Are Your Trading Cards Still Worth Keeping Today?
To distinguish it from the common playing card utilized in gambling and entertainment, cards associated with sports are called trading or, often, collectible cards. Baseball cards are the most widely-known, though there are likewise football cards, produced when the sport grew to be very popular, and as a group sports cards, for other sports games. Non-sports cards are about cartoons, television, movies or comics. Understandably, present cards about cartoon characters are more popular among children than those of sports, because of the promotion of anime and similar style cartoons.
Baseball cards were originally introduced in its tentative forms between 1902 and 1935 that, though of cardboard, were of different sizes and dimensions. It was not uniform like today, and usually had misprinted or erroneous contents due to printing shortcomings. The cards were actually just promotional gimmicks for tobacco products, chewing gum and other snacks sold during baseball games, much like the tokens in cereal boxes today. Because the cards contained information about the players, they later became more sought after than the products they suppported.
Since the cards cannot be selected inside the packing, those who see themselves having too many cards of one player exchanged them with the cards on other players. Trading cards hence became the norm and the label. After 1936, the cards were manufactured in standard sizes and measurements to aid trading, and were packed and sold independently of other products. Baseball cards hence came into their own time as products, and not simply promotional pieces.
The baseball card as recognized today was designed in 1952 by Sy Berger, who was working for the Topps Corporation. Topps was at the time a new entrant into the baseball card field, having earlier made cards that presented Hopalong Cassidy, a famous Western television character played by William Boyd. Sy Berger created the card that has the name of the player, his photograph, facsimile autograph, logo and team name on the front and his biography as well as some personal and game statistics at the back. The modern baseball cards still use the same over-all format which has turned into a classic.
Trading cards reached their heyday in the earlier 1990s, but have gone on a long glide ever since, along with baseball which is slowly drowning in basketball cheers. From around 10,000 US shops dealing in trading cards, today there are much less than 2,000 and growing less and less. Trading cards have lost so much in worth that many cards sell today as it did 20 years ago in modified prices. They have not become collector articles but rather cards to unload quickly, collecting dust rather than value in the basements.
A lot of collectors and hopefuls attribute this unforeseen phenomenon on eBay and analogous selling websites. All of a sudden, treasured cards are thought of as rare in an area were easily and inexpensively available on the Internet, so the stashed ones shed value fast. Not only for baseball cards but likewise for all trading or sports cards. It appears sports memories is losing ground to modern pecuniary considerations, and more is the pity.
Tags: football cards, sports cards
