I think they make trading cards for football and hockey and the like-I’m pretty sure we used to have them at Kmart. But how come baseball cards are so big, but not other sports? What gives?
Because baseball was once the most popular sport in the country, by far. During the golden age of baseball, the sport was far more popular in most of the United States than either pro football or the NHL. Up until the 1960s, college football was more popular than the NFL.
Baseball cards also predated other sports, and took off as a hobby when baseball was the most popular of the major pro sports.
However, there are football, hockey, and basketball cards now, as well as cards for other sports. They usually refer to them as “sports cards” now.
I can think of five reasons:
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More than anything else, really, because the baseball card industry, and hobby, have existed for so long. Baseball cards were being produced and traded before the NFL or NHL existed and before basketball had even been invented. It’s just a much more established card-trading hobby.
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Professional baseball, at least in North America, trades heavily on its image of being America’s national pastime, a sport that constantly references its past (of which it was far more than any other modern pro sport.) Baseball fans still talk of Babe Ruth, whose career began before the creation of any other major North American professional sporting league. Baseball cards are part of that; they have a certain old time feel to them. You can imagine kids trading them and putting them in the spokes of their bikes to make that cool BRBRBRBRBRBR sound. The other major pro sports aren’t quite as into their history as baseball is.
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Baseball cards, quite conveniently, have a reverse on which you can print the player’s statistics. Baseball is far, far more obsessed with statistics than any other sport. Fans get a certain satisfaction from that, even though you can find all the same stats on the Internet.
Christ. THREE reasons.
Hockey cards, as you might imagine, were a much larger phenomenon growing up in Canada although they did come along later (the first set was made in 1955 or 1956). Larger even than baseball cards, I’d wager.
Good point. The first baseball cards date from 1868. Boxing cards were also popular at the time (the earliest known boxing card is from 1862).
But I’m fairly sure baseball cards aren’t the biggest seller in the trading card market anymore. I remember reading a few years ago that Pokemon cards accounted for more than half of the yearly revenue for the Topps company. This article and this one both say the bubble has burst and the market has gone flat for baseball cards.
There were sports card sets featuring non-baseball players from the 1880’s, but they tended to consist of a mix of athletes from multiple sports, rather than just one sport.
You shouldn’t compare Pokemon - which is a trading card GAME - to Baseball Cards. Apples and Oranges, really. Nevertheless, my experience as a collector confirms that Sports Cards are a pretty dead market, and I was very fortunate to offload my complete Topps Baseball Card sets (1985-1993) to a collector recently. I even threw in the few Basketball and Football cards I had for a small extra fee.
That makes sense. Thanks.
Ignorance fought.
I still have a ton of my father’s 1948 Bowman sports cards.
He had baseball, football, basketball, and boxing.
You’d think they’d be worth a lot but not really. For instance, the 1948 Yogi Berra rookie card sounds like big $$$ huh? But a pricing guide says $500 near mint, and e-bay draws a winning bid at about $200.
It’s not worth it to me to sell a 58 year-old baseball card that was my father’s so I can pay my electric bill for a couple months.
I’ll hold onto them for sentimental reasons and pass them onto my son. Maybe in another 50 years they may be worth a little more?
“I can think of five reasons:”
“Three, sire.”
“Three.”
“And a fourth reason though shalt not think of…”
Oh what the heck.
How about, baseball is played over the summer, when the weather is warm and kids are out of school, and most easily able to bike to the store every time they get some money to go buy a few more packs of cards.
Like RayGun has already said… baseball cards may have been really big in the States, but growing up in rural British Columbia none of the kids collected baseball cards. It was all about the hockey cards… they still came with that crappy gum though that had flavour for about three seconds though. And that market has pretty much dropped out as well.
Topps doesn’t make Pokemon cards- they were originally made by Wizards of the Coast (now a division of Hasbro) and are now manufactured by The Pokemon Company. However, Topps does sell non-sports cards that do good sales- their Wacky Packages cards (sticker-cards parodying various products, a revival of a '70s Topps series) sell at “Pokemon-type” levels in the NYC area.
Hell, I grew up in St. Louis, and you should see my hockey card collection. ::flipping though it:: Ah, Chuck Lefley. Bob Gassoff. Jack Brownschidle. Bob Hess. Wayne Babych. Huh. I guess it’s just a collection of Blues.
Good times.
Topps does make Pokemon cards, both trading cards and game cards. They are licensed by WotC.
I think you have to compare them. It’s very easy to blame the decline of the baseball card market to the emergence of trading card games (e.g. Magic, Pokemon, etc). Sure, there are other reasons for the decline, but kids only have so much money. And you can actually do something with Pokemon cards rather then just keep staring at them.
Then you might as well blame the rise of video games for the decline of baseball card sales. They’re about as similar.