brown Hindu is the scarcest back in Tier 2.

A big thanks to the guys at T206resource.com for the use of their invaluable checklists.

*There is a question of whether Ames Hands Above Head was actually printed with an American Beauty 460 back or not.

T206 Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42: An Introduction

T206 O'leary Piedmont Factory 42

When I first got into collecting the T206 set, I read somewhere that Piedmont Factory 42 backs were rare and valuable.  They look almost identical to the other Piedmont 350-460 back, which is from Factory 25.  Because of this, they sometimes fall through the cracks and can be found at bargain prices.  For the next few months, I checked the bottom of every Piedmont back I saw on ebay, hoping to find my first Piedmont 42 (sadly, I didn’t find a single one).  At the time, I didn’t realize the Piedmont Factory 42 back was only possible on certain fronts (76 different fronts to be exact).  I wish someone had told me early on which cards to check the backs of and which cards to not bother with.  I figured it might be helpful to write an article about this topic, since I wasted a lot of time checking back scans of poses that couldn’t possibly have possibly been from Factory 42.

These are the most important things to know:

  • Piedmont 150 backs are all from Factory 25
  • Piedmont 350 backs are all from Factory 25
  • Piedmont 350-460 backs can be found with both Factory 25 and Factory 42 backs
  • Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42 backs are very scarce and sell for a large premium over their Piedmont 350-460 Factory 25 counterparts

So don’t bother checking the factory numbers on Piedmont 150 and 350 backs, because they are all the same.

The Piedmont 350-460 Factory 25 checklist consists of 109 poses.  The majority of those 109 also were printed with Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42 backs, but not all.  Here is the entire 76 card checklist of Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42:

piedmont-factory-42-checklist

These 76 poses are the only ones that exist with Piedmont Factory 42 backs.  It’s not clear why the other 33 poses printed with Piedmont 350-460 Factory 25 were left off the Piedmont 350-460 Factory 42 print run.  These are the 33 poses that exist with P350-460 Fact. 25 but not with P350-460 Fact. 42:

T206 Factory 42 No Prints

Now that we’ve gone over which cards to look for, let’s talk about value.  Prices seem to be down a bit recently, but they still command a large premium.  Cards in the poor-fair range have been selling for $150-$200 and the gd-vg range for between $250-$400 lately.  By the time you read this, the market could have changed, so make sure to check completed ebay sales and other online auction houses to get a better idea of the current market value.

Lastly, there is one slight visual difference between Factory 25 and Factory 42 backs.  The printing on the bottom of the Factory 42 backs takes up more space from left the right.  Knowing this and keeping an eye out for it can help you spot these cards.  Check out the image below to see what I mean.

pied-42-vs-25-comparison

Thank you to t206resource.com for the use of the above checklists.