In 1916, The Sporting News, a leading American sports newspaper, began publishing baseball cards as inserts in their weekly newspaper. These cards featured photos and profiles of major league baseball players and became one of the earliest and most influential examples of modern baseball cards.
The Sporting News baseball cards of 1916 helped establish many conventions that would be followed by baseball cards produced in the decades to come. Each card featured a player photo on one side and biographical and statistical information on the other. The size and dimensions of the cards, roughly 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches, set a standard size for baseball cards that is still largely used today on many modern issues.
The 1916 cards were also pioneering in showcasing both the National and American Leagues. Previously, baseball cards tended to focus solely on one league or the other. By highlighting the top players from both circuits, The Sporting News cards helped bring national recognition to the sport. In total, they profiled 144 major leaguers, with cards divided equally between the two leagues.
The decision by The Sporting News to begin including baseball cards was partly driven by the rising popularity of the relatively new hobby of collecting trade cards and memorabilia related to sports figures. Prior to the heyday of manufactured cards produced by companies like Topps in the 1950s, newspapers and magazines served as a primary outlet for distributing collectible cards as promotional inserts.
The 1916 Sporting News baseball cards provided fans with photographs and statistics on the game’s biggest stars, helping to promote interest in the major leagues at a time when the sport was working to establish a national following across the United States. Players featured included superstars like Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Ty Cobb, introducing their likenesses to a new generation of fans.
While production values were relatively basic by today’s standards, featuring mainly simple black and white pictures with typed text on the backs, the 1916 cards established many hallmarks that would influence the format of baseball cards for decades. Styles like individual player portraits, stats on the reverse side, and cardboard stock all became standard in the ensuing golden age of baseball cards from the 1950s through 1980s.
The cards also served as early glimpses at the evolution of baseball over the years. For example, the statistics listed, such as batting average and home runs, tracked the rise of the live-ball era and prominence of power hitting starting in the late 1910s and 1920s. Equipment details like barehanded fielding also showed how the game was still adjusting to the transition from the dead-ball period.
The inclusion of both American and National League players presaged the gradual integration of the major leagues after their long segregation. A few of the players featured in 1916, such as James “Hippo” Vaughn and Charlie Thomas, were among the earliest African American ballplayers before the widespread reemergence of black players after World War II.
Condition and scarcity make high-grade 1916 Sporting News cards some of the most valuable pieces of early sports memorabilia. A near-mint example of Babe Ruth from that pioneering first issue recently sold at auction for over $200,000, demonstrating the immense interest in roots of the modern baseball card industry. Later runs of Sporting News cards from the 1920s through 1940s also hold significance as predecessors to the golden age of mass-produced cardboard.
Though mass production and specialized card companies would transform the baseball card industry, the 1916 Sporting News issues established many initial conventions. From card sizes and player statistics to dual league representation, these early test runs helped bring baseball fandom into the collectible card era. Their simple design belied an outsized influence felt across a century of the pastime’s growing popularity, documented one player at a time through the everyday ephemera that became beloved childhood memories.
