The Rise and Fall of the Baseball Card Industry

Early Days

Early in the 1900s the sport of Baseball was starting to gain in popularity.  Sporting goods stores came up with an idea to promote their products by including baseball cards with their merchandise.  The cards were usually black and white or sepia in colour.  One side of the card would have a picture, not a photograph, of a player and the reverse would have some advertisement for a store or a product.  People didn't care about the cards too much.  A father would buy something and get the card if they didn't have a child to give it to they would just throw it in the garbage.

Honus Wagner Card From 1909-1911

It was in 1909 when tobacco companies started including baseball cards in packs of cigarettes.  This is where the most expensive baseball card ever was found and that was the Honus Wagner card.  The cards from tobacco products became extremely rare for two reasons.  First, the cards were seen as worthless.  Second, kids of the time couldn't buy tobacco products to get the cards.  Obviously, the cards from tobacco products are the rarest.


















Card Industry During War Time

Other companies started offering their own cards including ones that produced chocolate, honey, magazines and other sweets.  This continued up until the start of WWI where very few were produced and this contiued all the way through until the end of the great depression.  The practice however was continued in Canada where Canadian candy companies started including baseball cards and hockey cards as well.

1933 saw the beginnings of baseball cards being associated with chewing gum.  A chewing gum company from the U.S. and one from Canada started producing baseball cards with the most popular playing at the time including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.  The cards were also brightly painted and started to include very brief bios of the players.  The outbreak of WWII saw another lull in production as factories needed to produce supplies for the war effort and many of the players themselves were drafted into the war.








Modern Industry and Topps Monopoly 

At the end of WWII Gum Companies began including baseball cards again and in this time we see the rise of the Topps Gum Company.  Topps released a whole card set and then 4 years later released their Magic Photo card set.  In the 1950s there were 3 companies that were producing baseball cards, Bowman Gum, Leaf Candy Company and Topps Gum Company.  Leaf Candy stopped producing cards which left Bowman and Topps to compete with each other for exclusive player contracts in order to produce their likenesses.  In 1956 Topps bought out Bowman and thus now had a monopoly on baseball cards all the way until 1981.

Breaking of Monopoly and Downfall

Topps was sued in 1975 to break their monopoly and lost, opening the way for companies Fleer and Donruss to produce baseball cards of their own.  By the late 80s several companies had started up and began mass producing cards to satisfy the now popular collectors market.  Because of this most baseball cards produced during the 80s quickly decreased in value to almost being worthless.  Collectors would buy cards by the box, not open any of them and store them in their basement hoping that one day they would be worth a lot of money.  Unfortunately, this led to card companies flooding the market and now the baseball card market in full of cards, none of which are rare and all in mint condition.  Upper Deck was notorious for this when they started producing cards with foil stamps, autograph space, licensed cards to McDonald's and multiple special editions sets.



Final Words

For anyone looking the get into baseball card collecting your best bet would be to focus on cards produced before 1981 from Topps.  Anything produced after that will only drop in value.  The other option is the buy the cards of your favourite players or get them autographed since the value lies now with how much you enjoy them.