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NEW YORK CITY, N.Y.— In The Metropolitan Museum of Art, past a towering Spanish choir screen from the Valladolid cathedral and a Bronze sculpture of Diana, sits the Mezzanine level of the American wing, accessible only by an entirely glass elevator. Buried deep beyond paintings, vases, furniture and the rest of the 10,000 works of art is a collection of pieces that could fit in the palm of your hand — baseball cards.

The exhibit takes up three sides of a wall with 11 framed pieces featuring players like Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth and Stan Musial. At the beginning is a single sign explaining the importance of Syracuse native Jefferson R. Burdick, the man behind the cards.

Burdick knew his cards deserved a place next to Leonardo Da Vinci drawings, and for almost 60 years, they’ve lived at The Met. After a career as an engineer at the Crouse-Hinds Company, Burdick, originally from Central Square, New York, spent 15 years donating roughly 300,000 baseball cards, postcards and other ephemera to the museum until his death in 1963.

Known as the “father of baseball card collecting,” he worked as the nexus for a network of collectors by creating “The American Card Catalog.” Today, almost a million Americans still collect and trade baseball cards at conventions, which routinely happen in his hometown.

“He was kind of a visionary in that he thought this might be important when very few people thought there would be a reason to hold onto any trading cards,” said Dave Jamieson, author of Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession.

• • •

A. Hyatt Mayor, the 1947 curator of The Met, told Burdick to look someplace else for his collection. He didn’t understand it. It wasn’t the type of thing the museum collected, said Allison Rudnick, the current museum curator.

Burdick visited other institutions in New York City, but they all rejected his offer. He returned to Mayor, who finally agreed to take in the collection, one Burdick had been putting together since he was a kid. Jamieson said Mayor and Burdick were a perfect match while other curators “sniffed at the idea.”

Mayor wrote in the original directory for the J.R. Burdick Collection that Burdick brought his “little art nouveau oak desk” from Upstate New York and settled in the only available corner in the drawings and prints department to sort through his cards. Burdick created over 600 albums, matching cards based on the time period. The earliest cards were from the 1880s, but he added to the collection with cards from the 1950s and 1960s.

Rudnick said viewers often ask why baseball cards belong in an art museum. Burdick wrote the role of a museum is to “answer most questions and satisfy practically everyone who wishes to learn more about any particular field.” He knew the cards were not just a reflection of the sport’s history, but of the culture at the time. He liked imagining the time they were created and the people who created them, Jamieson said.

Baseball cards weren’t “standardized” until the late 1960s, when companies like Topps took over the industry and began making every one look the same. Cigarette or gun companies originally used baseball cards as advertisements to target the youth. Many of these cards littered Burdick’s collection.

The T-206 Honus Wagner baseball card is one of the most famous baseball cards, recently selling for $7.25 million. It was a part of the White Borders series by the Sweet Caporal cigarette brand. Rudnick said visitors like to see other examples of that, such as the “Green Borders” piece, which showcases 30 cards from Red Sun cigarettes.

Baseball cards at their core are commercial lithographs, a meticulous printing form that marries illustration, typography and text together. Five cards from the same year would be completely different in size, format and printing, Rudnick said.

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The earliest cards in the present display start in 1888 with “World’s Champions, Second Series” and “Old Judge Cigarettes Cabinet Cards.” The former displays illustrations of six players — four of them reified with thick, dark mustaches — superimposed onto drawings of random images like three baseball bats forming a teepee. The latter shows actual photographs of four players — all with real mustaches — with two looking straight at the camera.

“This is just photography in a different kind of form,” said Bob Jenkins, who came to view the collection last week.

The illustrations were based on photographs of the players, Rudnick said. They matched some of the popular illustrations at the time, like a DiMaggio card that looks similar to a Bazooka Joe comic. Other cards look like Andy Warhol prints, Rudnick said.

The “Big League (R324)” display has cards of Jim Tobbin, Chester Ross, George Coffman and Mel Ott from the Goudey Gum Company, matching the bright colors of a Warhol piece. They all have black-and-white photos of the players plastered onto neon pink, green, yellow and blue backgrounds. There’s no blue Chester Ross card.

“It’s not like he was trying to get every single card in the set, he wanted to get representative examples of stuff that was created,” Jamieson said.

• • •

Under fluorescent lights in the East Syracuse Ramada, collectors at this year’s Syracuse Sports Card and Memorabilia Show held briefcases filled with their best cards. They’re familiar with Burdick’s cards displayed 250 miles southeast. Table hosts had the same glass encasing covering their most valuable cards.

Scott Trudell, the owner of Glimpse of the Past, had his favorite card, the T-206 Ty Cobb Baseball card, blown up into a poster behind his table. The same picture was printed on his business card.

Trudell began collecting at 16, when a Cobb card cost 60 bucks. His father didn’t let him buy it, but the trip “lit a fire” under him, indulging himself into the hobby and starting with cards from the 1880s.

“Those are the cornerstones of the hobby. It’s cards like that which drive vintage collecting,” Trudell said about the vintage cards.

Trudell and the table hosts at the event remembered when they bought cards for a quarter a pack, putting them in the spokes of their bicycle to hear the rattling on the way back home. Now they’re worried about the smallest tear decreasing the value of their card, said Rick Boyle, the owner of RMB Sports Cards and Collectibles.

“You look back and think ‘wow how many cards were worth so much money that I destroyed as a kid,’” Boyle said.

Card events are their own economy, Trudell said. Experienced collectors arrive with specific cards in mind they wanted to buy or trade for. Some collectors looked for Josh Allen at the central New York show. Others searched for Aaron Judge. Boyle said he expected an influx in interest of his over 500 Judge cards after he broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record.

The ones in Burdick’s collection still pick up interest from die-hard fans. The illustrations on the older cards add value, Trudell said. The sketches themselves make the cards “one-of-one,” Boyle added.

“You don’t see a lot of the art work anymore,” table host John Decker said.

Since the 1970s, most cards became action photos of a player pitching, fielding or batting, Stark said. But collectors are still interested because of the player’s signatures stamped on them or the variety of unique “errors.”

Boyle held up two versions of a Bill Ripken card. One had a black tape over his bat. The other revealed what was written underneath: F*ckface.

• • •

In the middle of the Syracuse Sports Card and Memorabilia Show, a little kid yelled “dad,” pointing at cards just inches below his head. Some of the attendees at the show were well in their 80s, but the youth have kept the tradition alive, Decker said.

“This is a generational hobby,” Trudell said. “I’ve seen many families come in and grandfathers and their sons.”

Burdick didn’t put energy into making a home and bringing up a family because of his illness, Mayor wrote. He instead studied the cards, editing the Card Collector’s Bulletin and writing a series of books on the subject. As he finished the collection, he used cortisone to treat his rheumatoid arthritis. Two months later on March 13, 1963, he passed away from the illness.

“On the 10th of January 1963, he told us at five o’clock that he had mounted his last card,” Mayor wrote in the directory. “As he twisted himself into his overcoat he seemed suddenly tired. When he (bid) us goodbye, he added ‘I shan’t be back.’”

Burdick didn’t care about the cards’ monetary value. He glued the backs of cards onto albums, something that would be taboo today as each baseball card has plastic coverings to preserve the material. He worried about inflation making baseball cards too expensive for people to buy the cards they wanted. So he gave his collection to the Met for free.

“He died not a wealthy man with one of the best card collections in the world,” Jamieson said.

Published on October 26, 2022 at 11:30 pm

Contact Anish: asvasude@syr.edu | @anish_vasu