An American baseball card legend
Baseball cards date to the 19th century, but for Sy Berger, the decade after the Second World War was the perfect time to revitalize them.
The New York Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants dominated baseball, providing a fertile marketing climate aimed at youngsters in the New York area who had been born in the immediate postwar years. And throughout America, the arrival of television made it possible for youngsters to watch their baseball heroes in action.
Berger, who died on Dec. 14 at age 91, transformed a hobby into a high-stakes pop-culture niche as the father of the modern-day baseball trading card.
In the 1950s, Berger turned the Brooklyn-based Topps company into a name synonymous with those pieces of cardboard that children could flip (calling out front or back), pitch (nearest to a wall wins), trade or simply admire and store in a shoe box.
Berger introduced Topps cards in 1951. They came with taffy, rather than chewing gum, since a competitor seemed to have exclusive rights to market baseball cards with gum. But the taffy wound up picking up the flavour of varnish on the cards. “You wouldn’t dare put that taffy near your mouth,” Berger said, adding, “that ’51 series was really a disaster.”
A year later, after switching to gum, he conceived the prototype for the modern baseball card, supplanting the unimaginative, smallish and often black-andwhite offerings of the existing card companies. “We came out in 1952 with a card in colour, beautiful colour, and a card that was large,” Berger told the Society for American Baseball Research in 2004. “For the first time, we had a team logo. We had the 1951 line statistics and their lifetime statistics. No one else did it.”
The cards also had facsimiles of the players’ autographs below their images, another innovation.
“The design elements of the 1952 Topps set would kindle not only the imaginations of baseball-loving children, but also their collector’s instincts,” Dave Jamie- son wrote in Mint Condition, a history of baseball trading cards. “Topps was on its way to dominating the field of baseball cards for the next 40 years.”
Seymour Perry Berger was born July 12, 1923, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, one of three children. His father, Louis, a furrier, and his mother, Rebecca, moved the family to the Bronx when he was a youngster.
He collected baseball cards as a boy and had a personal hero, the Boston Braves’ slugging outfielder Wally Berger (no relation), who once took him through the Polo Grounds gates and let him sit in his team’s dugout before a game with the Giants. “As a kid, I had a full set of cards one year except for a Jesse Petty card,” he told the New York Times in 1985, referring to a left-handed pitcher of his youth. “I found another kid in the Bronx who had a Jesse Petty, but he wouldn’t trade it to me, he would only flip me. After about four or five hours, I won his whole collection. The last card I won was his Jesse Petty card.”
And long after he won that Jesse Petty card, Berger became a figure to be flipped in his own right.
On card No.137 in the Topps 2004 series “All-Time Fan Favorites,” there, in a jacket, white shirt and blue tie, is a beaming Sy Berger, with his autograph to match.