1934 R313-A Gold Medal Foods - Tommy Bridges and Envelope

Tommy Bridges was a pitcher for the Tigers for his whole 16 year career. And he was a good pitcher. He made the AL all-star team 6 times. He led the league in strikeouts twice. He has the statistical equivalence or superiority to several Hall of Fame pitchers, and ranks higher than the two most valuable subjects in this set in career WAR. Yet his card is sixth in terms of average value, a virtual common. In the '34 series, Bridges lost game 3 against Paul Dean, but beat Dean's brother in game 5 pitching a complete game. He finished out the '35 World Series for the Tigers with a complete game 7 victory. I wouldn't be surprised if he made it into the Hall of Fame someday. When he retired he was 8th all-time in strikeouts in the American League. By most measures, he was an elite pitcher in his era.

With many of the older card sets much of the information about how they were made and distributed has been lost. Most people didn't seem to care about those things at the time, companies that made and distributed them didn't care about maintaining records about them, and there were less legalities involved, so there aren't many paper trails. The way people collected cards back then was different than it is now and cataloging wasn't really a thing for cards. While there are still mysteries about the '34 Gold Medal Foods set, there are also some clear answers, largely because the envelopes they were sent in remain (often the cards were stored in the envelopes they came in, it seems).

Here is an envelope I have from the ebay lot where I got six Gold Medals and several other 1930s cards. Some of the things we can learn from the envelope are its place or origin - Gold Medal Foods in Minneapolis, how many cards came in the envelope - notice the number typed toward the bottom right (many envelope card combo sales have the same number of cards as the number typed on the envelope), and the area of distribution (most known envelopes were sent to the mid-west, great lakes, and northeast). Some cards (not mine) were used as postcards, which are stamped with a date and indicate the earliest determinable time the cards were distributed (almost immediately after the World Series). I found the obituary of the fella that originally received these cards. He was about 12 at the time of the Series (he lived to be almost 90).