Who invented baseball cards

Leaf produced cards in although they say on the cards which feature the rookie cards of Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige. It was the first post-World War II set to feature color pictures. Willie Mays rookie card pictured. The through sets feature breathtaking color portraits, while the set used specialized Kodachrome film, a type of fine, slow grain-rich color film.

The Bowman set is considered to be one of the crowned jewels of baseball card collecting and features the rookie cards of both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. I learned a lot from these guys especially some stuff about the Bowman photos and there is great discussion in the group. The cards were designed to look like a playing card and were meant to be played as a baseball-themed card game. The cards really never caught on and Topps decided to move in a completely different direction the following year.

In the autumn of , a young Topps employee named Sy Berger designed the Topps baseball card set on the kitchen table of his apartment in Brooklyn using cardboard and scissors. Berger, now a legend in the collectible space was an employee of Topps for fifty years and is considered to be one of the most influential figures of the hobby. Later series cards were produced in much smaller quantities due to the fact that the later series runs coincided with football season and kids heading back to school.

To compound this scarcity, Berger has admitted to dumping thousands of cards into the Atlantic Ocean :. They were put in boxes. It took three garbage trucks. I would say cases. All high series of Topps.

I found a friend of mine who had a garbage scow and we loaded the three trucks-worth on the barge. The cases were stacked on the center of the barge, and a switch was thrown and those now precious cards were consigned to the deep. And that was the end of it. Sy Berger Topps Executive. As David L. Farquhar notes in his fantastic blog , the legal issues were a big overhang on the card companies:. Bowman and Topps spent the early s entangled in a landmark legal case over the contracts permitting players to appear on their cards.

So the legal battles represented significant overhead. This marked the start of the Topps monopoly, as no other card company would produce baseball cards for another 25 years. As Wikipedia notes :. The Topps monopoly on baseball cards was finally broken by a lawsuit that let Fleer and another company, Donruss , enter the market in Fleer and Donruss began making large, widely distributed sets to compete directly with Topps, packaged with gum.

When the ruling was overturned on appeal in August , Topps appeared to have regained its monopoly, but both of its competitors instead began packaging their cards with other baseball items — logo stickers from Fleer, and cardboard puzzle pieces from Donruss. All Vintage Cards is the number one destination for everything related to vintage baseball, basketball, hockey, and football cards.

Our love of card collecting and in particular vintage sports cards drives our desire to inform others of the joys of collecting. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. I want to use this website and article as a source for my paper but need to know who the author is.

Please let me know. I am in the same position as both Makenna and Emory. This article is very detailed and will help a lot with my research paper. Id love to give credit to the author, shoot me an email with the information and ill be sure they get their credit. Hi, I am in a similar boat with the previous comments.

Keith Olbermann. Baseball Card Classifications You might see some weird letter classification system to help catalog different years and types of baseball cards. King Kelly. The famous T card of Honus Wagner. Ty Cobb Cracker Jack Card. And well-preserved cards featuring star players—whose high value were contingent on their rarity—meant a lot less when any child who encountered them immediately knew to keep them in mint condition, increasing supply.

As collectors wised up, the industry tanked. The value of the cards owned by most young collectors, whether they knew it or not as they later entered adolescence and adulthood, dwindled alongside the industry as a whole.

But since the odds of a favorable rating are vanishingly low—of the more than 10, Derek Jeter rookie cards submitted to one grading service, only have received a highly sought-after 9.

Mark McKinley, a professor of psychology at Lorain County Community College, in Ohio, wrote an article for National Psychologist in offering some explanations for the phenomenon. McKinley, who himself holds the world record for the largest collection of talking clocks , wrote that the roots of modern collecting can be traced to the s, when aristocrats would travel to faraway lands, cataloging whatever exotic fossils, shells, animals, and artworks they found.

He suggests that modern collecting, a much more democratic endeavor, is motivated by the desire to join a sub-community of like-minded enthusiasts, the urge to not let the past slip away, and the need to classify, label, and make sense of things. These are perfectly reasonable explanations. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Now considered investments by high-end collectors, rare cards in supreme condition have sold for millions.

In , an industry standard for card grading and authenticating was established by Professional Sports Authenticator, a sports memorabilia company. In August , Topps was designated to be replaced by Fanatics, which will produce officially licensed MLB cards beginning in Star power: Known as "The Flying Dutchman," Wagner had 3, hits and stolen bases in his career with the Louisville Colonels and Pittsburgh Pirates from He led the National League in batting eight times and runs batted in and stolen bases five times each.

In , he was a member of the first Baseball Hall of Fame class. Legend has it that Wagner was a teetotaler who abhorred the use of his likeness to sell tobacco.

Others maintain Wagner demanded more compensation from the company for using his likeness, and thus production of the card was limited. Whatever the reason for its rarity, the Wagner T card remains the most famous baseball card. Star power: A tremendous all-around player before an injury-filled decline, Mantle —who played from —is regarded as the best switch-hitter in MLB history.

If he were not hurt so often, he may have threatened Ruth's all-time record for home runs. Mantle finished his MLB career with homers. That honor goes to his Bowman card. But the Topps Mantle has one thing that card doesn't: A fabulous backstory. In , Topps owner Sy Berger let the printing presses run for some of his company's cards. But the late-summer release cooled collectors on the cards, and cases of the product went unsold.

In , Berger had as many as cases of the cards—including Mantle's now-valuable card—dumped into the Hudson River. Ruth, who played from , was the longtime MLB all-time home run champion until he was surpassed by Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds In , a year after his final World Series title, the Goudey Gum Company produced a card set, including four Ruth cards.