The History of Baseball Cards, from Tobacco Inserts to Modern Hobby Culture
Baseball cards began as photographic keepsakes in the 1860s, became marketing tools for tobacco companies, survived a monopoly in the gum era, and evolved into a collectibles market shaped by professional grading.
The first baseball cards were photographs, not the printed inserts collectors know today. In the 1860s, during and just after the Civil War, photography and baseball were both rising in popularity. The earliest known images of baseball teams were cartes de visite, small photographs roughly 2.5-by-4 inches mounted on cardstock. One of the earliest depicts the 1865 Brooklyn Atlantics. These were keepsakes, not collectibles.
The commercial baseball card, the kind designed to be collected, began in the 1880s with tobacco. Cigarette companies needed something to stiffen the paper packaging of their products, and they discovered that a small cardboard insert featuring an athlete or celebrity accomplished two things at once. It protected the cigarettes, and it gave customers a reason to choose one brand over another.
The Tobacco Era
In 1886, Goodwin & Company, a New York tobacco manufacturer that produced Old Judge and Gypsy Queen cigarettes, created what many collectors consider the first true baseball card set. Known as the N167 set, it featured players from the New York Giants. Between 1887 and 1890, Goodwin expanded massively, producing the N172 Old Judge set, a collection of more than 500 players with over 3,000 known variations. The cards used small albumen photographs, sepia-toned and glued onto cardboard, and they included both major and minor league players.
In 1888, Allen & Ginter, a Richmond, Virginia, tobacco company, released its "World's Champions" set (N28), featuring ten baseball players alongside athletes from other sports and public figures like Buffalo Bill Cody. The Allen & Ginter cards were color chromolithographs, and they remain some of the most visually striking cards ever produced.
The competition between tobacco companies to produce the most attractive cards ended abruptly. In 1890, the five major cigarette manufacturers, including Allen & Ginter and Goodwin, merged to form the American Tobacco Company. With no competition left, there was less incentive to spend money on promotional inserts, and card production declined sharply.
When antitrust regulators broke up the American Tobacco Company in 1911, competition returned, and so did baseball cards. The result was the T206 set, issued from 1909 to 1911, which included the most famous baseball card ever produced.
The Candy and Gum Era
After World War I, tobacco companies largely stopped producing baseball cards, and the candy and gum industries filled the void. The Goudey Gum Company issued its first major set in 1933, featuring colorful cards of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Bowman Gum entered the market in 1948 with its own sets.
In 1952, a Brooklyn-based company called Topps Chewing Gum released a set that defined the modern baseball card. The 1952 Topps set was larger than previous cards (2-5/8 by 3-3/4 inches), featured full-color photographs, and included statistics on the back. It became the template for every baseball card that followed. The most valuable card from the set, a Mickey Mantle rookie (#311), sold at Heritage Auctions in August 2022 for $12.6 million.
Topps acquired Bowman in 1956 and held a near-monopoly on baseball cards for the next three decades. Every kid who opened a pack of baseball cards between 1956 and 1980 was opening Topps.
Competition Returns
In 1981, Fleer and Donruss both launched sets, exploiting a contractual loophole: Topps held exclusive rights to sell cards with gum, so Fleer packaged cards with stickers and Donruss with puzzle pieces instead. In 1989, Upper Deck entered the market with a premium product that featured high-quality photography, tamper-proof foil packaging, and a hologram on each card to prevent counterfeiting. Upper Deck's debut set permanently raised the bar for card quality.
The Junk Wax Crash and Recovery
The late 1980s and early 1990s saw an explosion in card production. Topps, Fleer, Donruss, Score, and Upper Deck were all printing millions of cards. Collectors bought boxes on speculation, convinced that baseball cards were investments that would only appreciate. The overproduction, now known as the "junk wax era," flooded the market with so many cards that most from 1986 to 1993 are worth pennies today.
The market crashed in the mid-1990s and took years to recover. Manufacturers shifted toward scarcity, producing inserts with limited print runs, autographed cards, game-used memorabilia cards, and numbered parallel sets. By making certain cards genuinely rare, they gave collectors something to chase again.
The Modern Market
Today the baseball card market is dominated by Fanatics, which acquired Topps in January 2022 and holds MLB's exclusive card license. Cards are both physical and digital. A single rare card from a modern release can sell for thousands of dollars. Collectors Holdings, PSA's parent company, acquired SGC in early 2024 and Beckett in December 2025, consolidating the three largest grading companies under one roof. A PSA grade can multiply a card's value many times over.
From tobacco inserts to multimillion-dollar auction lots, the baseball card has been reinvented in every generation. The packaging changes. The economics change. The impulse that started the whole thing, the desire to hold a piece of the game in your hands, has not.