The True Origins of Baseball Card Collecting

By Paul M. Banks

It’s inevitable- whenever you have a discussion with family and friends about baseball cards, the conversation will eventually take on a decidedly nostalgic tone. It’s a nearly universal response, nostalgia when it comes to seeing or hearing about baseball cards.

It’s a large part of the hobby’s appeal, as we all have those pleasant lucid memories that we’ll never forget- the first time we bought a single card or pack of unopened cards. I still remember opening my first wax pack, of Topps 1985.

However, the first truly recognized set of baseball cards, as we know them, emerged in the 1880s. They came in packs of cigarettes, to help to keep the packet vertically upright, and trying to create more interest in the sale of tobacco products. The N167 set, created by Goodwin Tobacco company, featured a dozen cards of New York Giants players, to help promote the Old Judge line of cigarettes. Up to and then through the turn of the 19th century, baseball cards and tobacco products were synonymous with one another.

Layout of multiple pages of cardsPhoto byCollectibles Investment Group

We speak of course of the über-scarce 1909-11 T206 Honus Wagner. The museum has one of the nicest copies in existence in its collection.

Arizona Diamondbacks Owner Earl G. “Ken” Kendrick Jr. owns one of the most expensive baseball card collections in the entire world, and his stash includes a copy of the Wagner, which he paid more than $3 million for. Ken’s donations and loans helped make this exhibit, perhaps the best in the world on the topic, possible.

The Wagner was issued by the American Tobacco Company from 1909 to 1911 as part of the T206 series. The more romanticized notion of why so few were ever produced claims that Wagner stopped production of his baseball card early on because he didn’t want children buying cigarettes just to get his card. The more pragmatic and practical narrative says that Wagner wanted more compensation from the ATC. We can’t for certain which competing theories are true, or perhaps both could be true in some capacity.

One of the best players of his day, and of all time for that matter, it’s possible that Wagner felt he deserved a bigger cut than other players for the usage of his likeness, and production ended with a total of only 50-200 cards (the exact number is not known, but whatever it was, the number in existence today has diminished over the years) Wagner cards ever distributed to the public. For all the other players in the T206 series of cards, which was distributed over three years in sixteen different brands of cigarettes, the reproduction of their likenesses reached into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies.

The Wagner has been purchased by such sports luminaries as Wayne Gretzky and Bruce McNall (in 1991 for $451,000), with one copy selling for north of $3,000,000 in 2016.

Eventually, baseball cards partnered with chewing gum (or sometimes Cracker Jack) instead of cigarettes, and during the years between the World Wars, this became the norm. It wasn’t long until the gum took a backseat to the cards, and then after that, the cards became a stand-alone product in themselves.

Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”