Addie Joss Horizontal pitching

Adrian "Addie" Joss (1880–1911) appears here on the E90-1 American Caramel issue in the distinctive horizontal pitching pose — a wider-format card depicting the Cleveland Naps right-hander mid-delivery, his unusual corkscrew windup frozen in lithograph. The right-handed pitcher and hitter is one of the most poignant entries in any 1909-era card run because his story turned tragic so quickly: the season after this card was issued, Joss was dead at age 31 of tubercular meningitis, just days into spring training in 1911. By the time American Caramel chose him for the E90-1 set, he had already thrown a perfect game against the White Sox in October 1908 — one of only a handful in big-league history — and followed it up with a near-second no-hitter against the same club in 1910. Cleveland teammates organized a benefit game that summer of 1911 to raise money for his widow, and the lineup that took the field on his behalf is itself a Hall of Fame roll call. The horizontal-format E90-1 card is comparatively scarce because the wider die-cut profile made the cards more prone to corner damage in the candy boxes that distributed them. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978 by the Veterans Committee, after the standard ten-year service requirement was specifically waived in his case — a unique gesture for a player whose career was cut short.