Old School Baseball Cards from the Late 19th and Early 20th Century
Baseball card collecting has remained a beloved hobby for over a century now, with some of the most valuable and iconic cards being from the sport’s earliest decades in the late 19th and early 20th century. These old school baseball cards established the foundation for the hobby and culture surrounding collecting players on small pieces of cardboard. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the key facts and aspects of these early baseball cards.
Some of the very first baseball cards were included as promotions in cigarette packages in the late 1880s, with companies like Goodwin & Company and Buck Card Company producing sets of players from major league teams of the time. These cards featured basic pictures of the players in uniforms on the front with just their names and positions listed. Production of baseball cards greatly increased in the early 1900s with the two most famous early issues being the T206 White Border set from 1909-1911 and the even more iconic 1951 Bowman set.
The 1909-1911 T206 set produced by the American Tobacco Company is highly coveted by collectors today with individual cards in near perfect condition fetching millions of dollars at auction. What made the T206 set so special was the photographic quality of the images and the inclusion of stars like Cy Young, Walter Johnson, and Honus Wagner. The cards had a white border around the image area and featured the player’s team, position, and a short biography on the back. An estimated 200 million of these cards were printed, making individual high-grade specimens quite scarce today.
The 1951 Bowman set built upon what made the T206 cards special but also broke new ground by being the first modern style issue with colorful team logo designs on the front. Favorable gum laws at the time also allowed Bowman to include a piece of gum with each pack, encouraging more children to start collecting. Iconic stars of the era like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Roy Campanella, andTed Williams had their early career images forever captured in the designs of this breakthrough set which had a much lower print run than T206 at only 12 cards per player. High grade 1951 Bowman cards today can surpass $3 million at auction.
While stars and team logos drew new collectors to early issues, the inclusion of obscure lesser known players on cards gave a deeper glimpse into rosters and depths of team talent from each league and season. Early tobacco card sets often included all team members rather than just the biggest names. Regional differences in popularity also emerged, with players like Nap Lajoie and Elmer Flick achieving higher values for their early Piedmont and Sweet Caporal tobacco cards in the northeast than other regions of the country at the time.
Design styles also evolved across different sets. In addition to the white borders of T206 cards, issues from brands like Piedmont and Sweet Caporal featured different colored borders and back styles over the years. Numbers or letters were often used to index players by team and position on the back rather than full names. Picture quality also improved over time from sepia tones to true color photographs on late 1910s and 1920s issues as printing technology advanced. Gum and candy brands later adopted baseball card distributions in the 1930s and beyond to further grow the hobby.
While stars remained the most desired cards to collect, lesser known players of the day still retained value for dedicated collectors seeking to complete full team rosters from different eras. Having any early 20th century card of a player with even just a single major or minor league at-bat provided a historic connection to the early decades of professional baseball that longtime collectors appreciated. Along with respectable condition and centering, collector demand was often about capturing a slice of our national pastime’s origins within America through these small cardboard slices featuring long forgotten players of baseball’s earliest professional epoch.
The culture and business surrounding baseball cards had truly begun with these early 19th and early 20th century tobacco issues. Their simple designs established the concept of collecting players and following the evolutions of rosters that still drives the modern multi-billion dollar trading card industry today. While stars will always retain top investor demand, appreciation for full sets and the histories of entire rosters is what made so many lifelong collectors out of the children who first ripped wax packs hoping for their favorite players over a century ago. Whether starring superstars or deep roster depth players, these old school cards remain important artifacts that transport us back to the roots of America’s favorite pastime each time we gaze upon their sepia toned or color images.
