1919-21 W514 strip cards and Joe Jackson

W514 is the best known of the “strip card” issues: small, simply printed baseball cards sold in strips at grocery, candy and drug stores and cut apart by their owners. PSA's CardFacts describes 120 cards of about 1-7/16" by 2-1/2", each with a crude drawing of the player on a colored background inside a thick blank border, with name, team, position and number along the bottom. The backs are blank. The Just Collect blog notes the strips came ten cards long, with perforated lines to guide the cutting, sold as a promotion alongside candy.

When it was issued — and why that matters

The cards are thought to date from around 1919, but PSA notes that several players appear with different team affiliations, which suggests the set was issued over more than one year; hence the usual “1919-21” label. Those years are exactly the period of the Black Sox scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox players were accused of taking money to throw the 1919 World Series. A Chicago jury acquitted them in 1921, but Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned all eight from professional baseball for life.

W514 is a snapshot of that team. A Lelands catalog description says seven of the eight Black Sox appear in the set, and Heritage's 2026 master-set lot lists Joe Jackson (#15), Chick Gandil (#31), Lefty Williams (#35), Eddie Cicotte (#82) and Buck Weaver (#91), along with manager Kid Gleason (#112). For Jackson it is unique: the W514 is his only strip card.

Shoeless Joe Jackson #15

Jackson hit .408 in his 1911 rookie season, still the rookie record, and .356 over his career, one of the highest averages in major-league history. In May 2025 Commissioner Rob Manfred removed Jackson, who died in 1951, from MLB's permanently ineligible list, making him eligible for Hall of Fame consideration by the Classic Baseball Era Committee at its December 2027 meeting.

The population is dominated by “Authentic” slabs — 54 against 25 numerically graded. PSA's notes on the set explain why: original, cleanly cut examples are rare, because singles were often damaged when they were cut from the strips or afterwards.

Public records

The table shows how far the market moved after 2013: by 2022 a low-grade or Authentic Jackson was selling for close to what the finest graded copy brought nine years earlier. The Just Collect write-up observes that, given the set's link to the scandal, values have often not reflected the Jackson card's historical weight.

Complete and master sets

Because of the team variations — Rabbit Maranville (#21), Dave Bancroft (#40), Bob Roth (#47) and Hugh Jennings (#106) — a “master set” runs to 124 cards rather than 120. Heritage offered one in its April 3–4, 2026 Spring Sports Card Catalog Auction, anchored by an SGC VG 3 Jackson; the lot page describes it as a complete compilation of all 124 known cards, with Hall of Famers including Babe Ruth (#2, captioned “Home Run King”), Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson. Just Collect counts 28 Hall of Famers in the set.