In his National Pastime (2023) article “For Whom the Ballgame Tolls,” Sean Kolodzieg offers the following on the boyhood Cubs fandom of author Ernest Hemingway:
Hemingway was such a fan of the Chicago baseball teams that he ordered “action pictures” of Cubs players Mordecai “Three Fingered” Brown, Jimmy Archer, and Frank “Wildfire” Schulte from an advertisement in The Sporting News.
Sean’s citation for this fun tidbit pointed to The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1907-1922, and specifically a letter, circa 1912, that Hemingway sent Charles C. Spink and Son of the Sporting News. Here is the full text of the letter. (Forgive any misspellings and grammatical peccadilloes as Hemingway was just a kid.)
Mr. Charles C. Spink & Son
gentelmen—Enclosed find $.35 for which send me the following baseball action pictures—
Mathewson—Mordecai Brown. Sam Crawford. Jas. P. Archer. Frank shulte. Owen Bush. Fred Snodgrass.
Yours Truly
Ernest Hemingway
600 N. Kenilworth
Oak Park. Ill.
As the letter was undated, it seemed a fun exercise to see whether the specific action pictures Hemingway ordered might be useful in pinpointing a range of dates for the letter. As it turned out, that pursuit was not only successful but unraveled additional insights about the set not previously published and perhaps unknown to most collectors. Before sharing these results, I’ll first provide background for readers who don’t consider the M101-2 set a specialty.
Between July 1909 and December 1913, select editions of the Sporting News included 8-by-10 “action pictures” of 100 different baseball subjects. For example, readers of the October 13, 1910, publication found the Jack Coombs photo (above left) inserted within its pages, and readers of the February 10 Sporting News that same year received Sam Crawford (above right). Numerous sources, including the Standard Catalog and Old Cardboard provide the specific release dates for all 100 subjects.
That said, and as the Hemingway letter implied, springing for the periodical each week wasn’t the only way to obtain the supplements. Various (but by no means all) editions included print advertisements that offered readers the chance to order these same supplements on demand. For example, the ad below appeared in March 9, 1911, editions of the Sporting News.
Clearly it was exactly such an ad that Hemingway would have ordered from though not this specific one. Among other things, the list of subjects does not include Fred Snodgrass whose photo would come out, appropriately enough, that December 7.
For completeness, here are the issue dates of all seven players Hemingway ordered:
- Christy Mathewson – August 5, 1909
- Mordecai Brown – December 9, 1909
- Owen Bush – December 30, 1909
- Sam Crawford – February 10, 1910
- Jimmy Archer – January 12, 1911
- Frank Schulte – March 2, 1911
- Fred Snodgrass – December 7, 1911
What’s needed then is an ad from December 7 or later. From what I could find, the earliest such ad came January 4, 1912. Not surprisingly it included Snodgrass. Unfortunately, it did not include Mathewson, whose image had evidently sold out!
Could it be then that young Ernest’s letter reflected wishful thinking? Did he suppose he could order “off menu” in requesting the picture of Big Six? As it turns out, no. This is Hemingway after all, so you should expect more to the story.
Whether the Sporting News simply omitted Mathewson by accident in its previous ad, printed new copies, or simply happened on a previously undiscovered stack, Mathewson was once again available in the magazine’s February 1, 1912, edition. For good measure, so were the other six players Hemingway requested. Of the nineteen times an ad for these pictures appeared in the pages of the Sporting News, this was also the only such ad to include all seven players. Therefore, I think it can be said with some confidence that Hemingway’s order came from the February 1 edition. He was twelve years old at the time.
But why stop there, right? Why not go thru ad by ad and subject by subject to crosswalk every time a given subject was available for order. Yeah, why not!
In carrying out this exercise, two largely predictable things occurred along with one somewhat unpredictable thing.
- As time went on the number of available subjects tended to increase thanks to new subjects being added.
- Occasionally a subject would become unavailable, presumably due to having sold out.
- Sometimes a “sold out” subject would become newly available, as was the case with Mathewson in February 1912.
The first ad to omit certain subjects came on October 26, 1911. Only 58 of a possible 69 subjects were listed in that ad with key omissions including Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner. Cobb would never again return, while Wagner and the other ten would make anywhere between one and several more appearances in future ads. Straightforwardly then, we can conclude that Ty Cobb was the first subject to sell out. Following Cobb, the next subjects to sell out were Ed Walsh, Honus Wagner, and “Cobb-Wagner Shaking Hands,” all unavailable to collectors in ads later than February 1, 1912.
Here is a closer look at the eleven subjects missing from the October 26, 1911, ad. It’s certainly possible that surplus inventory simply turned up come February, but it’s also tempting to wonder if the Sp0rting News didn’t just print more of certain pictures whose supply had been exhausted.
Now if you looked at the above graphic carefully, you likely noticed one of the columns, rather than a date, has the header “Wood.” And this is where things get really fun. The ads I’ve shown so far offer the various supplements a la carte style. However, other ads offered readers a whole stack with the purchase of one year’s subscription to the Sporting News. My favorite of these came December 3, 1914, which was more than a year after the supplements ceased their run as magazine inserts.
The advertisement notably offers a “set” of 75 action pictures. The specific ones are not identified, but we can likely infer them to be a subset of the 80 pictures still available as of the previous ad, which ran August 28, 1913. Still, these magazine ads weren’t the only place “sets” were advertised. While very few seem to have survived into the present, partial sets were also offered on the backs of select supplements. One of only two I have seen was on the back of a Joe Wood.
The “ad back” Wood was not simply a variant of his standard supplement, which was issued October 31, 1912, as the 84th subject in the series. For one thing, the back advertises 93 subjects, including the final supplement of the series (Joe Birmingham), issued December 11, 1913. (The seven unavailable subjects were Bresnahan, Mathewson, Cobb, Lajoie, Walsh, Wagner, and Cobb-Wagner Shaking Hands.) For another, the descriptions of available subjects have been updated to reflect their status as of the end of the 1913 season. One example is Orval Overall, who is listed as a San Francisco Seal rather than Chicago Cub, but there are several. My best guess for the “ad back” Wood then is that it was inserted into a late December 1913 (or possibly early 1914) issue of the Sporting News in an effort to boost subscriptions while disposing of surplus inventory.
I believe similar is true of the other “ad back,” I’ve seen, Zach Wheat. However, the Wheat comes with a twist. Like the Wood, its ad includes the final subjects in the series, only now there are 84 available subjects rather than 93. However, it’s not just the evident depletion of the checklist that dates the Wheat later than the Wood. Check the teams and descriptions of many of the subjects.
The mix of Federal Leaguers, Pacific Coast Leaguers, and retired players definitively date the checklist to 1914. Just a few quick examples from the first column alone are Joe Tinker, Doc White, and Solly Hofman. The conclusion? If the “ad back” supplements are to be counted, the 1909-13 M101-2 release was technically a 1909-1914 release!
Feel free to check out my raw data from this research, and let me know if you figure out anything cool. Please also let me know if you can point me to any ads I missed in my research.
