One of the rarest team-issued photo sets, the 1950 Pittsburgh Pirates Picture Pack is a 26-photo gem, with several images used as the basis for 1951 Bowman cards. Kiner is the set’s highlight, but its original envelope is rarer and nearly impossible to find.
Mastro and Stenbach’s August 1997 Fine Sports Auctions Catalog offered this example.
The Standard Catalog of Vintage Baseball Cards describes the 26-card 1950 Pittsburgh Pirates Photo Pack as follows:
The player photos in this picture pack that was sold at Forbes Field measure 6-1/2” x 9” and are printed in black-and-white on heavy, blank-backed paper. A facsimile ‘autograph’ is printed on front of each picture, though all were written in the same hand. Several of the photos from this set were the basis for the color paintings found on 1951 Bowman Cards. The unnumbered pictures are checklisted here alphabetically.
A few past auctions have said that perhaps the set only has 25 photos, noting that maybe the Dillinger didn’t exist. However, the Standard Catalog includes it, and I found the following photo of one on eBay as part of a complete set that was listed for $160 in November 2024.
The eBay asking price of $160 is reasonable considering how few set sales I managed to track down and because Huggins and Scott sold a partial set of 20 for $172 in August 2022.
Also, contrary to the standard catalog, some auctions mentioned that the photos are on thin stock, not heavy-backed paper.
Finally, here are two photo pack images, Bell and Law, that were the basis for the ’51 Bowman cards.
I believe Pete Castiglione, Cliff Chambers, Murry Dickson, Vic Lombardi, Bill Macdonald, and Clyde McCullough are the others who match.
Update 16 December 2024: After I shared the article on my socials, SABR Baseball Cards shared the following photo of Pirates GM Joe L. Brown with a stack of the photos!
