T222 was the second of two baseball sets ever issued under the Fatima brand name, the other being the T200 set of 16 team cards in the previous year. The Fatima brand was used on many non-sports sets issued over a period of more than 40 years.
This was one of the last sets of the tobacco card era that ran from 1909 to 1916. Due to its small set size and scarcity, it's generally considered by tobacco card collectors to be a minor set and its popularity has been limited.
The 52 baseball players in T222 varied widely in their major league experience and stature. The set includes just seven players who were later inducted into the Hall of Fame: at just over 13% of the total, this a far lower percentage than most other sets of the era. In contrast, the popular Cracker Jack set also issued in 1914 includes many HOFers excluded from T222, among them Plank, Cobb, and Mathewson. Missing, too, are notable stars like Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Hal Chase, and Joe Wood, all of whom appeared in the T200 team photos.
T222 includes several obscure players like George Baumgardner (5 seasons, 36-47), Byron Houck (4 seasons, 26-24), Ray Keating (7 seasons, 30-51), Jack Lelivelt (only 51 AB in the previous season), and the most insignificant of them all, Billy Orr (2 seasons, .187 lifetime). My research on player uniforms shows that the photos used in the set were as much as five years old, which makes the player choices for the set puzzling.
It wasn't unusual for sets of the era to include other celebrities; in T222's case, there are 4 track & field stars and 6 actors and actresses. The track stars were all big names in their day: both Alvah Meyer (sprinter) and Matt McGrath (hammer) won medals at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. The actors and actresses are listed as Photoplay stars; Photoplay was one of the first magazines to cater to movie audiences.
Thirteen of the sixteen major league teams are represented; Pittsburgh, Boston AL, and Chicago AL (all good teams in 1913) have no players. The Philadelphia A's (11 players) and the Cubs (8) represent 36.5% of all players in the set. The remaining 11 teams have between 1 (Cincinnati) and 6 players (New York NL) represented. See the checklist for a full list of players and groupings by team.
T222's are gelatin-silver photographic prints measuring approximately 4 1/2 inches in height by 2 1/2 inches in width. Legitimate (i.e., non-altered) sizes may vary by as much as 1/8" in either direction. They are printed on an extremely thin paper stock and have a glossy exterior that makes the cards tend to curl when not in protective holders. Players are shown in full-length poses, most either at the completion of a throw or awaiting a pitch. Many of the photos were manipulated to enhance the picture quality - the Alexander photo below is an example of this.
All photos in the series were copyrighted by the Pictorial News Co., whose name appears in a white-outlined box in the lower right of all of the cards. Pictorial News Co. bought photos from freelancers and in turn sold them to newspapers and others. The company ceased operations in the 1920's. The names of the photographers will likely never be known.
All but five T222's appear with a handwritten number in the lower left corner of the card ranging from 2 to 9 and from 12 to 15 (see checklist). Cards without numbers appear that way because the player name is too close to the bottom border for the number to show. The numbering scheme has no obvious pattern: for example, there are 6 "7"'s, but only 2 "2"'s, and even if the unnumbered cards are assumed to have hidden numbers, the totals per number cannot average out evenly. It's possible that these numbers indicate the sequential issue of the cards, but this is purely speculative. These numbers are important in determining scarcity but not, as yet, for prices.
