The 1871 season was an important one for the growing sport of baseball in America. After the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed in 1857, the amateur sport was becoming more organized and professional. While baseball cards had yet to be widely mass produced and distributed, some early prototypes emerged during the 1871 season that are now considered among the very first baseball cards ever produced.
In 1871, the strongest teams and best players were located in areas like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. One businessman by the name of Charles Hastings recognized the growing popularity of the sport locally in Boston. With a new baseball park opening that year called the Congressionals Grounds, Hastings worked with a local lithograph company to promote the home team. They produced 200 small printed cards—each just a bit larger than modern business cards—that featured the individual photographs of players from the top Boston team, the Red Stockings.
Each card displayed a photo of one Boston player and listed his first name, last name, position, batting average from 1870, and hometown. Some of the star players featured included pitcher Albert Spalding, second baseman Ross Barnes, and outfielder Cal McVey. While not the first baseball cards ever made, the 1871 Boston Red Stockings set is widely considered the first prominent and widely distributed set of baseball cards intended specifically for that purpose. They helped promote the Red Stockings and players while also serving as early collectibles for eager young baseball fans.
Around the same time in 1871, another businessman named Charlemange Roth produced a similar set of small lithographed cards—but this time highlighting the top players from the powerful Washington Olympics team. The cards were nearly identical in design and size to the Boston Red Stockings issue. Some key members of the Washington Olympics featured included future Hall of Famers George Wright at shortstop and Harry Wright catching and managing. Unlike the Boston cards which were primarily a promotional item, the Washington Olympics cards were likely sold directly to fans as an early baseball card packet or series, according to historians.
Aside from these pioneering early baseball card sets specifically made for the 1871 season, other printed baseball-related materials and publications from 1871 occasionally included rudimentary baseball “cards.” The first annual Spalding Baseball Guide, published that year, had individual text profiles of top players illustrated with small embedded photos. Newspapers in New York and Philadelphia occasionally printed profiles of star ballplayers against a simple background with their picture, not too differently from the formatting we see on modern baseball cards.
While not true cardboard trading cards yet, these early photographs, lithographs, and printed profiles made in 1871 helped expand baseball fandom and foreshadowed how the hobby of collecting players’ images would grow. The success of promotional issues like the Boston Red Stockings and Washington Olympics cards demonstrated a willingness among early fans to purchase and trade these early baseball novelties. Important innovations in lithograph printing processes that emerged in the 1870s would soon allow for inexpensive mass production of baseball cards on heavier stock paper or cardboard.
Just five years after the Red Stockings and Olympics pioneers, childhood friends in Cincinnati named Samuel and Frank Bakewell bought the rights to include photographs of major leaguers in packs of tobacco cigarettes as promotions. Their “Baketell’s Boys” tobacco card series of 1876 is regarded by historians and collectors today as the first true modern baseball card set produced for the express purpose of marketing and trading. The 1871 baseball cards helped plant seeds for this revolutionary change by showing that fans enjoyed collecting player information and images tied to the growing pro game now known as Major League Baseball. While rudimentary by today’s standards, the 1871 prototypes blaze an important trail as some of the earliest baseball cards in history.
