AllMovie

As American as baseball is, so is baseball card collecting. Baseball cards first appeared as the stiff backs of cigarette packets but companies did not first conceive the idea of collecting the cards until 1933 when more and more baseball players were featured, like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, inside an individual packet with a stick of bubble gum. This video examines the history of the baseball cards and how the profitability of collectable cards grew in 1987, which further expanded the market and the production of these cards in the 1990s.