Ted Williams arrived in Boston in 1939 and led the American League in runs batted in as a rookie, with 145, to go with a .327 average and 31 home runs. His first card, in that year's Play Ball set, is a plain black-and-white photograph with his name only on the back.
Gum, Inc. of Philadelphia dressed the set up for 1940. There were 240 cards, each photograph inside an inner frame, and a nameplate along the bottom flanked by drawings of a glove, a bat, a catcher's mask and baseballs. The set also reached back into the game's past, with cards of Joe Jackson, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner, the last shown as a Pirates coach.
Williams is number 27: a black-and-white head shot inside a thin black border, printed in a dark brown tone, a young man looking pleasantly out at the camera. The nameplate reads “TED” WILLIAMS, with the nickname in quotation marks.
The middle of three Play Ball cards, and the last in black and white.
His second season, the one the card was issued for, was a step sideways only by his own measure: .344, 23 home runs, 113 runs batted in. The next year he hit .406.
It was one of the last sets made before the war, and it is the middle of his three Play Ball cards. The first is the rookie. The third, in 1941, takes this same picture and prints it in color.
