Over Thanksgiving I took a trip to go see the Baseball Americana exhibition at the Library of Congress. It’s a single gallery, doable in an hour, and I highly recommend visiting if you’re in DC before it closes. While I’ve already written about the general show on my own blog, for the purposes of this committee I feel like it’s worth highlighting the specific role baseball cards play in the exhibition.
Being part of the Library of Congress means that ephemera like cards are emphasized a lot more than equipment and artifacts. One of the key points this show makes is not only has baseball existed for 150 years years, it’s been recognizable that entire time; the existence of baseball cards—the earliest being a carte de visite from 1865 — is a key feature of this consistency. As long as we’ve had a game, we’ve been making pieces of cardboard featuring players’ pictures and trading and collecting the results.
Does a modern card (well, 1994 Bowman) with 4-color offset lithography, gloss UV, and foilstamping compare at all to a 130-year-old Goodwin & Co single-color uncoated photographic print? Not at all from a production point of view but seeing them next to each other in the same case and even my 6-year-old recognizes them as part and parcel of the same concept. Heck, even some of the poses are exactly the same.
The show continues with a display of a number of cards of stars of the pre-integration period. These are wonderful to see (and lust over) but the emphasis of this part of the exhibition is in who’s playing baseball and the cards are contrasted with photos of African-American ballplayers.
The clear takeaway to me is that while cards have always existed, their role in defining who “real” ballplayers are cannot be ignored. Seeing who we’ve chosen to make cards of is a powerful statement about who counts and who doesn’t in the sport.* I half-jokingly refer to Topps Flagship as the “card of record” but there’s a kernel of truth in there. Cards chronicle the history of the game and collecting them connects us to that history.
*Note, my takeaway isn’t just a race thing. When we see collectors express concerns about companies only focusing on rookies or stars or large-market teams it’s because of the way that cards function as a record of who matters.
Cards were my entrée into baseball history. They served a similar function for my kids. As much as my eldest hits Wikipedia, Baseball-Reference, and Retrosheet on the iPad, cards are why he knows who he knows and what sustain his interest and connection to the sport.
Later on, a sample of Japanese cards shows how the sport has transcended the United States and become more global. This is exactly right and, while I haven’t gotten into international cards,* I can’t deny that it’s really interesting to see how an American thing goes global and how baseball cards end up fitting into other country’s card-collecting traditions.
*My forays into Spanish-language issues are more of a language-based interest.
The only miss card-wise for me is that in the section that shows the increase of statistics in both scouting and the appreciation of the game. There’s a comparison of card backs and the nature of the statistical information that we’ve felt is appropriate over the years. Unfortunately we don’t actually get to see the backs and they’re merely described to us.
Plus there’s so much more that could be here. I would’ve loved to see a comparison of backs drawing a line from T205’s slashline of G/AVG/Fielding to the traditional slash lines of the 1960s, the whole range of proto-SABRmetric backs in the 1990s, and finally today’s inclusion of stats like WAR that I can’t even explain to my kids how to calculate. It’s not just that stats exist, it’s what stats we care about and how that impacts our understanding of the game.
SABR's Baseball Cards Research Committee 
Great post! Now I want to see the exhibit.
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“Cards chronicle the history of the game and collecting them connects us to that history.”
This is why I deduct a lot from sets who are missing important players. Revere 1952 Topps all you want, but if you don’t have Williams and Musial and Roberts and many of the best players in the game, its not really a flagship set. 1956 was the first true modern set — it was missing Roberts and Musial, still huge defects — and of course Topps has had an occasional missing star over the years. But 1956 is the first year that is truly legit in the way I collected cards when I came along years later, and 1967 is probably the first to have the top 50 non-rookies in the game. (Is this true? I’ll ask on Twitter.) (Pre-Topps cards are a different animal entirely in terms of how/when they were available.)
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While I intended my comment to be less about specific sets and more about the snapshot of who got cards in any given year or era it does suggest a way of critiquing sets and checklists.
Anyway, pre-1956 for me takes into account who was in Bowman as well. And during the monopoly years it also includes, to a certain degree, all the HOFer sets and things that existed in parallel to the mainline Topps releases as correcting who’s missing or who was missed in the past (an observation that can be applied all the way through to Ginter’s negro league players cards this past decade).
Also, limiting to the top-50 players, while important to consider, skirts dangerously close to the current model of just focusing on those top 100 players + the top 100 rookies as a way of building yet another 200-card checklist which serves as filler for hit prospecting. Getting the commons and being able to fill out a lineup for each team is incredibly important for me.
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I only used “50” as a proxy for “complete”. Obviously I want at least 20 cards per team (it was 25 or more in the early 1970s) and no one “missing.” I was not collecting during the years that Bonds was missing (A-Rod too?) but obviously that seriously hurts those sets in my eyes. The way I collected cards as a kid, if there were no cards of Johnny Bench and Reggie Jackson I would not have bothered to continue. That was what it was like in the 1950s. Topps never had a set with base cards of both Williams and Musial.
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Yeah my kids aren’t impressed that Bumgarner isn’t in any Topps sets this year. At least they have the Panini cards to fill that binder slot.
For my part, the missing stars are clearly exceptions. I’m more annoyed by how the non-starter cards are mostly prospects instead of the mix of experience that is actually on the team.
But yeah a set of all ~50 guys who appeared on the team—while exactly what I’d want Topps Living to be—would be an absolute beast to release and complete in total.
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Great insights, as always.
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