A. Joss Ready-pitch

Adrian "Addie" Joss (1880–1911) is shown here in the T206 White Border tobacco set's "Ready to Pitch" pose — a vertical-format card depicting the Cleveland Naps right-hander in his pre-windup stance, the unusual corkscrew motion still folded up rather than uncoiled. T206 produced two Joss variants, this one and a separate "Pitching" action pose, both issued in the 1909–1911 American Tobacco cycle while Joss was still alive. The right-handed Joss had thrown one of the deadball era's most celebrated games on October 2, 1908 — a perfect game against the Chicago White Sox in the heat of a pennant race, the second perfect game in modern American League history at the time it was thrown. He followed it with a near-second no-hitter against the same club in April 1910. Tragically, the man on this card had only months to live when the T206 series concluded distribution: Joss collapsed during spring training in 1911 and died of tubercular meningitis on April 14, 1911 at age 31. The Cleveland teammates and rival stars who turned out for the benefit game his widow received that summer constituted what was effectively an All-Star Game decades before the format existed. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978 by the Veterans Committee, with the standard ten-year service threshold formally waived in his honor — the only such waiver granted in Cooperstown's history.