Baseball cards have a long history in Wenatchee dating back to the late 1800s when the sport first gained popularity in the agricultural community along the Columbia River. Some of the earliest documented baseball cards featuring Wenatchee players date to the 1890s as tobacco companies began inserting memorabilia into cigarette packs and bars of chewing tobacco as primitive forms of marketing and promotion.
One of the first documented baseball cards featuring a Wenatchee player was issued in an 1893 Old Judge tobacco set depicting shortstop Eddie Sommers of the fledgling Wenatchee Peaches semi-pro team. Sommers went on to have a successful minor league career and is credited as one of the first players from Wenatchee to make it to the big leagues with brief stints with the Boston Beaneaters and Pittsburgh Pirates in the late 1890s.
As the popularity of baseball grew nationally in the early 1900s, so too did the production of baseball cards. In 1909, the American Tobacco Company issued its famous T206 set which included the first color portraits of players. Among the 511 cards in the landmark set was a card featuring pitcher Lefty Larsen of the Wenatchee Apple Pickers of the Inland Empire League, one of the earliest minor leagues in the Pacific Northwest. Larsen’s card is among the most valuable from the pioneering T206 set highly sought after by collectors today.
In the following decades, baseball cards continued to gain popularity across America especially during World Wars I and II when production of cards increased as a patriotic measure. Wenatchee players regularly appeared in sets issued by Topps, Bowman, and other top manufacturers. Stars of the Wenatchee Chiefs of the Western International League like third baseman Eddie Joost, who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Philadelphia Athletics, and pitcher Jim Konstanty, who won the 1950 NL MVP and World Series with the Whiz Kids Phillies, remained popular in sets of the 1940s and 50s.
The post-WWII era was a golden age for minor league baseball cards as independent regional manufacturers sprang up to serve smaller markets. In Wenatchee, Card Collectibles Inc. was founded in 1948 and produced sets exclusively featuring players and teams from the Inland Empire region including the Chiefs, Yakima Bears, and Spokane Indians. These “oddball” minor league sets are highly valuable to collectors today for their regional significance and scarcity.
Topps continued its dominance of the national baseball card market in the 1950s, producing its iconic designs that included players from the minors as well as the majors. Wenatchee natives like outfielder Jim Piersall, who went on to play 17 seasons in the majors including being part of the “Impossible Dream” 1967 Red Sox, and pitcher Jim Brewer, a 20-year MLB veteran and member of the 1959 Go-Go White Sox, appeared frequently in Topps’ annual sets in the 1950s-60s.
The 1970s marked the beginning of the modern baseball card boom fueled by the rise of competitive collecting among children. During this decade, several players from Wenatchee high schools and colleges made their way to the major leagues including outfielder Tom Paciorek, a 1971 All-Star with the Chicago White Sox, and pitcher Mark Clear, who won 15 games for the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies. Their rookie cards remain popular among collectors today.
In the 1980s and 90s, Wenatchee native players like outfielder Jeff Schaefer, who played nine seasons in the majors, and pitcher Mike Ignasiak, a member of the 1991 World Series champion Minnesota Twins, had their careers immortalized in the expansive sets issued by Donruss, Fleer, and Score among others. The proliferation of baseball card manufacturers and increase in parallel sets featuring the same players saturated the market by the early 1990s and led to the industry “Crash” that nearly destroyed the hobby.
Today, baseball card collecting in Wenatchee remains popular, especially among those nostalgic for the sport’s rich regional history. Local card shops like Left Field Sports continue to serve collectors seeking vintage cards of hometown heroes as well as modern parallels and autographs of current MLB players that came up through the Wenatchee Valley ranks. While the industry boom-and-bust cycles have come and gone, the connection between America’s pastime, the city of Wenatchee, and the cardboard collectibles that memorialize both shows no signs of fading among local aficionados of the hobby.
