Some of the earliest forms of baseball cards more closely resembled trade cards or cabinet cards – photographs mounted on card stock that were given out to customers as a form of advertising by businesses. In 1868, a Boston-based company known as the Pemberton Tobacco Company began including lithograph cards in its packages of cigarettes featuring early baseball stars and other baseball-related images as a marketing technique. These items were essentially meant to be keepsakes to help promote the sale of the tobacco product, and are considered among the first true baseball cards distributed.
In 1869, Goodwin & Co. began placing illustrated cards depicting Chicago White Stockings players in its packs of cigarettes. These early baseball-related cards were far more focused on advertising the tobacco product than the athletes themselves. It wasn’t until 1885 that trading cards began to become more common and geared primarily as collectibles unto themselves. In that year, a tobacco company known as Allen & Ginter began inserting small pieces of card stock with images of baseball players and other notable figures into its cigarette packages. Instead of just promoting the brand, these cards focused more squarely on the people portrayed.
This new generation of baseball cards was thicker and produced using a high-quality lithographic printing process. Each card contained an image on the front and sometimes biographical information on the back. They were not merely advertisements but intended exclusively as collectible novelties that built upon the rising popularity of the sport. A star of this earliest era of quality lithographed baseball cards was John “Hello Central” Solomon, who made his major league debut in 1887.
By the 1890s, tobacco companies had fully embraced baseball cards as a dominant fixture in their products. John Player & Sons began including cards in packets and cans of tobacco in England at this time. The most prolific American producer from this decade onward was the American Tobacco Company, which had acquired Allen & Ginter and several other manufacturers. Between 1885 and the 1951, over 20 billion cigarette cards were distributed by American and other companies, with baseball being one of the most popular sports featured.
From the late 1880s through the World War I era in the late 1910s, tobacco companies regularly churned out new baseball card sets, engaging famous artists of the day like Tomlinson and Carl Horner to illustrate them. Major stars of the period like Cy Young, Honus Wagner, and Cap Anson were featured extensively. These years also saw the rise of regional independent tobacco companies like Leaf and Piedmont issuing localized baseball card sets. The Great Depression of the 1930s slowed production considerably as disposable income declined sharply.
Following World War II, the golden age of baseball cards began in the late 1940s and 1950s as the economy rebounded and interest in the national pastime surged with icons like Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial and more gracing the cardboard. Tobacco companies responded by reviving colorful illustrated card issues inserted in cigarette packs. Gum and candy companies like Bowman and Topps also entered the scene in 1949, using the cards as incentives to drive sales of their confections. Their use of colorful photographic images vastly improved production values.
In the succeeding decades, these sport card businesses like Topps and Fleer gained dominance, using airbrushed photos on the cardboard stock until the late 1980s. In the modern period from the 1990s onward, technological advances like chromium and premium parallels helped cards evolve into a serious financial speculative investment field apart from their value solely as collectibles. Nevertheless, the legacy of baseball cards as a beloved licensed tie-in product can ultimately be traced back to those earliest advertising cards inserted in tobacco products from the 1860s-1900s.
Baseball cards emerged in the late 1860s as lithographed trade cards and cabinet cards that were included mostly as advertisements in cigarette and tobacco products to help promote sales. Through the 1880s and 1890s, they grew into specialized collectibles focused squarely on baseball players through the work of companies like Allen & Ginter. Major stars of the early professional baseball eras built the iconic status of early lithographed cardboard issues up through World War I. Following the postwar economic boom starting in the 1940s, baseball cards truly entered their golden age of popularity through the issuance of thousands of sets by tobacco firms, gum/candy makers, fueling their enduring popularity today among collectors, researchers, and investors alike.