39 after two Decades...Facts and Figures

As we approach the 4th of July thought I would take a look back after 20 years of focused Armour coin collecting (basically since the advent of EBay). The photo to the left was taken at a 4th of July  party in 2000 at my cousins in NJ after a few to many beverages.                We just recently found out that Armour made 2 million coins in each of the 3 years they were produced (see blog 38) . How many survived in collectable shape ? Who knows, but we do know how many have been graded by PSA since the first ones were sent in by SFLAYank ~ 2003-2004.

Lets compare 2006 (the first data I kept on graded coin populations) vs 2018 for the 3 Armour give-away years and for 1955 & 1960 Mantle's specifically:

 

   

Now that we have populations that are in the thousands we can also look at some other statistics and oddities .

 

1960 Daley vs Allison

15 years ago urban legend had it that Bud Daley (for reasons unknown) was the rarest coin of any of the sets. In the 2006 data there were only (7) Daleys graded...by 2018 we have (63) Daleys graded including (11) 9s and (10) 10s. However, I offer the comparison that there were only (7) Bob Allison graded in 2006 and today there are only (45) Allisons graded including (4) 9s and (5) 10s. Thus high grade Allison has always been rarer than Daleys ! Is that possibly because the urban legend Daley was priced so high (always > $500) that all those discovered were immediately graded ? or because no one wants a graded Allison unless your completing a graded set and there are only (25) graded sets as of 2018 ...

 



1955 Mantle Correct

In 2006 we already knew that the Mantle corrects were very rare coins. Mantle L-R had only one coin graded - a PSA 6. Certainly we all thought that the L-R was much, much rarer than the LorR. By 2018 the population difference is less than 2:1 . In this case I propose any and all Mantle correct in the hands of anyone who has access to an internet connection knows to sell or grade both of them so the graded populations are probably a good representation of the true population ratio.

Note Added 7/13: this does not take into account the number of coins that have been cracked out for regarding. The more valuable the coin the more this occurs so the Mantle populations actually over estimate the number of coins that actually exist. We know of one specific example where a Mantle correct L-R black coin was graded PSA 6, cracked out and regarded as a PSA 8. That's a value difference of hundreds of dollars.

Do the graders have a favorite color ?

Sine the early 2000's I have been tracking all the 1955 PSA 10's including color and cert number. Of the current (129) PSA 10's I have (116) of them logged in. Surely we can assume all of the common colors were produced in approx. the same numbers and surely the laws or randomness must conclude that no specific color would have survived in better condition (on average) than any other. So it is quite surprising that the following colors represent the population of 1955 PSA 10's.

Red(8); Orange(34); Yellow(17); Pale Green (11); Aqua (17); Navy (3)

Obviously the graders favor orange and if your sending in a navy blue...well don't hold your breath. To me that also means if you have a PSA 10 in red or navy it is certainly rarer and should hold added value.

By the way, the navy blue PSA 10's  are for Berra, Doby and Spahn. I have the Doby.

In terms of the rare colors, There are (4) dk red trans; (2) pale orange; (2) black and 5 dk green known. If you have any other rare color 1955 PSA 10s I'd love to hear about them...


Colors

If it weren't for color variations, my collection would have been done a long time ago.

Lots of you readers appear to continue to be interested in exactly how many colors exist for each year. My best guess right now is that the unusual colors came from the hot dog packs and the common colors for each year, which pretty much stayed the same,  were the only ones sent out in the end of year mail in offers.

As of 2018 I am tracking the following number of colors for each year

1955 - (COMMON) - dr red, red, orange, pale chalky yellow, lemon yellow, dk yellow, pale green, aqua, navy blue and black (RARE) dr red trans, pale orange, peach, dk green, lime green, azure blue, sky blue, Wisconsin blue, tan, yellowgreen (olive), gold and silver  (22)

1959 - (COMMON) red, orange, navy blue, royal blue, medium green, pale yellow (RARE) pale red/orange, dk blue, dk green, pale blue, grey/green, dk red, cream, aqua speckeled, navy speckeled, pale green opaque, pale pink, med pink, dk pink, pale, pale red.  (20)

1960 - (COMMON) red, red/orange, lt blue, royal blue, lime green, medium green, dk green, yellow (RARE) bright orange, salmon, navy blue, slate blue, aqua, blue/grey, mustard yellow, dk yellow, pale yellow (17)

The 1955 RARE Variations

While there are plenty of coins for sale any given week on EBay, the rare 1955 variations are the ones commanding significant prices especially the highly graded ones. I ran through some math on the variations and turned up the following (we already discussed Mantle)

Shear numbers -

- Antonelli New York - 42
- Gilliam L-R - 28
- Gilliam narrow gap - 20
- Jackson Nfielder - 24
- Kuenn B/T - 24
- Trucks 2 words - 54

- The trucks 2 words number is much too large. My guess is that when we identified this variation PSA lumped all the previous graded examples into the 2 words group instead of the 1 word group. If you think I'm wrong try finding one....

Note added 7/13: A reader responded that there are also a lot of miss labeled coins especially for the variations. I have personally seen a handful of Trucks 1 word coins labeled as the 2 word variation. Ditto Haddix tight vs wide.

If we look at the coins with the lowest % of PSA9 + PSA 10 we see:

Crandall 12%; Finigan Q 8%; Gilliam narrow gap 10%; Gilliam L-R 11%; Haddix narrow gap 6%; Mantle L-R 4%; Mueller 7%; Snider no decimal 8%.....

Lets look at the coins with the lowest number of 9s + 10s: (added July 8th)

- Antonelli New York  (6) + (1)
- Finigan Q (4) + (0)
- Gilliam L-R (2) + (1)
- Gilliam narrow gap (1) +(1)
- Haddix narrow gap (1) + (1)
- JAckson Nfielder (3) + (2)
- Jensen Red Sox (6) + (0)
- Kuenn wide  (7) + (0)
- Kuenn B/T (5) + (0)
- Mantle L-R  (1) + (1)
- Snider no decimal (3) + (0)
- Trucks 2 wrds  (9) + (1)  [again  I think these are lower than listed]

that's 56 coins ............

Looking at the PSA listed sets and those in my collection how many of these are accounted for ?

- Antonelli New York - 6
- Finigan Q - 3
- Gilliam L-R - 1
- Gilliam narrow gap - 2
- Haddix narrow - 1
- Jackson Nfielder - 4
- Jensen Red - 4
- Kuenn wide  - 4
- Kuenn B/T - 3
- Mantle L-R - 2
- Snider no decimal - 2
- Trucks 2 wrds - 6................................or 38

this explains why there is currently a lack of key coins in PSA 9 for sale on EBay unless someone is ready to breakup their set and sell it. !

For those of you interested in the numbers, thought this might be of interest....Happy 4th !

38. Some Mysteries Surrounding Armour Coins Solved ??

There have been some key questions that have lingered for many of us who started seriously collecting Armour coins around the time EBay came into being in the late 1990s. Some of those questions were answered a few weeks ago when I stumbled onto 2 articles that were written in 1989 and 1998 by someone named Richard Clothier.

The first article by Clothier was in the TAMS Journal (Tokens and medals Journal ) in Feb of 1989 entitled "Armour Baseball Tokens"
 Clothier describes how Ken Uran at Kenly plastics in Clinton Indiana approached the sausage division of Armour with a plan to insert plastic baseball tokens into their hot dog packs. The deal was signed and Kenly acquired the necessary players permissions and got the permission of the food and drug administration to insert these plastic coins near the food.

Clothier claims that the (24) 1955 players were produced in (23) color variations. He claims there were 16 color variations in 1959 and states that "some new color variations occurred in 1960 but they were more limited than the 1955 run" . More on this later.........

So the coins were produced at one factory (that's all they had) and delivered to he Armour packaging factories from one source. All of he colors were made in the same plant. In fact he states that "many of the odd colors were created accidentally during the change in production run from one standard color to another"

I completely disagree with this statement no matter who made it. As I showed a few blogs ago these colors come from red, yellow, navy blue, black and white. Since here were no white coins in any year or back coins in 1959 or 1960, the addition of these colors was intentional not accidental. Accidental produced the swirled coins but did not produce gold or silver or tan. More than likely that was the factory workers having fun making new colors.

Many of us have wondered why there were no coins in 1956, 1957 and 1958...Well Clothier claims the Armour advertising agency convinced Armour not to do the same give-a-way two years in a row. By 1959 however, he claims the grocery outlets convinced them to issue more coins.

Interestingly, Clothier adds that a 1961 set was planned, but had to be scrapped because changes in the hot dog packaging equipment made it "impossible to meet FDA requirements"

One more line in the article really opened my eyes "Incredible as it may seem, Kenly produced more plastic baseball tokens for Armour in 1955 then the United States mint did dimes."  The claim is that Kenly produced 40,000,000 that's right 40 million coins per year for Armour. Several of us have wondered whether that made any sense at all. Well, the population of the US in 1955 was around 100 million and if we assume 4 persons per household that's 25 million families. Armour was without doubt a national company so they had access to all of them. If the give-a-way lasted 10 weeks in he summer that's 4 million families a week that needed to buy a pack of hot dogs or roughly 1 out of 6 families in the US. Don't know about you, but we had hot dogs and Campbells pork & beans night once a week in our house.

When Clothier wrote his second article in 1998 in "Fun Money"..  In this article he states "There are about 600 uniquely different Armour coins when you consider all players, all years and all color variations" (download a copy here: http://s88204154.onlinehome.us/apms/warehouse/FM10.pdf )

Not sure where he got the 600 number from at all. There are far more than that. If we take the original (24) players from 1955 and the claimed 23 colors that's  552 unique coins all by itself without 1959 and 1960. If Clothier knew about any players NOT being made in any specific colors he did not share that in either article.

He claims the most common of all the coins are the 1959 aaron group (aaron, ashburn, blasingame, cerv, fox, malzone, robinson, sievers, skinner and triandos) in the common colors (red, navy blue, royal blue, green and orange). I would tend to agree.

Clothier offers that the common colors of each year ".. far outnumber he scarcer colors such as gold, black, silver, tan, pink, cream, two-tone, off white and see through" In the article Clothier claims that "...a collector named Doug Stultz wrote to me with more information about the coins."
I checked with Doug and he does not recall the article or ever contacting Richard Clothier                        (WHO SAYS FAKE NEWS HASN'T BEEN AROUND FOREVER ?)

So lets assume Clothier came across the now infamous Stultz article in Feb 1987 Sports Collectors Digest. Doug never mentioned how many colors existed from each year and while he did list colors he had seen for each year, did not then, and does not now, agree with ever having seen coins that were "two-tone, off white or see through".....but....., from the names Clothier gives the colors in his 1998 article many of them match what Doug described in 1987.

When several of us tried to track down the current status of Kenly plastics we found that it had mysteriously burned to the ground in 1961 and is currently listed as a EPA toxic waste site. Can it really be a coincidence that the year the Armour contract was canceled the plant mysteriously burns to the ground ??

THE TERRE HAUTE TRIBUNE __ -3 FINAL EDITION Vol. CXXXIV—No. 143. Terre Haute, Ind., Saturday, October 21, 1961.

 

FIRE LEVELS PLASTICS FIRM

Kenly Co. Factory Is Total Loss .....The blaze was discovered in the northeast corner of the warehouse about 3:35 a.m. and, when firemen arrived a few minutes later, “was all afire inside and ready to fall in,” according to Assistant Chief John Dolan. Rapid spread of the flames was attributed to the chemical nature of the plastic materials which, according to firemen, “burns more rapidly as heat becomes more intense.” ...... The loss was estimated at more than $200,000, all machinery, stored finished products and the nine-year- old building being lost

So here is the totally unsubstantiated Kenly plastics rumor that I have just started. Kenly was ready to produce the 1961 armour coin set and in fact was developing prototypes in the fall of 1960 (the molds have to be ready to go if your making 40 million of anything) When they were informed by Armour that the FDA had put a hold on the deal they realized that this would bankrupt them. They then hired one of Tony " big tuna" Accardo's men in Chicago to come down and torch the facility. Before burning his factory to the ground for the insurance money, some of the Kenly production workers brought home buckets full of the 1961 armour coins for their kids but these, as of yet, have not turned up in the sports hobby. .....just kidding.......


NOW....back to the issue of how many different 1955 coins there are...

1998 Clothier Color List for 1955 Armour Coins

[with best guess 2018 equivalent names in ( ) ]

 

common -medium rare (10): Dk Blue (navy), Aqua, light green (pale grn), red, orange, yellow (lemon yellow), black, dk red, pale yellow (pale chalky yellow), bright yellow

rare (12): lime green, pale orange, pale red, baby blue (sky blue ?), royal blue (azure ?), golden yellow (dk yellow), cream, pink, gold, tan, silver, burnt orange, dk green

Here is my up to date list of 1955 colors with the proviso that a color is not official till there are at least 3-5 confirmed pieces of the exact same color (must be dead nuts on the same)

2018  ArmourPhil Color List for 1955 Armour Coins

common -medium rare (10): dark red, red, orange, chalky pale yellow, lemon yellow, dark yellow, pale green, aqua, navy blue, black
rare (12): dk red - trans, pale orange, peach, dk green, lime green, azure blue, sky blue, Wisconsin blue, tan, yellow/grn, gold, silver

Even if we conclude that either cream or pink are what we now call peach that still leaves several of his colors unaccounted for. Your thoughts on this or other Armour issues, as always, are welcomed .......




 

37 Are you Kidding Me

With a title like "Are you kidding me" most of you probably think I'm going to rant about the pricing put on Arour coins by the newest Armour mega seller on the scene the KY Outlaw...I'm not. The issue isn't what this coin is selling for because I'm a capitalist and as I have said before these coins are worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them. If this seller can get $5000 for a PSA 10, 1960 Armour coin more power to him.

However, this specific coin raised the hairs on my neck. The current owner is "Tigie"and indeed he is trying to get $5000 for this red orange PSA 10 Mantle. Lets take a close look at it. It's the grading not the price that is driving me nuts !


A close look at the back of the graded PSA 10 coin shows that half of the back rim is missing
what more can I say than

"Are you kidding me !

 

If this were not a PG webpage I'd have other things to say

 

 

 

36 the Wisconsin find of 2018 & Where the COLORS Come From

It has taken a month or more to get this post up about a new color variation in the 1955 Armour set, but I was wanting to make sure I was correct about what I was going to say .

Before I start though,  we need to go through some basic info that I have gathered on colors.

For years I and the other collectors have tried to find a listing of colors that all of the Armour coins would match. Basically there is not such color chart available that we have found.

It finally came to me that mixing colors into plastic is like mixing paint. If you look at any gallon of paint and look what they are mixing to get the custom color you want, you find that here are 5 basic colors being added. The primary colors of red, blue and yellow and the additional two colors that are used to make the shades - black and white. Those 5 ...that's it.

I stumbled onto the following "app" "Real Color Mixer" which you can load onto your phone from the google store. Basically it mixes those colors in any ratio that you want. I would rather do it on the computer (vs my phone) so I could then take a pic of the resultant color, but so far I have only found this app for the phone and none for a computer.

Anyway, we can now talk about colors, create them  in this app and see if they match any known colors.

For instance:

1959 dk pink is 9 red, 30 white and 2 yellow
1959 pale pink is 5 red , 30 white and 2 yellow
(whether its 30 white or 28 white makes little difference, but basically double the red and go from dark pink to pale pink ...)

You can hold up the coin next to the phone and match the color...

More importantly if you send me the composition I can generate the same color on my phone and see if it matches anything that I have.

Everyone struggles with Navy Blue vs Royal Blue (1960) till they hold them side by side in their hand. Well navy blue is straight blue and royal blue is 9 blue, 1 yellow and 2 white

1955 Aqua is 1 blue, 1 yellow and 4 white
1955 red is red
1955 dk red is 9 red and 1 black

Some of you are probably saying "he has to much time on his hands" but ....for me this now makes it all make sense.

the WISCONSIN FIND (At first I called it Minnesota - Mia Culpa)

So with this basic knowledge about color on hand lets look at the Wisconsin find of 2018. It was about a month ago that several EBay ads popped up with what looked like a least (200) 1955 Armour coins. There were near complete sets in red and navy and groups of singles offered by player. Checking them over I found first that none of the lots had any of the rare variations for any player. The Mantle lot of 14 (see below) had  reds and yellows and an orange and an assortment of blues. 4 Navy blues for sure and then 4 coins of at least 2 shades

 

Being accustomed to seeing awful color pictures of Armour coins on EBay I presumed the lighter shade was aqua (though it looked more blue than aqua) which meant the medium shade must be azure ...A color that I need for Mantle. The seller wanted $1299 for the lot but I made him a lower offer since I would have to sell off all the other coins. Looking at his other pics I saw loads of the paler blue coins so they had to be aqua....right ? The only other option was the ultra rare sky blue. I only have one of them (Rosen) so no way all of a sudden someone comes across literally dozens of them...or so I thought.

 

To make a long story short, the winners of these lots started contacting me and were kind enough to send lots for inspection. The photos below tell the story. 5 different blues showed up. I'm calling the new color Wisconsin Blue for the state of the find.

 

I separated Wisconsin  in the pic from the sky blue because they are close in color ...but when you have them both in your hand they are definitely different. At least 17 of the possible 24 diff players turned up in this color so it is now an official color variation as far as I am concerned.

 

I have not locked down the exact color compositions yet in the color App, but it just the blue to white ratio.  You might think well all of these are just a little off and no two are exactly the same. Not really...below are 10 of the Wisconsin blues that I have had my hands on. As you can see they are all the same color just like all the aquas in my or your collections are the same color.

 

 

 

So how rare are they? Looks like here were 27 of them in this find.  That's more than the current number of known silver or gold or olive green or peach or tan that we know of, but who knows whether we ever see a bunch of this color again...so yes they are rare. If you won any of these Wisconsin blue, sky blue or azure coins please send me pics for the blog...ArmourPhil



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

35 Set Break Sale on EBay

As readers of this post know, I have not used this blog for advertising, but I am in the midst of selling off my 1955 Armour set "55 Armour Auction set" of extras on Ebay

 https://www.psacard.com/psasetregistry/baseball/company-sets/1955-armour-coins/publishedset/220092

Wanted to give my readers / collectors an opportunity to acquire the following coins that are left from the set. Check out the link to see which coins are still available and let me know which ones you are interested in for your sets...


When the sale is over I will come back and list the prices that I got for these coins to give readers a perspective on real auction prices for these coins. Note their is still a Mantle correct L-R available !

philgarrou@att.net

Notes added 4/12/2018, 6/13/2018

Updating what has been sold :

Antonelli N.Y - PSA 8 - $40
Antonelli New York, PSA 7 - $110
Finigan "O" PSA 6  - $35
Gilliam L-R wide gap , PSA 7 - $75
Gilliam L-R narrow gap PSA 8 - $250
Haddix wide and narrow gap as pair - $60
Jackson Infielder (TAN) - $100
Jensen RED Sox, PSA 7 $65
Kuenn  B/T  $250
Mantle  (Mantel) PSA 7 - $175
Mantle (correct L-R ) PSA 6 - $850
Rosen -PSA 7 - $27.50
Snider (.341) - $75
Trucks (2 words) - $250
Trucks, One wrd - PSA 7 $27.50

6/13/2018 - I have pulled some back for other reasons...this will be my last update

 .....so as we have discussed many times, value lies in the rare variations and the rare colors.

34: 1960 Mantles

 
 
 

As we close out 2017 I thought I would add a near complete glimpse of the Mantle colors from 1960. The 60 coins come both as translucent ( if you hold it up to the light you can see some light coming through) and what I call trans or transparent (when you hold it up to the light you can read the back of the coin)

This shows 13 different colors and is missing medium green and sfla blue (which I know exist and I am searching for) and bright orange which I have with a chip in the rim and never graded.

In addition 5 of the colors in trans. Remember my theory on trans coins is that they do not have filler in them. Filler is a cheaper material like sand that is blended with plastic to lower the cost. The cooling rate of the plastic may also be involved as to whether the resultant coin is transparent or opaque. Are these really variations? PSA thinks NOT, but then again they don't even recognize the different colors or the bust tilts.

 I have never seen a trans red or royal blue....I have several trans red/oj and Dk green in 1960 but not Mantle.

Before the year ends I wanted to mention that one of our fellow Armour collectors, ChiSox Tony, who owns the #21 1959 set and the #7 1960 set took the initiative to contact Bud Daley and inquire whether he knew why his 1960 Armour coin is so rare. The letter and the response are shown below.

So it does not look like we will be getting any answers from Mr Daley and the scarcity remains a mystery !

SO until next year may I wish you

 

ARMOURPHIL

33. SFLA Yank 55 MAntles

 

Continuing our "show me yours and I'll show you mine game, SFLAYank has offered up pics of  his 1955 Mantle Armour coins. These are coins where he has both the miss-spelled variation "Mantel" (the common coin) and at least one of the correct spelling (Mantle) i.e. either (L or R) or (L-R). You may recall from earlier blogs that he also has the extremely rare colors of tan and sky blue and dk green  in the incorrect spelling version. So, here they are. Dare I say, maybe no one else on the planet has 22/24 as Larry does.

The correct orange and red corrects are the only ones I have ever seen. The yellows are nearly as rare.

Maybe, if we are nice we can get the Doug Stultz to show us his from his raw collection !