The story is told over and over again.
With a wistful look in his eye, he says, “When I was a kid in the 1950s, I collected baseball cards. I’d attach a baseball card to the back wheel of my bicycle with a clothespin. The wheel’s spokes would hit the card, and the flapping noise made the bike sound like a motorcycle. The faster you went, the better it sounded. It destroyed the baseball card, but who cared? Those cards cost less than a penny each.
“The thing is, some of those cards I ruined are now worth hundreds of dollars.”
I did it, my friends did it, you or someone you know did it. A common childhood practice that cost us a lot more than we realized. How many of us could be rich today if we’d just taken care of those baseball cards?
How rich? A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card is worth a hundred thousand dollars. A 1954 Bowman Ted Williams card, $70,000. And a 1951 Bowman Willie Mays card, $60,000.
The most valuable baseball card of all? A 1909 Honus Wagner card that was issued by a tobacco company. Nearly three million bucks.
Honus Wagner played for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1897 to 1917, and many baseball historians consider him the greatest shortstop who ever lived. Ty Cobb went one step further, calling him “maybe the greatest star ever to take to the diamond.”
The story goes that Wagner stopped the distribution of these tobacco cards because he was a non-smoker, and he did not want his name associated with tobacco. There may be fifty of these cards that survived. One of them sold at auction in 2007 for $2,800,000.
The first baseball cards were produced in the 1860s, with a picture of a baseball player on one side and an advertisement on the back. Companies that made these cards didn’t sell just baseball cards, though. Baseball cards were just a part of their line. They also sold cards with presidents, comic characters, and animals. Collectively, they were all called “trade cards.”
In the 1880s, tobacco companies began printing baseball cards and including them in packages of tobacco. But ten years later, when most independent tobacco companies combined to become the American Tobacco Company, the manufacture of cards was deemed no longer necessary since there was no longer competition in the tobacco business.
But in the early 1900s, the U.S. government split up the tobacco monopoly, and once again different companies used baseball cards to sell their tobacco. Thus began the “golden age” of baseball cards. It lasted until World War I, when companies again stopped making the cards.
Baseball cards reappeared in the 1930s, but this time they were made by chewing gum companies. This was the “silver age,” and it lasted until World War II rationing made paper scarce and the production of baseball cards was again halted.
In 1948, the Bowman chewing gum company brought baseball cards back. The Topps company jumped into the fray in a big way in 1952, and many of the 1952 Topps cards are highly sought-after today. For a penny, you could get one baseball card and a flat piece of bubble gum. For a nickel, you got six cards and one piece of gum.
In 1956, Topps bought out Bowman and pretty much took over the baseball card industry.
That lasted until 1981, when Fleer and Donruss began issuing baseball cards. (A court decision allowed them to sell cards, but not with bubble gum). The latest company to enter the field is Score.
Today, several companies print baseball cards. But most collectors are more interested in the older cards, the cards of our era.
Kids of today collect many things. But half a century ago, baseball cards were the only thing that many young boys saved. I remember when I was about eight, sitting in a circle with half a dozen other kids, passing around our baseball cards. We’d admire cards of the biggest stars (you usually had to buy a lot of lesser-known names before you hit a well-known player), and occasionally we’d trade cards with each other.
For some reason, the name of one player struck us all as extremely funny. His card seemed to turn up in the Topps packages more often than any other player. His name was Rip Repulski, and he was an outfielder for the Cardinals. He was a solid if not spectacular player, and he played for several teams in an 18-year career.
Why has the hobby of collecting baseball cards gone downhill over the years? I think there are several reasons:
In our day, there were 16 major league teams, and no league divisions. The winner of each league went to the World Series. It was easy to follow the pennant races with so few teams involved. And even the poor teams had one or two big-name stars.
Today we have 30 major league teams, and 16 of them go to the playoffs. That would have been the entire league in the 1950s!
Also, most of the big stars stayed with the same teams. Mickey Mantle was a Yankee, Pee Wee Reese was a Dodger, Ted Williams played for the Red Sox, and Brooks Robinson was an Oriole. You could be a fan of a team, and a fan of that team’s stars.
Today, players hop from team to team, following the bouncing checkbook. If you like a team, you’ll have different players to learn every year. If you like a particular player, you may have to switch your team allegiance each year to follow him around the leagues.
And in our day, there were 400 players in major league baseball. Today, there are 750. So the talent is spread more thinly, and many major leaguers of today would not have made it to the majors fifty years ago.
This expansion of baseball may have made more money for the professional sport, but it made the game, and the players, harder to follow for the rest of us.
Further, compared to other sports, baseball moves slowly. It is often as much of a chess match as it is a sport. Other sports that move faster and have more action have grown in popularity as our attention span seem to be shortening.
Combine all that with the newfound popularity of pro football and pro basketball, and baseball is no longer the Sport of Sports that it once was.
It was nice to be there when baseball was the undisputed king of sports.
But if only we’d known then what those baseball cards would be worth today, there wouldn’t have been so many “motorcycle” bikes on the streets in those days.
Dan Hughes and his wife Kathy own the Kaleidoscope Art Studio in Rantoul, which offers classes and self-directed workshops for both children and adults. Please visit their website at http://room200.com. Dan is a Parkland College retiree. He was the general manager of the college radio station and an instructor in broadcasting. He also wrote, produced, and hosted The Parkland Challenge, a popular local television quiz program for high school academic bowl teams. He has written books on metal detecting and adult softball, and he does weekly podcasts (internet radio shows that can be listened to anytime). Email Dan at danhughes@juno.com, and check out his website at http://danhughes.net.