Baseball Legends At the Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays an iconic sports card collection.
The Met is taking visitors out to the ball game in the current exhibition, Baseball Cards from the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick. On view until July 22, the exhibit is a new rotation of baseball cards from the museum’s Jefferson R. Burdick collection.
The exhibit displays cards from the late nineteenth century to the modern era and features the top baseball players of their day. These cards were slipped into the packaging for gum and tobacco products as advertising material that ultimately became collectibles. A look at these cards not only shows a player’s name and field position but also displays diverse, and at times colorful, designs that were created by commercial lithographs.
Along with approximately 303,000 advertising inserts, postcards, and photographs, the collection—consisting of over 30,000 cards—was donated by Syracuse, New York, electrician Jefferson R. Burdick (1900–1963).
Burdick is a well-known name in sports card collecting because of this collection. When the card collector donated his impressive collection to the Met, then-curator of prints and photographs A. Hyatt Mayor (1901–1980) tasked Burdick to reorganize it to museum standards. What resulted was a cataloging system presented as the American Card Catalog (1939) that took Burdick fifteen years to refine, but it has proved so successful that card collectors still use it today. More information about the exhibition and the Jefferson R. Burdick card collection can be found at metmuseum.org.
Pictures are baseball cards from the Jefferson R. Burdick collection. (Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
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