One of the more enduring bits of hobby lore concerns the rarity of the 1949 Bowman Pacific Coast League set, whose 36 subjects have bedeviled collectors for decades. The PCL was nearing the cusp of "open" classification from Organized Baseball at the time, which was eventually granted to see if it could become a viable third major league. That ascension from AAA to Open happened in 1952 and the level of talent often was better than the minor league designation implied. The weather was fine for the most part (some seasons ran to over 200 games) and a lot of major leaguers on the way down from the Show ended up playing there along with dozens of major league prospects headed in the opposite direction. There were also players in the league who were career minor leaguers by choice as the circuit offered relatively good pay and extensively recruited west of the Rockies at a time where it still wasn't all that common to casually travel across the Continental Divide.
There's a rich history of PCL sets that stretch back to the T-card era and by 1949 most were either team-issued or sponsored by businesses that primarily operated in the same geographic area as the league. That particular season, which ran to 187 games, the league boasted franchises in Oakland, San Diego, Hollywood, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland. For reasons unknown, Bowman elected to issue a separate set of PCL players in addition to their major league specific 240 subjects.
Reports vary but the cards seem to have been sold in Philadelphia (home of Bowman), Seattle and Portland, possibly co-mingled with the MLB cards, although Mark Macrae, as reliable a source as there is for all things PCL, relays they were known to have sold separately, at least in Seattle. A number of surviving examples are hand cut and some sources indicate they could be found in sheet form as well. All-in-all, it's remarkably murky distribution-wise, especially for a Bowman product.
They look just like the regular-issue 49 Bowman's:
Rucker was a typical PCL player of the day- a veteran who had played in the National League for a half-dozen years in the Forties (all with the Giants) and then concluded his career out west, in this case ending in 1950. A short blurb in the December 1951 Card Collectors Bulletin gives us what is likely the first or second mention of the set (it reads like it had been identified in an earlier issue that year):
Still not very well known by the end of the decade, the fourth issue of Woody Gelman's Card Collector newsletter, dated September 1959, had a short piece on them. This was quite possibly the first time many collectors had even seen an image of one:
Gelman, or his ghost writer, mentions most of the cards were destroyed, which I'd say is possible but not definite. In fact, if they were actually disposed of, they were likely sold by the pound to Philadelphia "junk" stores specializing in paper and not just discarded. No matter, they are difficult; PSA presently has 605 examples in their database, or just under an average of 17 per subject. Specific populations range from a low of thirteen to a high of twenty-two, which is essentially random as there are no star players involved. As above, some fairly well-known names were included though.
The cards are not impossible but do get pricey even as demand for them has waned a bit over the years. They are neat little items and their infamy has kept them in the minds of hobbyists for over seventy-five years now.
