By Ed Adamczyk
Niagara Gazette
NIAGARA FALLS —
Consider the baseball card, its relevance and place in history, not to mention childhood memory.
Dave Jamieson, in “Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession”, offers a series of vignettes that chart the rise and fall of a humble item of sports memorabilia that became, in turns, an advertisement, a collectors’ fixation, an investors’ nest egg or a simple scrap of cardboard.
The book is full of well-drawn and outsized characters as it tells the story of those who care about cards and why: boys with baseball on the brain, “graders” who attempt to turn their supposed expertise in fair-good-excellent appraisal into something of a specialized profession, the experts who can doctor the cards to dupe the graders and quick-buck artists galore.
Jamieson’s take, that of a skeptical journalist on the trail of a long and funny story of need, greed and irrational searches for simple pictures of ballplayers, makes the book a joy to read.
According to him, the demand for baseball cards fueled a number of American vices, the first of which was smoking. Cards depicting famous actors, battle scenes and baseball players were inserted into cigarette packs as promotional mechanisms in the 1870s, promoting many to take up smoking and others to encourage Pop to change brands. It was immediately thereafter the “complete the whole set” attitude overcame America and interest in baseball cards rose with tobacco usage. Generations later, the same mindset spawned a nation of bubble-gum enthusiasts.
In one chapter per adventure, the reader meets some remarkable people, including a monomaniacal card hunter from Syracuse whose obsession with acquiring and cataloguing every baseball card ever created turned him into something of a hermit (his collection now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art); the art department staff of Topps Chewing Gum Inc., the New York Yankees of the card world; a statistics professor named James Beckett, who organized the secondary market for baseball cards so that it was understood a Mickey Mantle card had more value to a collector than, say, a Marv Thronberry; and an engaging collection of crackpots, thieves, nutjobs, hustlers and others who baseball card collectors will identify as extreme versions of themselves.
By the 1980s, the mania for what began as a picture of some bearded ballplayer tucked into a pack of Sweet Caporals had become serious investments whose worth could be charted like common stock. A “coming out” moment, according to Jamieson, was the May 4, 1982, airing of the TV show “Hart to Hart”, wherein the stylish amateur detectives solve the murder of a baseball card fanatic whose fortune in cards sets off a family inheritance squabble. Suddenly, if you were not aware that stash of childhood memories in an attic shoebox was big business, you knew it then.
Years later, when the author locates his own precious pile of boyhood cards, he fantasizes of the riches they’ll bring, only to find the card shops have all closed, those that remained were making their money on Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, kids were throwing their money at video games instead of baseball cards, and that he had arrived at the tail end of the 1990s era of speculation. The stuff that dreams are made of crashed to Earth and became mere miniature portraits of forgotten baseball players.
The Major League strike of 1994, the avalanche of available cards to collect and the changing tastes of the kid with a few bucks in his pocket are all contributors to the demise of the baseball card. Like sport itself, it is a pastime and an industry, and along the way the book deftly isolates examples of the people who made, grew and eventually ruined this hobby (or market). The investments crowd refers to this phenomenon as a “bubble,” and that is exactly what it was.
There are more scholarly and analytical books on the topic of baseball cards, but none as enjoyable as this volume of snapshot perspectives on its history, its personalities and its crash. Your old pile of baseball cards may be (or were) a sentimental attachment to one youthful memory or another, but you need not be reminded there is no place for sentiment in business.
Wherever your cards ended up — your pocket, your mom’s basement, in the spokes of your bicycle, the auction block, the landfill — you’ll find a number of pleasant (and odious) surprises in this funny and engaging book.
Ed Adamczyk is a freelance writer from Kenmore.
IF YOU READ
• WHAT: “Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession”
• BY: Dave Jamieson
• DETAILS: Published by Atlantic Monthly Press, 272 pages
• GRADE: B+
