T227 Series of Champions Baseball Cards

The T227 set was made up of 25 athletes from several different sports and only four players represented baseball. However, those four players are all Hall of Famers so they're in demand among collectors.

The cards are larger than standard tobacco cards from the era, and slightly smaller than modern-era cards. They show an artist-rendered lithograph of a player in an action pose with a generic but still nicely-done background. The player's name appears in the upper right corner and a thin white border surrounds the card. The backs feature a fairly lengthy write-up of the player's career, with a cigarette ad at the bottom. Most cards feature an Honest Long Cut ad, but some have a scarcer Miner's Extra ad.

The four players are Ty Cobb, Home Run Baker, Rube Marquard and Chief Bender. All four were early inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, which keeps values fairly high. The biographies explain each player's statistics from the 1911 season, which allows collectors to identify it as a 1912 issue.