Maybe you saw this item in the paper a couple of weeks ago: “Monday, Dec 15, 2014. The father of the modern baseball trading card who designed the famed Topps versions in the 1950s has died. Sy Berger was 91.”
An awful lot of guys I knew when I was a kid spent part of their allowances buying packs of Topps bubble gum to get the cards. For a nickel, you got six baseball cards and a stick of rock-hard bubble gum. What a deal!
Sy Berger was the guy who came up with the idea, probably never guessing that he’d start a hobby sensation that would last for decades.
According to one source I read, Berger, using scissors and cardboard at his kitchen table, played around with ideas for trading cards until he struck upon a design that endured for decades: a card with team logos and simulated player autographs on the front and bios and stats on the back.
When I was a kid, I never figured out if I was buying gum and the cards were a bonus, or if was buying cards and the gum was a bonus. Considering the popularity the cards achieved, I’m betting the cards were way more important than the gum.
Sy Berger’s trading cards probably were partly responsible for the transformation of ordinary ballplayers into the superstars they’ve become today. At least partly because of the cards, the players became celebrities. And the cards themselves became a business. Collectors today sometimes pay thousands of dollars for coveted baseball cards, especially for some of the ones from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
Berger was born on July 12, 1923, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When he was a student at Bucknell University, he became a friend of a guy whose father was one of the four Shorin brothers who founded Topps in 1938. Nine years after he graduated from college, Berger took a job with the company whose main product was Bazooka bubblegum, each piece wrapped in those iconic waxy comic strips.
When Berger started at Topps, he was tasked with finding a way to sell more bubble gum. He knew that cards depicting professional athletes had already been used to sell other products, especially tobacco. Berger himself had collected baseball cards as a boy. So Berger set out to modify the practice by offering kids bubble gum instead of tobacco.
He made the cards bigger and more colorful than the tobacco cards had been, featuring team logos and player signatures. He filled the reverse sides with statistics and fun facts.
The cards were a huge success, so much so that by 1956 Topps bought out its chief competitor, the Bowman Gum Company. Bowman made “Blony” bubble gum and also included sports cards in its packaging, especially “rookie cards.”
There were several antitrust lawsuits against Topps, but the company was able to hold its position in the industry until the 1980s. By that time, Berger’s cards had become a major part of pop culture, adding other series devoted to Elvis Presley, Davy Crockett, Batman, “Star Wars” and dozens more franchises besides those of ballplayers.
Berger was a New Yorker, and in those days the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants dominated baseball. Berger recognized that there was a fertile marketing climate if you aimed your product at youngsters in the New York metropolitan area who had been born in the immediate postwar years.
Berger became a familiar face in major league clubhouses. He bargained with ballplayers for the rights to use their pictures and statistics on his cards. He offered ballplayers annual payments of $125 to sign exclusive deals with Topps, and he appealed to their vanity by giving them dozens of cards printed with their likenesses.
Can you imagine today’s stars signing for a piddling $125 a year? But in the ’50s, that wasn’t chump change.
Berger said, “We came out in 1952 with a card in color, beautiful color, and a card that was large. For the first time, we had a team logo. We had the 1951 line statistics and their lifetime statistics. No one else did it.”
Berger always said that he was “basically in the children’s entertainment business.” And for more than 60 years he let plenty of grown men hang onto a piece, quite literally, of their own childhood.
He transformed a boys’ hobby into a high-stakes pop culture phenomenon. Kids all over the country had shoe boxes full of the cards. They treasured them and traded them, and many of them sold their treasures to big-time collectors.
I wish I still had mine!
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