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Baseball Cards Hold Timeless Memories
Article
Mike Dodd reflects on childhood collecting, the evolution of cards, and the big changes affecting collectors young and old. If only your mother hadn't tossed all your cards...
Curator of Collections, Card Cyber Museum
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
Excerpt
When Sy Berger sat on his couch in Hempstead, N.Y., designing the 1952 Topps baseball card set, he decided to play it safe with the information on the back. At the top of the column for the player's statistics from the previous season, he wrote "past year" instead of 1951. "We didn't know if these things would sell. We were neophytes," he recalls. "We put 'year' so if they didn't sell, maybe we could sell them the next year." If only Berger knew. The set became the prototype for today's cards, and the little chewing gum company from Brooklyn, N.Y., has sold billions of them since.
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Baseball card collecting has become, for many fans, much more than a hobby. There is a great deal of value in certain baseball cards, and building a valuable collection could take years of research, time, and work. When a collector is interested in building a valuable baseball card collection, it is very important for the collector to know how to grade baseball cards. Baseball card grading is a method of determining the condition and value of a particular card.
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Topps' Sy Berger, father of the modern baseball card 