Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession

This is a must read for anyone who is in the sports cards industry. This well written and researched book answers the origin story for baseball cards in a way that is educational as well as entertaining. The competitive nature and innovation of the hobby throughout the generations is a captivating read. In business, some times things go right, some times they go wrong, but how it came to be is always intriguing. This book is also put together perfectly from the classic "house of cards" cover design, to the 16 interior high gloss pictures that give a visual history, to simply the classic novel paper type that makes it an enjoyable read compared to a lot of modern cheaply put together books. You can judge this book by the cover and it won't disappoint you.

Buying collectibles from one's youth will not reverse the natural aging process in any way whatsoever. Given some of the astronomical, and often outright outrageous, prices demanded for some old mass produced products, buyers almost have a right to expect them to perform such miracles. In a cruel twist, items that once provided entertainment for kids, such as trading cards, video games, action figures, etc., later became costly "investments" entirely out of reach of any kids, past or present. Not to mention that these once enjoyable and usable things often get encased, presumably "forever," in numbered and graded plastic cases and then become "useful" only for their perceived "value." In many other respects, this process renders the sealed items useless. People will pay the heftiest premiums for untouched things that no one ever used for their original purpose. These arguably neglected things, things that didn't entertain anyone in their own day, become as precious as medieval reliquaries. Though this relatively recent phenomenon of worshiping unused things, and now intentionally inaccessible and unusable things, defies logic in many ways, unsullied items from the past also provide the highest nostalgic payback. They allegedly look just as they would have to people of their times, or, most importantly, as they would have to their buyers as children. The price of nostalgia remains incalculable and appears without limit. Illusions of recapturing youthful vigor or forever lost times, or simpler hopes of vast riches, seem to underlie the sometimes reckless speculation in items once meant for temporary mass consumption. The market has since built "collectibility" into itself, as just about everything produced comes with the word "collectible" somewhere in its description. As older and once uncollected products took on the aura and value of collectibles, companies began to exploit the supposed future collectibility of current items. Now economies everywhere seem oversaturated with "collectible" things.Those who collected sports cards in the 1970s and 1980s, likely as children, may identify with the strangeness of "locking up" items for eternal preservation. Many at that time who bought wax packs off drug store shelves, complete with that inedible, and by then unnecessary, "gum," likely never thought of the cards having "value" beyond the mere completing of their sets or obtaining their favorite players. As to their condition, only egregious creases or tears caused outright rejection. Trades typically happened card for card and the idea that these pieces of fragile cardboard might have actual monetary value in the world at large seemed ridiculous. But then the great speculation of the late 1980s and early 1990s happened and sports cards, particularly baseball cards, took on the aura of blue chip stocks. People started "investing" in cardboard in hope of paying for their children's college education or their own retirements. Given soaring card prices, along with the market's generally short financial memory for speculative bubbles, it made sense at the time. Then a number of things happened to send these once treasured relics literally, some would argue inevitably, into the wood chippers of radio stations. For some, they even became objects of scorn. Anyone before that time who put their collections aside and lived healthy lives outside of the card market likely missed the catastrophe. The author of the fascinating historical survey "Mint Condition" fell into this category and a startling realization apparently inspired his deep investigation into the root causes of the late twentieth century "card mania." Though it does cover many non-sports cards, it focuses almost exclusively on baseball and says next to nothing about football, hockey or basketball cards.The book reads like an exploratory history wrapped around a tiny memoir. The introduction tells the author's own tragic tale, one that many can probably relate to, of how his childhood "cardboard treasures" turned out to have little to no value in the early twenty-first century. Reunited with the thousands of cards he collected in the 1980s, he had hoped to finally reap the long-awaited profits that he remembered the once regal market proffering. He encountered something quite different and the profits, or lack of them, proved severely disappointing. The market seemed to have completely collapsed. Numerous dealers had vanished, online auctions featured desperate pleas to sell lumbering piles of cards for measly sums, the dealers he managed to find told him that his stash had no value, and one even refused to look at them. Another dealer told him the hobby had become "complicated" by big money, an overwhelming amount of sets and auction scandals. While the author's "valuable" childhood cards had aged in a distant closet, kids had moved on to other things, such as playing video games or collecting Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards. In other words, the industry had somehow completely alienated its traditional core demographic. It instead attracted affluent adults who wanted to relive the days when cards spoke directly to them. To find out what happened, the book looks back to the origins of baseball and the cards that helped popularize it. That requires traveling back to the 19th century."Peck and Snyder," a very early sporting goods store, manufactured America's first known baseball cards in 1869. Used for promotion - or, in today's vernacular, "swag" - they featured pictures of entire teams. Soon, cards as inserts played a role in boosting cigarette sales. An ambitious James Duke put photos of famous alluring actresses on ads for his cigarettes. Satisfied with the results, he then inserted pictures on cardboard into individual packages and ingeniously numbered them so people would want to "complete the set." This simple gimmick boosted sales beyond expectations. Actresses, mostly scantily clad, and athletes, subjects then considered "uncouth," produced the most sales. Other companies soon copied Duke's scheme, including Allen & Ginter, who featured baseball players in 1888 and an interesting and scandalous "Women Baseball Players" series that showed women dressed far too tightly for late nineteenth century sensibilities. "Old Judge" then raised the bar by releasing a card for every major league player. Cigarette sales, even to children as young as 10, skyrocketed. But printing cards also ate into precious profits and, as retaliation against "this picture-giving business," multiple companies formed the American Tobacco company, or trust, in 1889 and put an end to cigarette cards for a few decades.As antitrust legislation began to threaten the Tobacco industry, cards reappeared in 1909 with 15 brand names. Known as the T206 series, it ran from 1909 to 1911 and produced the hobby's most worshiped card, the T206 Honus Wagner. For reasons unknown, and still disputed, the card only saw 100 or less printings. The legend that Wagner had it intentionally withdrawn to discourage kids from smoking, though a fantastic story, remains controversial. The invention of "bubble gum" in 1928 led to a vicious market for children's "pennies" and "novelties" differentiated the voluminous brands. Fleer began with a comic strip wrapper and Goudey countered with the popular "Indian Chewing Gum" cards that depicted Native Americans, but not always favorably. In 1933, Goudey's "Big League Chewing Gum" cards dominated the gum market, but no one could find card number 106. Though the company never admitted it, many accused Goudey of excluding that card to drive kids into a wild completion frenzy. If so, it worked. Parents who complained received a now very valuable "Nap" Lajoie card that resembled the 1934 series. Bowman had entered the gum market in 1929 with "Blony" and cards inevitably followed, most notably the violent and popular 1937 "Horrors of War" series that claimed to promote peace. Baseball nearly vanished during World War II, but Bowman continued to profit from gum and cards, despite scarce resources.The post-war years began with "the card wars" between the fiercely competitive Bowman and Topps. After a few flops, Topps took an immense risk and signed deals with baseball players who already had exclusive deals with Bowman. When the famous 1952 Topps set appeared in stores, Bowman sued, but the case found that players should decide their own publicity. Bowman gave up the fight in 1956 and sold their rights to Topps, making them into a virtual monopoly that would last for decades. They kept an ominously tight grip on the market. Only Ted Williams relented and signed with Fleer for a single year in 1958. The resulting set, 80 cards of Ted Williams, stands as one the industry's most awkward creations. Topps released two famous non-sports sets in 1962, the gruesome "Civil War News" and the even more gruesome and racy "Mars Attacks." Around this time, baseball players received no revenue from card sales, prompting Marvin Miller in 1968 to convince players to not renew their fixed payment contracts with Topps. They agreed, unionized, renegotiated, and "group licensing was born." Fleer saw its chance and won in court, which forced the union to allow other companies to print baseball cards by 1981. In that same year, despite fears of overload, kids bought up all of the Topps, Fleer and Donruss cards produced. Topps's fierce monopoly had officially ended, but the healthy competition seemed to actually increase interest and sales.Around the same time, adults began treating cards as commodities not only to collect, but to "invest" in. Price guides with grading standards appeared in the late 1970s and values rose steadily. Investment firms bought Topps and Donruss, rookie cards became a hype and counterfeits began to appear, most notably the 1987 Don Mattingly rookies created by a 14 year old. It fooled most experts, but not Paul Sumner, whose ability to identify fake Mattingly cards led to the founding of Upper Deck in 1988. Raising not only printing and quality standards, they also added holograms to every card to foil counterfeiters. Their risky move of featuring then unproven Ken Griffey, Jr. as card #1 of the premiere set paid off in droves. No one knew how many cards each company actually printed, but estimates ran into the millions. Given those numbers, cards couldn't really qualify as "scarce," but people bought them like precious rarities nonetheless. Then in 1989, a missed obscenity on a Billy Ripkin card provided the best bad press possible for the hobby, but it ultimately led to the sale of Fleer. Investors now controlled most of the hobby and it grew to unsustainable levels throughout the early 1990s. The rarest cards and sets sold for hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars through auction houses such as Sotheby's. "Cardboard gold" became the ubiquitous tagline. Inevitably, fraud and counterfeiting became increasingly rampant, leading to the rise of third party grading, but some have claimed that altered cards can go undetected even by grading services. The debate continues to rage.The rally crashed with the highly derided baseball strike in 1994. To many, greed seemed to infect both the sport and the card hobby and people dumped their cards en masse. One radio station announcer promised to burn any cards sent to him and he received so many that fire marshalls prohibited him, so he switched to a less dangerous, but still effective, wood chipper. The industry had released some 350 sets in 1994 alone, supersaturating the market and adding to the resentment. To keep remaining buyers interested, valuable "inserts" provided an "illusion of scarcity" and transformed the hobby arguably more into gambling than collecting. People starting buying cards for the inserts and the cards fell to the side. This practice reached its pinnacle in 2003 when Donruss carved up a 1925 Babe Ruth game jersey, arguably an act of historical vandalism, and sold its 2100 tiny bits in packs. Donruss, then in the hands of investors, defended it as "the reality of the free market and the reality of capitalism."By the end of the book, things don't look too good for the hobby. The speculators have taken over and exploited the nostalgia of moneyed adults, the FBI performed some investigations, and children have found other, and more affordable, things to do. The author implores Topps to "restore cards" rather than reinvent them, and to make the hobby accessible to children again by bringing back its lost social dimensions. Whether kids still want baseball cards at all remains a larger question, as they apparently want other cards. Along with that, a culture shift seems to have taken place, in that everything seems to have become "collectible" in today's America. Collecting something for its own sake, without any regard to "value," seems extremely challenging after a hobby experiences a rampant speculative episode. Can cards even go back to those quaint days when kids flipped, wrote on and handled them with what now seems like reckless abandon? Could anyone see them as valueless playthings ever again? In short, has the hobby crossed a line that it can never "uncross?"As potential support for that claim, Covid-19 conditions seem to have reignited some of the investment zeal that the hobby lost, though nothing compared to the 1980s and 1990s. But one could say the same for almost all collectibles during the pandemic. Only time will tell whether it all ends up as a temporary spike or as an outright revival, but sports cards seem to look more and more like artifacts of generational interest, though the efforts of Jefferson Burdick did bring some attention to major museums. The "famous" cards, such as the T206 Wagner, remain outliers and appear outside the hobby mostly due to their insane auction prices. Another major event looms as Major League Baseball announced that it will end their decades long relationship with Topps and begin anew with Fanatics beginning in 2022. Few saw that coming, especially Topps. Though the book obviously couldn't cover such recent developments, people infected with "the collecting disease" should read "Mint Condition" for its interesting historical information, many unforgettable stories and also some perspective on what can happen when big money invades a hobby.

This book sat on my wish list for months. I delayed purchasing it because while I loved collecting baseball cards as a kid I figured there was no way an entire book about baseball cards could be enjoyable.I was dead wrong.While the idea of baseball card history sounds rather dull, Jameison makes it humorous, entertaining, and insightful. He does so by displaying the historical import of certain card sets (arguing, for example, that cigarettes owe their American success to baseball cards), interviewing those who played key roles in the creative and business growth of baseball cards, and giving us an up-close look at the most eccentric collectors and dealers.He writes as one who, like me, loved the hobby of collecting and trading cards as a child in the 80's -- only to eventually give up on the hobby when baseball cards became so expensive and overproduced that chidlren could no longer participate in the same way. As such, I felt as if he was investigating on my behalf and speaking on my behafl throughout.That said, if you enjoy quirky American history, business case studies, or interesting characters you should find the book a quick and fun read. Even if you were not a card-collecting child in the 80's.[...]

This is a wonderful book on many different levels. I was surprised to learn that baseball cards have been in existence since the 1860s. The book explores, in a very entertaining way, the marketing of cigarettes and gum by packaging them with collectible cards; images of baseball players being by far the most popular. The author also tells fascinating stories of the men who significantly contributed to the hobby: the entrepreneurs, the collectors, the creative teams and in later years the speculators. The story of how one company became a long running monopoly in the industry and how that monopoly was broken by the head of the baseball player's union was engrossing. The chapter on a contemporary baseball card dealer who warns buyers about doctored cards, can be read in a new light, since he recently admitted to trimming the sides of the world's most famous and valuable baseball card.

There are very few history books, that can hold my interest from the first page to the last, but Mint Condition does just that. Jamieson takes us from the early days of 19th century tobacco cards to the "investor-collectors" of today. Along the way he keeps the book moving by infusing stories from the history of the American consumer goods industry, the evolution of professional sports in America, and the phenomenon of collecting that some people take so seriously.A must-read if you ever collected cards, but also a great book for anyone interested cards, coins, baseball, candy, tobacco . . . A first-rate take on 20th-century Americana!

This book is indispensable for anyone who collects baseball cards. I was pleasantly surprised at how well written Mint Condition is, the result of Jamieson being both a professional journalist and a knowledgeable collector. As a former newspaper editor myself, I have no patience for boring writers but there were no dull sections in Mint Condition. My only quibble: There should have been a few paragraphs explaining why it's okay to restore an old painting or a vintage automobile, but its not okay to clean, trim, smooth or otherwise improve the condition of a vintage baseball card. (For that matter, coin collectors have never adequately explained to me why it's taken for granted that cleaning or "whizzing" a coin lowers its value). I would love an updated commentary in light of the 2012 Black Swamp Find.