There are more collectors of baseball cards than there are of any other type of sports card. It makes sense, when you think about the fact that baseball cards have been in production far longer than any other form of sports card. Baseball card collecting is a pastime rich with tradition and history. Quite a good few baseball card collectors also collect other sports cards and memorabilia, and tend to be quite avid among the various types of collectors. Some enjoy the thrills of opening a fresh box of cards. Others find their thrill in hunting down specific cards, like special inserts or rookie cards.
There are a plethora of means and ways to collect baseball cards, there is no right or wrong way to do it. Many collectors will collect cards that are of their favorite team, and they do it by either collecting team sets, or by collecting single cards.
The History of Collecting Baseball Cards
Nobody is completely, 100 percent sure which baseball card was the very first one to be produced. Even still, the hobby relating to baseball card collecting dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century, which is well over a hundred years ago. The first company that is believed to have produced baseball cards and cards for other sports is a company known as Goodwin & Co., which was the manufacturing company for Old Judge cigarettes and Gypsy Queen cigarettes. The first baseball cards were actually pretty small in comparison to modern day baseball cards, as they were only between an inch and a half and two and a half inches, and they were printed on really thick cardboard. Old Judge picture baseball cards were issued between 1886 and 1890, and there were more than 2000 different cards from this set alone that have since been found and cataloged.
Goodwin & Co managed to have success in marketing their baseball cards and numerous other sports and picture cards along with their cigarettes, and this led other tobacco manufacturing companies to issue their own unique sets of cards. Between 1909 and 1911, the American Tobacco Company had a T-206 set that had a famous Honus Wagner baseball card. Companies in numerous other industries also began to use baseball cards, which they offered as a premium to sell products, including caramel companies, candy companies and gum manufacturing companies.
The Topps Company was able to dominate the market for chewing gum and baseball cards for many years until it lost in an anti-monopoly market in the year 1980, and then in the year 1981 Fleer and Donruss began to make major baseball card sets. Not long after this point, baseball cards became even more important than the products that they were packaged with, and they began to be packaged all on their own, creating a completely new industry. Now there are a myriad of companies that are manufacturing baseball cards including Upper Deck, Score and Pacific.
Photo Credits: tonystl
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