Identity lives on the back. We decline to price what we cannot identify.
Cobb has four cards in T206: two batting poses, with the bat on his shoulder and off it, and two portraits, against green and against red. The red is the more common of the portraits. It is one of six cards the hobby calls super prints, which t206resource dates from a combined print run in June 1910 to the end of the set. It is the only front in the set found with fifteen of the sixteen advertising brands; Uzit is the one missing. The list has moved as cards have surfaced: the first confirmed red portrait with a Broad Leaf 350 back appeared in 2024.
The rarest back of all reads, in green ink, TY COBB, KING OF THE SMOKING TOBACCO WORLD. It advertised Ty Cobb granulated cut plug, made by the F.R. Penn Tobacco Company, an American Tobacco subsidiary, and advertised in Georgia newspapers in February and March 1910. It appears on no other front. Nearly every copy has a thin, glossy coating over the front that ordinary T206s lack, and about half show tobacco stains. Burdick listed it with T206, and most experts accept the connection, though some argue it belongs in a set of its own.
Six were known in 1997, when five more turned up in Georgia inside a book from 1907. By 2012 there were thirteen confirmed, and early in 2016 about fifteen. Then, in a house in the rural South, a family found seven of them in a crumpled paper bag. The find was announced on March 3, 2016, and the hobby called it the Lucky 7. An eighth came out of the same house two years later, and another has since been found in a matchbox in a Georgia sock drawer.
These were Cobb's best years. In 1909 he won the Triple Crown, at .377 with 9 home runs and 107 runs batted in, and led the majors in hits and stolen bases; his Tigers won their third straight pennant and lost the World Series to Wagner's Pirates. In 1911 he hit .419 with 248 hits. He finished with a .366 average and 4,189 hits, and in 1936 he received 222 of 226 votes in the Hall of Fame's first election, the most of anyone.
The image is the same on every one of them; the cards are not, and what separates them is printed on the side nobody photographs. A house that priced this card from its front would be guessing. So he is shown here, where the story can be told whole.
It is featured in the Vault as a card to be admired and understood, not chased on a given afternoon. No live price, no link to buy. Just the history.