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Summary
Summary
When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson's parents sold his childhood home a few years ago, he rediscovered a prized boyhood possession: his baseball card collection. Now was the time to cash in on the "investments" of his youth. But all the card shops had closed, and cards were selling for next to nothing online. What had happened? In Mint Condition, his fascinating, eye-opening, endlessly entertaining book, Jamieson finds the answer by tracing the complete story of this beloved piece of American childhood. Picture cards had long been used for advertising, but after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into cigarette packs as collector's items. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes. In the 1930s, cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression. In the 1960s, royalties from cards helped transform the baseball players association into one of the country's most powerful unions, dramatically altering the game. In the '80s and '90s, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing, surviving today as the rarified preserve of adult collectors. Mint Condition is charming, original history brimming with colorful characters, sure to delight baseball fans and collectors.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"It's a form of megalomania, of course," one famous card collector once said of his hobby-and, as Jamieson explains, there are plenty of people willing to cash in on collectors' obsessions; the secondary market for baseball cards may be as much as a half-billion dollars annually. It used to be even stronger: Jamieson got interested in the history of baseball cards when he rediscovered his own adolescent stash only to find that its value had plummeted in the mid-1990s. His loss is our gain as he tracks the evolution of the card from its first appearance in cigarette packs in the late 19th century through the introduction of bubble gum and up to the present. The historical narrative is livened by several interviews, including conversations with the two men who launched Topps (for decades the first name in cards) and a collector who's dealt in million-dollar cards. Jamieson also digresses neatly into curiosities like the "Horrors of War" card set, the legendary "Mars Attacks," and a profanity-laced card featuring Cal Ripken's little brother. It's a fun read, but it also shows just how much serious work went into sustaining this one corner of pop culture ephemera. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Every time a rare baseball card brings a million-dollar price at auction, thousands of aging former collectors wistfully recall shoeboxes full of rookie cards and wonder if they lost a fortune when Mom cleaned out their rooms. The answer, according to Washington-based, award-winning journalist Jamieson is . . . probably not. Jamieson doesn't supply lists of valuable cards (there are collectors' journals for that); rather, he chronicles the history of collectible cards, profiles a few unique collectors, and tracks the development of the hobby and ponders its future. He profiles Jefferson Burdick, an almost forgotten man who donated what was probably the greatest collection of baseball cards ever assembled to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art over the course of a decade before his death in 1963. In tracing the history of collectible cards, Jamieson shows the extraordinary lengths to which the early cigarette and card companies went to separate young boys from their money, a penny and then a nickel at a time. A not uncommon tactic was to issue incomplete sets to keep collectors fruitlessly buying in search of a card that didn't exist. This is a fascinating history that encompasses not only the nuances of serious collecting but also the business machinations and card-marketing strategies that contributed significantly to the rise of the cigarette and gum industries. Superbly informative and entertaining.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MOST baseball writing is not exactly about baseball. Jim Bouton's classic tell-all, "Ball Four," spends more time on the players' high jinks than the players' play. As the grammar in its title hints, HUB FANS BID KID ADIEU (Library of America, $15), John Updike's imperishable farewell to Ted Williams (an essay now available in book form), concentrates not on the "Kid," but on the fans. While few books delve deeper into baseball's intricacies than "Moneybali," the advanced statistics Michael Lewis writes about are merely the particulars of his case study; his book is about "the art of winning an unfair game" - any unfair game. What four new books talk about when they talk about baseball also isn't always baseball itself. An excellent and rigorous history of baseball cards concludes with a manifesto calling on makers to restore the business "to what it once was" - the author needs cards to be a living link to his childhood rather than the utilitarian objects that he elsewhere shows them to be, A history of interracial barnstorming drowns you in baseball minutiae while asking you to look finally at baseball's effects on society. Roger Maris's biographers urge us to see the Yankee slugger as an Everyman rather than a professional ballplayer with a couple of genuinely heroic seasons. And a superb study of the fastball reveals the pitch to be an alchemical formula for resurrecting the dead and redeeming the game itself. But, sometimes, a bat is just a bat. Dave Jamieson's "Mint Condition" is a comprehensive romp through a quirky subject's history. Because Jamieson, who has written for The Washington Post and The New Republic, clearly did ample reporting, his yearning for the years when there were only a few baseball cards per player feels less frivolous than when, say, members of his parents' generation fondly recollect the days when a Buick looked like nothing but a Buick. He details early tobacco cards, stuffed into packs to keep the cigarettes from crushing; kitschy nonbaseball series like Mars Attacks; and the rest of the history. But the real fun comes in the mini-profiles that propel the narrative; especially memorable is Jamieson's sketch of the gadfly who purposefully doctors cards in order to reveal how poorly the ultra-powerful grading agencies do their jobs. The book really heats up when Upper Deck is started in 1989. The first card company explicitly to appeal to serious collectors, it kicked off a ferocious competition among producers, spawning an absurd number of brands and gimmicks and series that turned most noncollectors off - especially the kids. (Jamieson, as well as this reviewer, could do little but give up the hobby.) This shortsightedness helped turn the business into the emphysema patient it is now. "The problem with the industry today isn't what baseball cards have always been," Jamieson argues, "it's what baseball cards have become." But might not the mid-'90s card decline be linked to, say, the mid-'90s rise of the Internet? (For one thing, there is now an easier way to find a player's stats.) Jamieson forgets that things are never what they used to be. When Jefferson Burdick, the dean of card collecting, lamented that "there are too many baseball cards being issued," it was 1959, and a Topps looked like nothing but a Topps. Writing from a Pacific island during World War II, a Washington Senators player advised his bosses that if Major League Baseball ever opened its doors to blacks, they ought to sign a talented seaman he had just played with. The Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck got to him first, and Larry Doby integrated the American League in 1947. With this story and many - too many - others, Timothy M. Gay's "Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert" convincingly shows that, as with the rest of society (like the Navy), baseball integration was a more gradual process than we are usually taught. The first recorded interracial baligame took place in 1869; Babe Ruth participated in integrated games for extra cash; and in the 1930s and '40s, after the seasons ended, interracial barnstorming games were held at Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field and dozens of smaller venues across the country. The book's recountings of these endless autumns are, well, endless, though the inimitable black pitcher Satchel Paige is usually available to resuscitate the flagging narrative. Gay, the author of "Tris Speaker," wants us to see these games as seminal showmanship - Paige and Dizzy Dean were "America's first black-and-white buddy act" - which somewhat undercuts his argument that they dramatically reformed the sport. Gay more successfully shows that the white impresarios behind all this were as penny-wise as they were liberal-minded. At the book's close, the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey makes one of the canniest signings of ail time: the second baseman Jackie Robinson went on to win Rookie of the Year and, later, Most Valuable Player honors. Among other achievements. IN the acknowledgments of "Roger Maris," Tom Clavin and Danny Peary thank Maris - who broke Babe Ruth's single-season home run record by slamming 61 in 1961 - for giving them "the most thrilling baseball season of our youths." Oh, that explains it. That explains the proprietary tone in which Maris is always "Roger"; the bewildering amount of uninteresting family background and childhood narrative; the glossing over of Maris's paltry batting average and addiction to streaks and slumps. Clavin and Peary's need to cast Maris as a normal guy who was, in one sportswriter's words, "ordinary in size - or less," implies that Maris's feats within the game are not sufficient for us to dwell upon: as always with baseball, there is an extra lesson, and Maris's is that we, too, can be gods. Clavin, a sports and business journalist, and Peary, a sports and pop culture historian, are better at evoking baseball in 1960, when new Yankees dissatisfied with small contracts were told to sit tight and await their World Series checks. While Maris's home run record is perceived in the poststeroid era as having been chiseled into indestructible granite, Clavin and Peary usefully remind us that, because of the fact that 1961 was the majors' first 162-game season, Maris's status as home run king was actually hotly disputed, and was not officially considered totally legitimate until the startlingly late date of 1991. There is always an asterisk, until there isn't one. "The mighty fastball could certainly ring up a lot of batters," Tim Wendel observes, "but sooner or later the ride always seemed to get too bumpy.'for everyone involved." In the wonderful "High Heat," Wendel leverages that tension - the fastball as both blessing and bane - to mine a stunning amount of drama from the small cadre of pitchers throughout history who happened to be able to hurl a baseball really, really fast. Ostensibly, Wendel, a founding editor of USA Today Baseball Weekly, is trying to determine who is fastest, and in the end he puts Nolan Ryan at the top (gentlemen, start your debating engines). But this conceit is, thankfully, only a conceit, a pretext to revel in the details. And in the mystery that surrounds this simplest of pitches: despite methods varying from Bob Feller's strenuous, towering kick to Walter (the Big Train) Johnson's relaxed sidearm, why have all the fastest pitchers reached right around 100 miles an hour? Meanwhile, Wendel's writing is also all fastballs. Sensitive and scrupulous, he never forgets that for every Ryan and Sandy Koufax, lucky to have their unearned gifts, there are flameouts like Steve Dalkowski - a tragic fireballer who couldn't control his otherworldly heat and never made it out of the minors. Readers won't forget Dalkowski when the superhyped Washington Nationals rookie Stephen Strasburg establishes himself as the fastest pitcher in the District of Columbia since the Big Train took the mound more than 100 years ago. AFTER reading Wendel, you instinctively connect Johnson to Strasburg. "High Heat" is "a séance with the game's past," an almost literary fantasy in which all the great pitchers throw side by side on the same diamond. While baseball has long been something well suited to breaking bread with the dead ("Field of Dreams" is notably not about soccer), Wendel's purpose is particularly urgent: he wants to recover the game's sense of continuity, which baseball fans long treasured before "steroids knocked the whole rig into the ditch." He has chosen the right subject for this project: steroids may have improved the fastball pitcher's longevity (see Clemens, Roger), but they failed to enhance his speed. So at least Wendel's flight of fancy is rooted in the mechanics of the game itself. Yes, the game itself. It's nice that baseball cards serve as a route back to our childhoods; that casual exhibitions paved the way for real social change (this is especially nice); that a slugging superhuman passed for an ordinary human, making his inspiration more credible. But baseball itself is pretty great, too. In 1960, the game was at the pinnacle of its popularity and prestige, and Updike could get away with putting the fans at the center of a September afternoon. But I wonder if baseball can afford the same indulgence today. And anyway, what lingers most from Updike's essay is not what the fans do, but what Williams does. And what do you think he does? He hits a home run to dead center in his final at-bat at Fenway. Let the game have the last word, and it rarely lets you down. Marc Tracy is a staff writer at Tablet magazine.
Choice Review
If baseball is the "national pastime," then collecting baseball cards has been the pastime of the national pastime. Initially--starting in 1869 with the first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings--baseball cards were advertising gimmicks stuck in cigarette packages. They soon became an obsession with young fans, and that obsession lasted for more than a century. By the 1980s, these "collectibles" had become big business. Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris provided the first account of baseball cards in 1975, with their nostalgic The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book. The present title is now the definitive treatment of the subject. Jamieson (an award-winning journalist) takes the reader from the Civil War origins to the boom and bust of the baseball card, with appropriate genuflection to bubble gum associations and legendary labor organizer Marvin Miller, who in 1966 came up with the strategy of using proceeds from baseball cards to fund the baseball players' infant union. Though the book lacks an index and a formal bibliography, it does have bibliographic notes; those, along with the author's intelligence and the high-quality glossy reproductions of historic baseball cards, earn this reviewer's forgiveness for shortage of apparatus. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. S. Gittleman Tufts University
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. 1 |
1 Please, Mister, Give Me the Picture! | p. 11 |
2 Anyone Can Get the Cards | p. 31 |
3 People Chew Harder When They Are Sad | p. 49 |
4 Cartophilia | p. 69 |
5 The Great Changemaker | p. 89 |
6 Down in the Sub-subbasements | p. 115 |
7 Nostalgia Futures | p. 139 |
8 Cardboard Gold | p. 159 |
9 Gem Mint Ten! | p. 177 |
10 The Ringmaster | p. 193 |
11 A Visit to the Doctor | p. 217 |
12 It's Just a Piece of Cardboard | p. 237 |
Notes | p. 249 |
Acknowledgments | p. 271 |