Harking back to the Golden Age of both television and Major League Baseball, the 1950 Drake's Bakeries set memorializes the collision of these great American forces on 36 different 2-1/2" by 2-1/2" square, black-bordered baseball cards that could be found in packages of Drake's Oatmeal and Jumble cookies. The full-bleed obverse design features sharp black and white photographs in an old-fashioned television screen format beneath the title, "TV Baseball Series." The backs show each player's name, position, team, birth date and place, height, weight, and eye color in bold black print above a more detailed player biography, very much like Bowman's baseball cards, and then followed by a bold printed Drake's advertisement urging sweet-toothed fans to "Save 'em - Trade 'em" and "Collect your complete set" of "TV Baseball Star Pictures." If some of the pictures also look similar to Bowman's cards, that's because they are. In fact, several of the set's key cards, including Berra, Spahn, Furillo, Reese, and others, use the exact same images as their 1950 Bowman counterparts, only in black and white and without Charles Steinbacher's artistic touches. Rarely offered in complete set form, the presented assembly boasts an improbable 7.01 GPA and ranks as the #2 Current and All Time Finest Set on record at PSA, a staggering achievement considering that only 3 cards from the entire issue have ever graded above NM/MT 8 at both PSA and SGC combined. The reason for this is rather obvious. Similar to a handful of other notoriously condition sensitive sets spanning the entire canon of baseball card collectibles, including the 1885 Mayo's Cut Plug issue and the 1962 Topps Football and 1971 Topps Baseball issues, the 1950 Drake's set fearlessly featured full-bleed black borders, making high-grade examples next to impossible to find, even straight off the presses. Imagine crossing a 1950 Bowman with a 1971 Topps baseball card, and that is precisely what we have in the seldom-encountered 1950 Drake's set, 36 exceptionally fragile black-bordered beauties that exponentially increase in appeal the higher they climb the grading ladder. A rare opportunity to acquire one of the hobby's scarcest and most challenging sets from the dawn of baseball's Golden Age. PSA 9 MINT: #14 Spahn. PSA 8.5 NM/MT+: #8. PSA 8 NM/MT: #5 Snider, 25 Rizzuto, 33 DiMaggio. PSA 7.5 NM+: #18 Furillo, 19 Reese. PSA 7 NM: #4, 6 Campanella, 9 Thomson, 15, 17, 21, 22, 24 Berra 34, 36 Slaughter. PSA 6.5 EX/MT+: #11 Hodges, 16. PSA 6 EX/MT: #3, 12, 13, 23 Henrich, 28 Reynolds, 31, 35. PSA 5.5 EX+: #2, 10. PSA 5 EX: #7, 20 Dark, 27, 29, 30 Tebbetts, 32 Pesky. PSA 4.5 VG/EX+: #26. PSA 4 VG/EX: #1 Roe.
Bid on the complete 36-card set or bid individually on individual cards and groups offered in separate lots. Break up the set, or keep it together; it's really your choice! At the end of the auction, the set will be sold to the highest aggregate bidding, whether that is the sum of the individual lots or the highest bid for the complete set offered in this lot. Our website will automatically reflect whichever portion has received the highest bidding. Placing a bid on this lot constitutes bidding on the entire 36-card set. Good luck!