What's In The Cards? A Love Of The Game Beyond The New York Yankees

In 1979 I spent most of my spare time doing research for what I hoped, as a passionate fan of the N.Y. Yankees, would be a book reporting the team's triumphal march to a third consecutive world championship. It was not to be a Yankee year, however. They fell out of pennant contention early in the summer, and by the time September rolled around, I found myself so confused over how to get a grip on the season that I was forced to retreat into the world of my baseball cards.

Back in May and June of that season, I'd gone on a spree of buying cards. One of the prices I'd paid for not becoming a fan until late in my childhood was that I missed out on the card-collecting stage. Anyway, I couldn't have been a collector even if I'd wanted to. As I learned years later, because of wartime shortages virtually no baseball cards were printed between 1941 and 1948.

So I'd never traded cards with my friends—five Snuffy Stirnweisses for one Ted Williams, or a Ted Kluszewski for a Hank Sauer. I'd never flipped cards competitively, odds against evens. I'd never squirreled away in shoe boxes tall rubber-banded stacks of cards, which, dug out decades later, might contain treasures worth hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, not to mention an afternoon's worth of Proustian evocativeness. (The most valuable baseball card in existence, the famous T-206 depicting Honus Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, is, if in mint condition, worth as much as $20,000.) So even at the age of 44, I found it difficult to look at a package of bubble-gum cards without feeling a sense of having missed out on something.

One afternoon early in the '79 season, when the garish display of baseball cards on the counter of my local stationery store had as usual caught my eye, I found myself explaining to the two proprietors my need to do some intensive research in the field of baseball. Even though they looked at me curiously, I scooped up about five dollars' worth of cards along with my afternoon paper.

I was interested to see how my collection would evolve. I had often heard that it was the practice of Topps Chewing Gum, Inc. to print fewer cards of the better players. How else to explain why the ones that had most increased in value over the years were the Cobbs, Ruths, DiMaggios and Mantles? Scarcity of supply had to be at least a part of it. The theory had even been asserted in print. In a quirky 1977 memoir called Baseball and the Cold War: Being a Soliloquy on the Necessity of Baseball, the author, one Howard Senzel—a disillusioned veteran of New Left politics but also an unreconstructed fan of his hometown baseball team, the Rochester Red Wings—claimed to have seen the uncut sheets of cards that his father, an employee of the firm that did Topps's printing, would occasionally bring home from the office. Sure enough, Senzel insisted, on each sheet of cards some of the mediocre players' images were duplicated. The game was rigged!

Because of this, I assumed that as I accumulated cards by buying random packs every time I went into my stationery store, the least represented players would be the Steve Garveys, the Willie Stargells and the Rod Carews, while those who piled up quickest would be the nonentities who played for weaker teams like Toronto, Seattle, Atlanta and San Diego. But that wasn't the way it worked out.

By the end of May, I had collected about 2,500 cards. Putting them in order had given me something to do while listening to the late-night broadcasts of Yankee games from the West Coast.

It looked at first as if my collection was heavily weighted with lesser-known players, since among the most frequent repetitions were Mike Phillips of St. Louis (12 duplicates), Tucker Ashford of San Diego (11), Barry Bonnell of Atlanta (11), Jim Mason of Texas (10), Tom House of Seattle (9), Balor Moore of Toronto (9) and Wayne Gross of Oakland (8). All of these players were obscure, at least to me. In fact, out of the 765 most common players in my collection, 567 could be described as either journeymen or relative nonentities.

On the other hand, I hadn't exactly proved that Topps weighted its print runs. For among my duplicates were 10 Vida Blues, 9 Rick Mondays, 8 Joe Morgans, 8 Tom Seavers, 8 Lee Mazzillis, 7 Steve Garveys, 7 Rick Burlesons, 7 Dave Lopeses, 7 Jim (Catfish) Hunters, 7 Reggie Jacksons, 6 Fred Lynns, 5 Rod Carews, 5 Dave Parkers, and 4 Pete Roses. In fact, you could field a pretty fair all-star team from among these repetitions.

What's more, I couldn't spot any pattern when I judged my collection in the light of team competence. Of my 765 most duplicated cards, 347 represented teams in the top half of their respective divisions, while 418 played for teams in the bottom half. As for the balance between extremes: my multiples included 129 players from first-place teams and 125 from last-place teams, so there was no visible trend in terms of team ability. In fact, the only pattern I could see was that I seemed to be accumulating players from the National League West Division, of which I had 287, faster than I was collecting players from any other division, and more than twice as fast as I was gathering players from the National League East, of which I had 117. Since I'd bought all my cards in the East, where collectors were least likely to want Western Division players, this made small sense from a conspiracy theorist's perspective, unless perhaps the Topps company was trying to promote increased contact between the two parts of the country by flooding each with what the other most desired.