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if you are thinking of completing this set my guess is you might complete it in the year 2050,if you are lucky & providing you have lots of $$. i doubt there are many complete sets in existance. i also don't think it is not even attempted to complete by many. anyone else care to comment on this scarce set?
This message has been edited by DCWD on Sep 18, 2007 7:24 PM
while I do agree completing the set will prove extremely difficult, expensive and time consuming...as will finding certain hof'ers...finding commons in ok condition is not terribly difficult!
This set, like many others, is one where you should be able to get a decent number of the cards without too much strain. There's usually a couple on Ebay at any given time. However, where you really hit a wall here is with the high numbered cards which are all shortprints. Alexander (rookie) and Johnson are always immensely popular with collectors and don't come up that often. When they do, competition is pretty fierce. A couple of the shortprints are also of the variety that only show up once every couple years or so - if not less often than that. I'm not the biggest expert on this set and would certainly defer to others such as Bill Cornell for a better analysis, but it seems to me as though a couple of the shortprints in particular may be so few in number that there may actually not be enough cards to go around as you get to the end of completing this set.
**edited to add scan of one of my t222s...**
This message has been edited by shammus on Sep 18, 2007 9:32 PM
I'll preface this statement by saying that by no means am I an expert on T222s, and in fact have interest in only a small subset of the set: Cleveland players. I think that all of the Cleveland players in the set (of which there are three, maybe four?) are the short prints of which Brian speaks. For the past two-plus years I've been looking for any Cleveland player to add to my collection and had come up empty until just this past Sunday. This included scouring the National this past summer and tracking eBay.
So if this price for what I think is a short-printed card, graded only "authentic," coupled with how long it took me to come across it, is any indication, completing the set seems like a pretty daunting task.
Again, take it for what it's worth, considering the source.
Rob - Congrats on winning the Leibold. I was the underbidder on the card and was hoping to cross it off my wantlist. It presents very well and doesn't seem to exhibit any of the creasing that t222s typically have. Terrific card!
I had been thinking that I should have added to my post that I was only one bid away from paying about $150 for the card, so maybe it should be considered that the selling price was somewhat artificial because it might have been the product of some shilling. So knowing you were the underbidder makes me feel better.
As for the grade, I totally get the paper remnants and such on the back, but there's another current thread about cards with a "1" grade that look like they've been put through the ringer. Given the lack of typical creasing -- as you point out -- I was certainly willing to put up with the back problems and the "A" grade.
T 222's are next to impossible to obtain in high grades (6 and above)
We own the only "7" PSA has ever graded. It took us nearly three years
of searching to identify this stellar examples.
There are only "3" known examples in PSA 6 and the SGC population is
small also.
Perhaps some day, someone will discover a trunkful of T 222's heretofore
untouched by anyone for 95-100 years...until then, graded cards with
a sharp and a lack of creases presents a series collecting challenge.
"...I was only one bid away from paying about $150 for the card..." pretty much sums up exactly how I felt about the end of that auction. Only in my case, with a little more remorse since I failed to win the item. Terrific looking card so congrats again!
To answer an earlier question, I know of one collector who has finished the set and another who is only one card away. After these two individuals, I'm not too optimistic that there are enough cards in the hobby for too many more sets after theirs. Just not nearly enough cards to go around it seems and large groups of these are very rarely made available like you see from a lot of other tough sets (ie...e94s, e98s, etc..). With their EXTREMELY fragile nature, I suppose it's not entirely surprising that so few copies of certain cards have survived to this day.
I've owned ~125 T222's and finished my set last year - it took winning a complete set from Lipset to cherrypick the 7 last cards I needed.
The "high number" (lower left hand number) is the best indicator of how tough each card is. Anything 12 or higher qualifies and the ones with "15" (Lelivelt, Henry, Johnson, JC Smith, L.Magee, Lobert) are the hardest. Henry is almost certainly the key to this set - I've owned 2 and haven't seen another for sale anywhere in 5+ years. An SGC 40 Lelivelt was sold for >$3K by David Bryan just a few months ago.
I do think you can get to about 40 cards without too much difficulty, as they're available and the prices have come down this year.
Mr. Lipset's Encyclopedia refers to those little numbers, often overlooked. He says that 12 through 15 are the numbers that are most difficult. 52 cards, 47 have numbers from 2 to 9 and then 12 to 15. A guess of mine is that the 5 without numbers would be '1's if they had had numbers.
All of those 15's are tough to locate. I bid on that Lelivelt, and was left in the dust. I'd like to own a T222 Lelivelt one day.
I spoke with a fellow once who collected them as a kid. He said he had about 300 of them, many duplicates, but never could finish the set. He thought the set was 100 cards, as mentioned on the back. He said his mom threw them away when he went to college. I'd guess that was in the very late 20s, I think he graduated in the early 30s. When I spoke with him he was elderly, retired in southern Alabama. I didn't have the heart to tell him that there were only 52 different, and that he may well have had a set.
They are great images. Given the passage of time, those "pictures" will fade. Light accelerates that. If you get some T222s, don't leave them laying around in sunlight. And when you have a choice about buying one over another, I'd lean toward a darker better image as opposed to a slightly higher numerical grade.
Just 'cause they're difficult isn't a reason to collect a few. Finishing T206 isn't actually easy, but some of us still chase them.
T222s are overlooked and downright reasonable in terms of price. I had a large group at the National, but hardly got a nibble. I sold the group as singles through Just Collect over the past several weeks, so I didn't have to schlep them all the way back home and it was nice to see many of them posted in this thread.
Bill nailed the five tough ones. Years later and I am still looking for a Henry.
A few more things about this great set that occurred to me after my last email:
- It's commonly thought that there are 60 T222's (52 baseball, 4 track & field, 4 actors) and the other 40 were never issued. Actually, there are at least 6 silent screen actors and there may be more, although I'd be amazed if any more baseball players appear. The track & field and actors are as tough as most baseball high numbers.
- Just to pile on PSA, they don't know anything about this set. I keep seeing examples that have badly tanned backs - these were soaked, but not penalized as they deserved. I'd take a very close look at any of these before I bought one (again).
- Many of the photos date to as early as 1909. I figured this out by comparing the photos against the Marc Okkonen "Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century" book, which everyone should own. The book has flaws, but nothing else like it exists.
- Billy Orr, the 11th Phil. AL player in the set, was so bad that he would've been in T207. Nice to see him in this set.
Here's a Fatima ad of Alexander. Same photo that was used in T222.
