BASEBALL CARD TRIVIA - HOW
DID IT ALL BEGIN?BASEBALL CARD TRIVIA - HOW
DID IT ALL BEGIN?Card collecting began in the late 1800's. Tobacco
companies printed cards of athletes and celebrity entertainers
on cigarette packages in the hopes that they would sell more cigarettes
to the people who wanted the cards. The tobacco cards were plain looking
and very small. Most had nothing written on the back and the stars were
identified only by their last names. Most of these cards were of baseball
players, but there were football, and later hockey stars too.
Then, in 1933, the Goudey (said Gow-dee) Gum
Company came up with the idea of using cards to sell bubble gum instead
of tobacco. The Goudey cards were created with the kids in mind. They featured
the great ball players like Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth and had very colorful
designs. A pack consisted of a stick of gum and a baseball card and sold
for one penny!
By 1951, many other companies like Bowman Gum
and Topps Chewing Gum had jumped on the bandwagon and several sets 
of gum cards were made each year. Then, in 1956, Topps bought
the Bowman Company and became the largest sports card maker in the world.
The 50's and the 60's were a great time for kids collecting and trading baseball cards. For 5 cents, you would get a pack of five Topps cards and gum! Most kids then didn't care much if the cards got worn or bent. They traded them and played games with them, not realizing that someday they would be worth lots of money.
Many kids attached the cards to the "forks" which held their bicycle wheels in place. The cards would be attached with clothespins and would make really cool noises when they rode their bikes and the wheels spun around.
By the 70's, the hobby began changing and adults
were collecting cards too - especially the older cards. The more people
wanted these old cards, the higher the price for them became. Cards which
formerly sold for pennies, like Nolan Ryan's 1968 Topps rookie card started
to sell for ten dollars, then hundreds, then thousands
of dollars.
Today, collecting baseball cards is very serious business. Over 20 billion new cards were sold last year alone! The most popular sports cards are baseball, football, basketball and hockey. However, there are also cards for pro wrestling, boxing, soccer, bowling, fishing, and dog sled racing. Even the American Gladiators have cards.
One company prints baseball cards in Spanish
and another 
portrays football
players as superheroes. It is virtually impossible now to collect a full
set of every type of card because there are so many. Some people say too
many are on the market.
Many people, including collectors are trying to figure out what all these cards are really worth. Some say many are not as valuable as the price guides say they are.
Collecting these cards makes a great hobby. But the most fun part of the hobby is not putting them in a safe deposit box - read them and enjoy playing with them. The idea of a hobby is to have fun!
Have you ever wondered when you bought a pack of baseball cards how they were made? Well, there is a lot of work involving nearly 200 people in the making of just one set of cards. Great detailed attention is given to make sure that every card has a nice design, great photograph and interesting information. Decisions have to be made as to which players to put on the cards and that they are produced properly. This takes much time and planning. This summer, the companies that make baseball cards will be working on the cards for 1999 and begin planning for the cards that will come out in the year 2000!
Beginning at spring training and all through the World Series, photographers are busy taking the player's pictures. These pictures will be for next season's cards. Editors who work for the card companies then look at the hundreds of pictures and pick the best photograph for each card.
Writers are looking up information about each
player and then decide what gets printed on the back of each card. They
include the player's statistics and interesting facts about the player.
This work has to be done fast because
most card companies must have the information in November which is just
a month after the season ends.
Artists are busy designing the cards. Dozens of designs are looked at before a decision is made about which looks the best. Computers are used to create the cards. Then the photograph, design and information are combined and stored on a computer disk.
Production people use computers to arrange the cards into large sheets which are called "forms". These forms look like big posters and may have as many as 110 different cards on each one. Then at the plant where they are printed, a "proof" is made of each of the forms. The designers, writers, photo and word editors then carefully checked each form to make sure there are no errors. If a card were to be printed with a mistake on it, it is called and "error card".
Next, at the printing plant someone takes a photograph of each form and then the image is burned onto a piece of metal, using ultraviolet light. This piece of metal is called a "printing plate". Next the plate goes to a huge printing press where it will press ink into the cardboard. Large white sheets of thin cardboard are put into the printing press. The front side with the picture on it is printed first onto the cardboard and then the cardboard gets flipped over . A different plate is then put into the press and the back of the card gets printed onto the cardboard. This results in huge sheets of cards.
Next the printed cardboard sheets are sent to the cutting machine where they are cut into precisely 2 1/2 X 3 1/2 inch cards. This is very important because an incorrectly cut card looks bad and is not as valuable.
A decollator machine then separates the cards and mixes them up. This way you will not get two copies of the same card in the same pack.
The decollator then moves the stacks of cards into a machine that will wrap each stack of the cards in foil or paper and seals the pack. This decollator machine knows exactly how many cards to put into each stack. Next, the cards are put into boxes and are ready for shipment.
The boxes of cards are then sent by trucks to stores all over the country. The first cards for sale are the spring cards. These are usually printed in November and come out in the stores in December. Full sets of cards, which are not wrapped in packs, are also delivered to card dealers.
So, from a plain piece of white cardboard to a finished baseball card for you to enjoy, collect, and trade, that is how a baseball card is made!
The goal of card collecting is to have fun. Which ones should you collect or how much you spend on them is up to you. But here are some tips:
There can be alot of different reasons why a particular card is valuable: Maybe the card is old, and most of the copies of that card have been lost or destroyed. The card may just be wanted by a lot of people because the player on the card is a favorite, or a big star.
Sometimes one card may have an error on it and that error may only appear on a few copies of that card. Card companies sometimes print fewer copies of some sets of cards than others. They also print cards that are meant to be more valuable than others. Often, they will print a smaller amount of a card with an autograph on it, and then they will mix that card in with a regular set. What they want you to do is buy more packs of cards as you search for these premium cards, and since these particular cards are rare, that makes them worth more.
So what it boils down to is if alot of people want the card, or there are not many copies of a card, it is usually valuable.