Baseball card

A baseball card is a small card printed on heavy paper stock, featuring one or more baseball players. The typical format for a card is to have an image of a player on the front, with information such as statistics on the back. While baseball cards may be of any size, the standard size in the industry is 2-½ inches by 3-½ inches (on most cards, the image is oriented vertically so that 2-½ inches would be the width, and 3-½ inches the height).

The modern sports card industry

The blow to production from World War I was compounded by the Black Sox scandal's blow to baseball's public image, and cards were not produced in significant quantities for more than a decade. In the 1930s, baseball cards finally began to reappear with various candy products. Beginning in 1933, a chewing gum company named Goudey began producing cards, and gum became the product predominantly associated with baseball cards. Goudey produced larger sets of cards than usual, and numbered them to facilitate collecting. Goudey also released a new set annually for several years to coincide with the cycle of baseball seasons, until World War II curtailed baseball card production once again.

Related Topics:
Black Sox scandal - Chewing gum - Goudey - Collecting - World War II

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This time baseball cards were resurrected by Bowman Gum, a former competitor of Goudey in the 1930s. However, another company that sold bubblegum, Topps, soon added baseball cards to its product line as well. The two companies competed for consumers, but also for rights to the baseball players featured on their cards, with each company trying to sign players to exclusive contracts to appear only on its cards. After several years of this, Topps bought out Bowman and enjoyed a largely unchallenged monopoly for more than two decades.

Related Topics:
Bowman Gum - Bubblegum - Topps

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The Topps monopoly ended in 1981, as Fleer and Donruss issued baseball card sets in that year. Topps sued both companies, but a court ruled that Topps' exclusive rights only applied to cards sold with gum. During the following years a number of other companies, such as Score in 1988 and Upper Deck in 1989, entered the market, saturating the hobby with cards until the 1994 players' strike caused a decline in interest and industry consolidation. In the meantime, the competition brought many innovations, such as improvements in card quality and measures to discourage counterfeiting. Companies also released multiple brands of cards, as well as artificially rare and unique cards, to appeal to different types of collectors. In 2001, Wizards of the Coast introduced MLB Showdown, the flagship game of its Showdown Sports series of trading card games, adding a twist to traditional baseball cards by making them into a playable game.

Related Topics:
1981 - Fleer - Donruss - Score - 1988 - Upper Deck - 1989 - 1994 - Wizards of the Coast - MLB Showdown

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