SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
4 FOLLOWERS
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
3M ago
Consider me unschooled enough in the ways of Topps products that I didn’t realize Heritage had a separate high numbers series until I ran across this great looking card on eBay. Some quick research on Trading Card Database revealed that this was the final card of a ten-card insert set found only in the 2023 ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
In near lockstep with the explosion of legal online sports gambling sites, the card-collecting industry has seen a proliferation of card breakers—parties that buy unopened boxes of sports cards and open them live on social media streams. Hobbyists (a/k/a gamblers) pay for spots in the “break” that will entitle them to keep all the cards ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
Act I Despite growing up a stone’s throw from the place, I somehow never knew until rather recently that Venice had a professional baseball team. True, it wasn’t there for long, but for two seasons the once-and-future Vernon Tigers of the Pacific Coast League called Venice home. As those two seasons were 1913 and 1914 ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
It seems like an impossible job—condense the history of baseball in the 19th Century to a set of one hundred cards. After all, it took Harold and Dorothy Seymour three hundred pages to cover the same ground in their collaborative volume Baseball: The Early Years. But that was the task undertaken by a small band ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
Introduction I enjoy picking apart unexplained details of vintage sets to see where that journey leads. This article puts 1935’s Big League Gum baseball set, often shortened to “1935 Goudey,” under a microscope with similar aims. It looks at what’s in the set, obsesses over missing details, and considers how it fits into an important ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
In 2023, there are dozens of baseball card sets at every price point. Any major star has thousands of cards available, with hundreds added annually. We can buy most cards we want in just a couple minutes, at a competitive price. But 50 years ago, there weren’t nearly as many choices for collectors as there ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
Author’s Note: This is the third in a multi-part series that explores the legal backstories that have shaped (and continue to shape) the baseball card industry. You may recall that Fleer and Donruss entered the baseball card market in 1981 after a Pennsylvania district court found that Topps and the Major League Baseball Players Association ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
Author’s Note: This is the fourth, and final, installment in a multi-part series that explores the legal backstories that have shaped (and continue to shape) the baseball card industry. Worth a Gamble? In 1996, a group of plaintiffs filed lawsuits against card manufacturers in federal courts across the country claiming that including insert cards in ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
Author’s Note: This is the second in a multi-part series [Part I] that will explore the legal backstories that have shaped (and continue to shape) the baseball card industry. Once considered mere ephemera used to induce children to buy penny confections (or cigarettes!), the industry has been inundated by costly legal battles waged in the ..read more
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee Blog » History
7M ago
One of the elements of Topps Heritage that routinely catches my eyes are the Heritage News Flashbacks. For a small insert set which is purportedly about the heritage year’s news highlights, I’ve found it to be an interesting window into what kind of things Topps considers mass-market newsworthy. Given Topps’s coverage of the 1950s–1970s we ..read more