1933 Four-on-One Exhibit Set and Checklist

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

‘It’s In The Details’

Title	W463 Exhibits
Year	1933
Size	3 3/8″ x 5 3/8″
Images	Color Tints
Type	Exhibit
Number in Set	16

1933 Four-on-One Exhibit Set Overview

Eight different pre-war sets make up the W463 Exhibits issue. In addition to the pre-war era W463s (and the earlier W461s from 1921 through 1928), additional Exhibit card sets from the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were also printed as well.

Exhibits are sometimes called postcards, although that isn’t really accurate since only some have postcard backings. Many Exhibit cards are blank-backed and some cards include a corner coupon printed on the back.

These are classified in the American Card Catalog as W-Cards, but they are not strip cards like other W-card issues.

Most Exhibits look fairly nice. However, almost all of the sets have plenty of typos and misspelled names. Players were also misidentified throughout the series.

Starting in 1929, Exhibit moved to a different design to feature four players on one card. All W463 classified cards have this same design with four players to a single card. Collectors should note that many of these cards have been cut up over the years. Thus, instead of having one large card with four pictures, they were left with four smaller individual cut ‘cards.’ That has also confused many collectors unfamiliar with W463s as to the origins of these new, smaller cut cards. While there is some value for these cut outs, the fully intact four-in-one cards, of course, are worth much more.

Specifically, the 1933 Exhibit card set features cards with a variety of tint colors.

Similar to the 1935 Goudey set, these cards do not merely contain random players. Instead, four players from the same team were used. Each of baseball’s 16 teams were featured on a card — this was a change from the first few years in this series when each team had two cards. All of the 1933 Exhibit cards have blank backs.

These cards included the name and team/league of the player pictured. As with past Exhibit sets, a dark ink was used when the print was over top of a lighter background and a light ink was used when the background was darker. Formatting is varied with some players having their full first/last names printed and others only having initials of their first and or middle name printed.

Cards do not include card numbers. All of the cards have a vertical layout.

As it was in the last two Four-on-One sets, the most valuable card here is a Yankees edition featuring Babe Ruth. However, he is not pictured with Yankee legend Lou Gehrig as he was in past years as Gehrig does not appear in the set. Gehrig would, however, return in the following year on a card with Ruth.

A Hall of Fame Mixup

Through the years, Exhibit cards had all sorts of players that were incorrectly identified. One of the more notable ones is found in the 1933 set.

On the Brooklyn Dodgers card, Hall of Fame catcher Al Lopez is pictured but his name on the card is listed as Vincent Lopez. According to Baseball Reference, there is no such major league player from the 1930s with that name and Al’s full name is Alfonso Ramon Lopez.

Interestingly, that’s not the only weird thing about this card. It’s notable that the Vincent Lopez name is actually in a different font than the other font used in the rest of the set. Even the other players featured on the Dodgers card, Glenn Wright, Dazzy Vance, and Frank O’Doul, use the correct font. The font used for Lopez’s name is slightly smaller and not as bolded as the others.

The font variance seems be explained away by the fact that Lopez was a new addition to set from previous years. In the 1934 set, for example, font variances seemed to follow a pattern with a different font being used for players new to a particular team’s card. And this card’s other three players all appeared on cards in the 1931-32 set.

Still, what’s with Lopez not being identified correctly? If Lopez was an entirely new player, it would be a little easier to understand why he was difficult to identify. But Lopez had been with the team since 1928 and was a full-time player starting in 1930.

While Lopez is misidentified here, this is not the only Exhibit misclassification for him. In fact, he was also called Vincent in the 1934 and 1935 sets. After not appearing in the 1936 set, he was finally correctly identified by his full first name of Alfonso in 1937.