Ricky Adams is a name that many baseball card collectors are familiar with even decades after his story first made headlines. His tireless effort to collect every notable baseball card ever made is an incredible achievement that highlighted both the history of the hobby and one man’s determination.
Adams was born in 1962 in Long Island, New York where he grew up with a passion for collecting that started with baseball cards at a very young age. Like many kids in the 1960s and 1970s, he spent afternoons and allowances trading and adding to his growing collection. Even from a young age Adams had grander collecting ambitions than most. While other children may have been content collecting the cards of their favorite teams or players, Adams set his sights on obtaining one of every notable card ever produced.
It was an audacious goal considering how many decades of baseball cards had already been released and the rarity of many older vintage sets and players. Undaunted, Adams began researching card production history and started seeking out the harder to find vintage cards from the early 20th century. Through trades at shows or in the mail, purchases from ads in the back of collector magazines, and relentless want lists posted everywhere collectors congregated, Adams slowly checked off sets and players from his target list.
By the late 1970s, Adams had amassed a sizable collection consisting of several complete sets from the 1930s and 1940s as well as many key vintage singles. There were still gaps and rarities that evaded him. In the pre-internet era, locating specific hard-to-find cards could take months or years of searching. Adams never gave up, spending all of his free time and later income from part-time jobs hunting for that next elusive card to complete a set or checklist item.
In 1980, Adams came across a reference in a dealer publication to the famed 1909-1911 T206 set, one of the most iconic and sought-after in the hobby. Previous collectors had been unaware that several variations of the original 511-card set existed with different player rotations and image poses. After corresponding with experts, Adams identified that the true population of distinct 1909-1911 cards was over 700 individual issues. This massive expansion of the set presented both a monumental collecting challenge as well as the opportunity for unrecorded finds still hidden away in attics or forgotten collections.
Adams committed fully to achieving a complete registry of every T206 variation, spending the next several years in relentless pursuit. He scoured shows, wrote want lists, and studied archives in museums to populate his database. By the mid-1980s, Adams had amassed what was considered the world’s most extensive T206 collection with examples of over 630 findable variations accounted for. His efforts to fully document the set brought greater attention and appreciation for those vintage tobacco cards and helped establish them as amongst the most iconic in the hobby.
Bolstered by his success cracking one of sports collecting’s greatest enigmas, Adams redoubled his focus on locating every remaining pre-war card to complete his lifetime checklist. Throughout the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s, Adams left no resource untapped. He formed a network of researchers around the country to assist with his wants lists and followed up on even the most dubious of card leads. Numerous pieces thought lost to history were rediscovered thanks to Adams’ perseverance.
In 1998, after over three decades of collecting, Adams achieved his goal of attaining all definable, high-number baseball cards issued prior to 1948 in Near Mint to Mint condition. His renowned registry contained over 18,000 distinct pre-1950 baseball issues, constituting one of the most comprehensive vintage baseball card archives in existence. The scale of Adams’ collection was unmatched and a true testament to his relentless dedication.
News of Adams’ completion spread nationwide and his accomplishment was featured in Sports Illustrated and on television programs. He was hailed as setting the standard for modern sports card collecting. By obtaining the unregistered remnants of over 100 years of card production history, Adams had essentially reconstructed a virtual set registry extending back to the earliest days of the hobby in the 19th century. For lifelong collectors, it was an awe-inspiring achievement that would likely never be duplicated.
In the years since, Adams has continued to make significant contributions to researching and cataloging baseball and other sports card production histories. He authored the definitive encyclopedia on tobacco card variations and his collection has been consulted by museums, academics, and other collectors. Now in his late 50s, Adams says his lifelong chase helped preserve an important part of baseball history and he has no regrets in pursuing his lofty goals, even if others may have considered them unreachable. For dedicated collectors of any era, Ricky Adams is a role model who proved that through dedication and perseverance, the extremely difficult can be achieved. His story illustrates both the history and future possibilities of the incredible hobby of baseball card collecting.
