Copyright berkshireeagle
The 2025 World Series just ended a week ago as the Dodgers beat the Blue Jays in the final game. Watching this game brought back memories from my baby boomer childhood years. Growing up in Pittsfield and being a Red Sox fan, I was much more invested in baseball as a youngster than as an adult living in the Midwest. Just about every boy I knew who grew up in the 1950s and '60s loved baseball. During the summers my friends and I went to local games, listened to Major League games on the radio, played pickup ball in the neighborhood or just tossed baseballs with each other. Baseball seemed to dominate much of our daily activities. And one of our most popular hobbies was collecting baseball cards, a rite of passage for us, preteen baby boomer boys. I am sure that some preteen girls collected cards, but as I youngster I did not any who did. For pudgy flat-footed me, who never made a Little League team, baseball cards gave me the ability to impress others with my memory of the players’ statistics that were on reverse side of the players’ pictures. Besides a connection to our heroes, baseball cards were our first introduction to a form of “social currency trading” and also to a sort of gambling. We learned the value of the most popular baseball players for whom fewer cards were put on the market like Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. To get these prized cards, we would have to trade many of the less popular players’ cards with our friends. But in addition to trading, we more often gambled by “flipping” cards where one lad would hold a card about chest high and flick it to flip over and over and land either heads up on the ground with the player’s picture showing or tails with the statistics side showing. Both participants agreed to how many cards lad No. 1 would flip, and then lad No. 2 would have to match the cards in his flips in order to win. No match meant losing. Generally, it was a good way to get rid of duplicate cards or to amass extra cards for trades. Those who flipped cards rarely risked losing their most prized cards. The downside of flipping was that cards got bent or worn out and many of these did not survive in great condition for future valuable collections. But our collecting was never for an investment, but all for fun. No one would ever think that someday selling our cards could buy a new auto or even a house. We just wanted to have fun and learn about baseball in the years before the advent of the internet and ESPN. The history of baseball cards that were marketed in wax paper packages (where you can’t see the cards) and with a flat piece of bubble gum, really began after World War II. The Bowman Gum Co. packaged bubble gum and other nonsports trading cards dating back to 1927. This confectioner was the first post war company that mass-produced black and white baseball cards in 1948. Another company, Topps, started in 1938 by selling candy. In 1951 Topps began issuing sets of multicolored baseball cards. A third company, Fleers, that had started in the 1920s, did not produce baseball cards until 1959. We were familiar with Fleers earlier in our childhood for its wrapped chunk of pink bubble gum called Dubble Bubble. Each penny piece also included a collectible numbered small cartoon strip of a chubby character named Pud with a fortune or fact printed under the cartoon. I first collected baseball cards in 1954, and my cards were by both Topps and Bowman. The brand made little difference to me, a 9-year old beginner. Sometimes I favored Bowman as the nickel packs had six cards while Topps only had five. I collected for about three baseball seasons through 1956 which was the only year I amassed a complete set of Topps cards including the rarest cards of Ted Wiliams and Mickey Mantle. Back then there were only 16 major league baseball teams, and about 350 cards to collect of all the players, and managers. For as little as $10 in purchases, shrewd trades and skillful flipping, one could get a complete collection. We learned to buy cards in different variety stores at different times, or we would risk getting the same players in packets of cards that came from the same box sent to the store. In 1956 Topps acquired the Bowman Gum Co. and became the major maker of bubble gum baseball cards selling under both brand names. Over the next 20 years the company obtained exclusive contracts with ball players for many of their cards and thus dominated the market for collectors who sought full sets of players. In 1980 after five years of litigation, Fleers won a court battle to end the monopoly by Topps. In 1981 there were 26 major league teams and 858 different available from the three major card companies: Topps, Fleers and a new one, Donruss. By the 1990s these baseball card makers had better quality cards but the market became oversaturated. Thus, collections from those years are far less valuable to those who bought them for investment purposes. My nephew, who is 30 years younger than me, started collecting baseball cards in 1988 through 1996. By then he could buy an entire set of major league cards in boxes vs. penny or nickel packs with gum. He also bought individual cards of favorite players at card shows that were not yet held in the early baby boomer years. Along with autographed baseballs, he had stored his entire collection in one storage tub for 30 years hoping to be a great financial investment. Now close to age 50, he is uncertain what to do with his card sets. He learned that they are not so valuable having been obtained when the market was so saturated. However, for other collectors some of those earlier “pre-saturation” baby boomer cards like those of Mickey Mantle are very valuable. They can command over $20,000 each with many in near mint condition in the six-figure range. The highest price that was ever paid for a baseball card was in a 2022 auction for a 1952 Mantle card that sold for $12.6 million. As my teen years came, my interests in baseball cards, and even baseball, had been replaced by social clubs, music, cars and dating. When I left home for college I left my full collection of 1956 Topps baseball cards in a bureau in my old bedroom. On one visit to my home years later, four of the five drawers in my bureau were just as I left them. They had collections of comics, stamps, papers, souvenirs, postcards, and a slew of rocks, patches and other odd items. The one other drawer that had my baseball cards was empty. Many baby boomers lament about how when they out grew their baseball cards or they left home, their moms pitched their cards. My parents were not to blame for the disappearance of my cards. It was likely one of the many younger visitors who got to stay in my room that had the “sticky fingers.” Today baseball cards are still being collected, but collecting is not the same fun hobby I recall. Newer cards are high tech and a big business. Many collectors now buy and sell via online auctions allowing more global access, but also more incidents of scams and counterfeit cards. Some card companies dominate the market and prices are based on their licensing arrangements. Higher prices and the fun of card collecting has too often become investment driven. Baseball card collecting for beginners also has much more competition in cards appealing to fans who favor other sports as basketball, football and hockey. In more recent years I have bought several affordable cards of major league players from online auctions, but not because I renewed my childhood hobby. My collecting has been limited to locals who played in the Major League to add to my ephemera collection of the Berkshires. Among those are cards of Art Ditmars, Dale Long, Jack Chesbro, Gene Hermanski, Tommy Grieve, Jeff Reardon and Turk Wendell. And of course, I admit I have 20 different cards of my classmate and star shortstop of the Baltimore Orioles, the late Mark Belanger. I never asked and wondered if Mark had been a card collector too as a youngster.
