Baseball cards have been around since the late 1800s and were originally included as promotional inserts in tobacco products to help advertise cigarette and chewing tobacco brands. One of the earliest and most influential issuers of baseball cards as a standalone collectible was The Sporting News.
Founded in 1886, The Sporting News was the longest-running sports newspaper in the United States. Throughout the early 20th century, it became the premier source of baseball information and statistics. In the 1920s, The Sporting News began regularly including baseball cards as inserts in their weekly newspaper issues. These early Sporting News cards helped popularize the modern concept of baseball cards as collectibles.
Some key things to know about vintage Sporting News baseball cards:
Design and Production: Early Sporting News cards from the 1920s-1940s featured basic horizontal color photo fronts with no stats or bios on the back. They were printed on thin paper stock and often featured borderless photos. Production values improved greatly by the 1950s with stark colorful borders and fuller photos.
Size: Vintage Sporting News cards spanned various standard sizes for the era, including 2 1⁄2 x 3 1⁄2 inches in the 1920s-30s and 2 5/16 x 3 5/16 inches in the 1940s-50s. This made them versatile to include as inserts in the newspaper.
Photographs: Early photo quality was basic but captured unique poses. By the late 1930s, photos showed more detail and incorporated uniform shadows to look more dynamic. Color photos became usual by the late 1940s-1950s issues as technology advanced.
Distribution: As one of the most widely read baseball publications, Sporting News cards had a vast national distribution from being inserted in hundreds of thousands of newspaper copies each week. This massive production run makes surviving high-grade examples quite rare today.
Player Selection: Early 1920s issues generally featured one star player per card to highlight The Sporting News coverage. By the 1930s, sets typically included 6-8 players to better represent recent top performers. Superstar players were especially featured.
Condition Issues: Due to lightweight paper stock and mass distribution, finding vintage Sporting News cards in high grades like NM-MT is extremely difficult. Even securely stored graded examples often grade no higher than AG-VG. Creasing is extremely common.
Prominent Players: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron, and Stan Musial are among the all-time great players that received early spotlighting on Sporting News cards in the 1930s-1950s in their primes. The cards captured their huge popularity at the time.
Sets vs. Singles: Most surviving vintage Sporting News cards exist today as sparse individual “singles” rather than complete sets due to the insert distribution method. A few early 1920s issues are known as full sets of 8-12 cards however.
Numbers: Early Sporting News cards did not utilize uniform numbering schemes that modern issues employ. Numbers were assigned sporadically or not at all on many vintage examples from the 1920s-1950s era.
The Sporting News continued issuing baseball cards as inserts off and on through the 1950s before eventually phasing them out as the separate baseball card market boomed. Their early issues established the critical role that newspapers could play as card publishers and promoters of the young hobby. While condition issues plague many survivors, Sporting News cards command prestige as some of the earliest modern baseball collectibles influencing the multibillion-dollar industry that exists today. Whether incorporated in sets or on their own as singles, they remain a fascinating part of baseball memorabilia history.
