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Bill C. brought up a good point in the Ramly/American Caramel thread. The only Washington player in any of the E-92 through E-105 major league sets is Schaefer--and he's only in -92, -101, -102, and -105. That fact has puzzled me for a long time. My guess is that Schaefer is in the sets at all because he was such a fan favorite in Detroit; he was traded to Washington on August 13, 1909 along with Red Killifer for Jim Delahanty.
For a long time I wondered why no Johnson, but through the end of the 1909 season he was only 32-48. It wasn't until 1910 that he began going strong, 25-17 that year. (Which, now that I think about it, makes the T204 Johnson somewhat of a puzzle as well. Why him? Washington is grossly over-represented in the T204s, with 12 players out of only 121 in the whole set. But I digress.)
Other teams have poor representation in these E sets, too.
Braves: no -93, -94, -95, -96, -98, or -102
Browns: no -93 to -98 or -101 to -103
White Sox: no -93, -95, -96, -97, or -103
Random thoughts:
Why no Phillies in the E-95 Philadelphia Caramel set?
Why no Braves in the E-94 set? (George Close was in Cambridge, Mass.)
If E-92s, -101s, and -102s are truly 1909 issues, they must have been released late in 1909; Schaefer is shown with Washington, but he began the season with 87 games in Detroit.
Though the E94 set has traditionally been associated with the George Close Candy company due to the rare overprints advertising various George Close products, it is not at all clear that the set was produced for them. It actually seems to have been an anonymous set, like E101 and E102, that may well have been distributed with a lot of different company products and George Close was the only one to happen to stamp the backs of theirs. The overprint examples of E94s make up an extremely small number of the actual E94s extant. My guess is that they constitute less than 1% of the total population of E94s based on my unscientific observations. So though George Close company was from Boston, the cards themselves may have been printed elsewhere and made available to a number of different sellers.
JimB
