1911-14 D304 General Baking Set

Issued from 1911 to 1914 in loaves of bread, the D304 set is viewed as one one of the more popular baking/bread sets.  The D304 set is filled with hall of famers, including Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Cy Young and Christy Mathewson.  While not impossible to locate, the cards are tough to find, with PSA only having graded on average roughly 24 cards of each player. 

The Cobb from the set, visually is the standout, while the other player drawings have a good resemblance to the player in question, but not quite like the Cobb.  The Cobb is probably one of my favorite cards of all time, and is one of the hobby's most valuable baseball cards of all time.   The card is worth over $20,000 (dependent on the back) in even Poor to Good condition: notably PSA has graded less than 30 of the D304 Cobb card.

Issued with five different bread back advertisements--there are some back variations which are much tougher to track down; notably Martens, Weber and General Baking. Brunners and Butter Krust tend to be far and away the easier ones to find. 

While there are 25 players in the set, there are five variations which include the team name blacked out of players that were traded.  These players include Frank Chance, Hal Chase, Otis Crandall, John Evers and Charles Herzog.   Here's a Frank Chance with his team name blacked out:

I will admit, that a few of the player illustrations look a bit cartoonish.  The Nap Lajoie card is one.  Did the same artist that drew the Cobb likeness also illustrate this picture?  

I like the colors in the Johnny Evers card from the set.  One other note, unlike many of the tobacco and caramel issues from the era, these images were not re-used across any other baseball set.

I also wish the Wagner from the set looked a bit more like Honus Wagner, but so be it, still a cool card:

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