Location, Location, Location: The Transmission of Racist Ideology in Baseball Cards

While on the surface baseball cards may appear to be a mundane object of child's play, they are precious tools for examining U.S. society. Baseball cards not only hold a wealth of information regarding the players they feature they also reveal much about the state of society at the time of thei...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Negro educational review Vol. 55; no. 2-3; pp. 75 - 134
Main Authors Regoli, Robert M, Hewitt, John D, Munoz, Robert, Jr, Regoli, Adam M
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Greensboro Negro Educational Review, Inc 01.04.2004
Subjects
African American Achievement
Athletes
Black athletes
Children
Civil Rights
Civil rights movements
Classification
Correlation
Disproportionate Representation
Economic Impact
Geographic Location
Ideology
Number Systems
Popular Culture
Primary Sources
Race
Racial Bias
Racial discrimination
Racism
Recreational Activities
Role
Space
Status
Team Sports
Trading cards
United States History
Value Judgment
Vertical Organization
New York
Chicago Illinois
California
United States > US
Colorado
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Summary:While on the surface baseball cards may appear to be a mundane object of child's play, they are precious tools for examining U.S. society. Baseball cards not only hold a wealth of information regarding the players they feature they also reveal much about the state of society at the time of their production and the individuals who collect them. In this paper we analyze "the numbering system" that the Topps Chewing Gum (Baseball Card) Company constructed and used between 1956-1980 to identify for all of America who were "the heroes of the game". Under the numbering system, each card in a set is assigned a specific number according to a hierarchical ordering of player prestige, ostensibly based on performance. The question arises, however, whether Topps based its decision on where to locate players in a card set strictly using "on-the-field" performance or whether some other factor, such as race, played a role. Our findings suggest that Topps may have discriminated against black players from 1956-1966. Then between 1967-1980 the reverse occurred: black players received card numbers (location in set) that exceeded those warranted by their performances. These findings suggest that the progression of the Civil Rights Movement affected racial practices in the assignment of baseball card numbers and created a world in which at least one segment of big business became cognizant of the need to recognize the long-ignored athletic accomplishments of black athletes. (Contains 2 tables and 3 footnotes.)
ISSN:0548-1457