Allen Ginsberg was an American poet known for his epic poem Howl and for his pioneering work in establishing the Beat movement of the 1950s. While best known for his poetry and activism, Ginsberg also had an underknown passion: baseball. Throughout his life, Ginsberg was an avid collector of baseball cards and would spend hours organizing his collection and learning the statistics and histories of his favorite players.

Ginsberg’s interest in baseball began at a young age growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. His father was a high school teacher and sports fan who would take young Allen to local baseball games of the minor league Paterson Panthers. At the games, Ginsberg became enamored with not just the sport being played but also with the colorful cards advertisers would hand out featuring photos of the players. He soon began collecting and trading these early cards with the neighborhood kids.

By the late 1940s after moving to New York City, Ginsberg’s baseball card collection had grown substantially. As a student at Columbia University studying poetry, he would often spend downtime in his dorm meticulously sorting and displaying his cardboard treasures in binders. Players from the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers dominated his personal favorites as those storied franchises thrilled fans in their annual Subway Series showdowns.

A well-known anecdote has Ginsberg bumping into one of his literary heroes, William S. Burroughs, in a Greenwich Village bookshop in 1949. Engrossed in discussing Dosteovsky, the conversation turned to other interests when Ginsberg excitedly showed Burroughs a rare Honus Wagner T206 tobacco card he had purchased. This helped break the ice between the two thinkers who would become influential leaders of the Beat movement just a few years later.

In 1954, shortly after the publication of Howl thrust him into fame, Ginsberg set off on travels across America and India. Always the collector, he began amassing foreign and vintage cards to add to his Stateside stash. Much of this global windfall came from small shops and street markets he frequented during his counterculture adventures. Through the late 50s and 60s, Ginsberg’s card binders bulked with finds from Japan, Mexico, Italy, and beyond.

Upon returning to his native New York, Ginsberg took a particular interest in the then-expansion Mets, rooting for the lovable losers as an underdog fan. He was known to attend multiple Mets games each season, often carrying a bag containing his card collection for show-and-tell with fans. One of Ginsberg’s prized 1967 possessions was a Tom Seaver rookie card, foreseeing the franchise’s and player’s eventual success.

In the 1970s as his fame rose, Ginsberg donated a selection of his rarest early cards to institutions like the Baseball Hall of Fame to preserve pieces of the sport’s history. Meanwhile, he continued nurturing his personal collection with 70s superstars like Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose. Always one to appreciate counterculture, Ginsberg proudly displayed handmade anarchist Cuba baseball cards in his Soho apartment.

Sadly, many of Ginsberg’s later years were spent battling health issues before his death in 1997 at age 70. In one of his final interviews, he reflected on baseball cards as archives conveying the essence of Americana. “Whether reading poetry or looking at cards, it’s about perceiving hidden histories and grasping a snapshot of culture from another era,” Ginsberg said. After his death, his massive collection was donated to the Library of Congress to be digitized and made available for public research – a fitting home for a collection amassed by one of history’s greatest literary rebels.

Ginsberg’s passion for the cardboard cultural relics lives on. In 2021, his self-portrait was featured on an Allen Ginsberg baseball card as part of an artist series. Proceeds from sales of the limited-run cards help support poetry initiatives. While best remembered as a writer who challenged conventions, Allen Ginsberg also demonstrated how seemingly disparate interests can be intertwined. Through dedicated collecting across decades, he ensured his love of baseball would earn an honorable place in his expansive creative legacy.