Why are Baseball Cards Rectangles?

Why are baseball cards almost always rectangles? Has anybody ever made a serious effort to answer this question?  Because I think its actually quite an interesting one to consider, but nobody that I can find ever has.

It’s the sort of thing we all take for granted, but there are two possible theories that might explain the dominance of the rectangle:

1) Baseball cards are rectangles because rectangles are the best shape for a baseball card to take.

Or

2) Baseball cards are rectangles not because they are the best shape but simply because back in the 19^th century the first makers used that shape for reasons that made sense back then (such as the need to fit the cards into tobacco packages which were rectangular) and everyone just copied that and stuck with it long after the original reason stopped being relevant.    


I raise this arcane question because there is an interesting difference in the history of the Japanese and American hobbies in this respect.  In the US the rectangle has never been seriously challenged as the shape that baseball cards take.  From the 19^th century to today it has always been the dominant shape and only the occasional oddball set has strayed from using it.  In Japan on the other hand the rectangle faced some serious challenges from other shapes in the early history of baseball cards and it wasn’t until as late as the 1970s that the rectangle became the dominantly accepted shape.  


This actually suggests pretty strongly that theory 1 above, rectangles are best, is the correct answer since the historical idiosyncrasies of 19^th century American card makers likely wouldn’t have affected the decisions of Japanese card makers in the 70s.  


Still though, I thought it would be interesting to consider the history and relative merits of rivals to the rectangle to double check that this actually is the case.  Are rectangles really better for baseball cards?

So in no particular order lets look at the “Big 3” other shapes: Squares, triangles and circles (and also "other" shapes).

1. Squares

Is it really a square though?

The square is the closest relative to the rectangle in the shape family so it makes sense to start with a consideration of them.  The only difference between the two is that the square has four sides of equal length rather than two.

Yet the square has almost never been used in baseball cards, which is weird.  Looking through the PSA Card Facts list of sets between 1886 and present it wasn’t until 1987 that I found a card set that had been made in a square shape – the 1987 Jiffy Pop Discs set (pictured above) – and even that doesn’t count since the cards were intended to be punched out of their square shaped backing and assume their intended shape: circles!

Its almost obsessive the lengths card makers went to avoid making squares.  Clearly from the period of the 1930s to the 1950s a lot were tempted to make square shaped card but could never fully commit to the idea.  The Goudey sets of the 1930s, Playball sets of 1939-1941, Bowman sets from 1948 to 1950 and the Redman Tobacco sets of the 1950s all toyed with card shapes that were very close to being squares but not quite: they always made one side (usually the vertical) longer than the other.  Its almost like they were daring themselves to make a square card, but kept chickening out at the last minute.

Almost a square but not quite

Likewise in Japan I don’t know of any square cards that have been made.  The shape is universally avoided.

Why the dislike for the square?  From a card maker’s perspective they would be just as easy to make as rectangular cards, you just need to line them up on sheets and cut straight lines to produce them.  Maybe it has to do with rectangles being a bit easier to hold in your hand if you have a stack of them.  If you curl your fingers up like you do when clutching a pile of cards, the palm of your hand creates a kind of rectangular spot where a pile of rectangles can easily fit, but a pile of squares would be difficult to accommodate.  


So that is one theory: our human palms did not evolve in a way that favored holding piles of cardboard squares so we decided to avoid using that shape for baseball cards.  This isn’t very convincing by itself though.

A second theory might be that the square is simply so close to the rectangle that it falls into the "uncanny valley".  This is a theory used by robot makers to explain our reactions to the appearance of robots.  A robot that looks nothing like a human (like C3PO) doesn't really bother us.  But we humans find robots that try to look too human revolting.  It seems the fact that a robot looks close, but not quite right, triggers this reaction in our brains.  It creates a bit of a paradox though, the less a robot looks like a human, the more comfortable we are with it.

Maybe the same thing is at work with squares and baseball cards.  We are so accustomed to them being rectangles that if we were to see a square one something in our brain just screams "WRONG" at us and makes us find them a bit unsettling, a feeling we don't have with circles for example because they are further removed from rectangles (like C3PO is further removed from the appearance of a real human).

Not sure if this holds up, but its food for thought anyway.

2. Triangles

With the exception of some avant garde  insert cards in recent years, I don’t think anybody has ever seriously tried to make a triangular set of baseball cards, either in the US or Japan.  

Technically not a triangle but kind of close

Unlike squares though it’s a lot easier to understand why triangles wouldn’t make good baseball cards.  The image space for the player picture would by necessity be smaller, which would detract from its look.  Producing them would also be more complicated since the sheets wouldn’t lend themselves to being easily cut in straight lines like with rectangular or square cards.  


Storing them would also be a pain.  And you’d probably constantly be poking yourself with the corners when you flipped through a stack of them.

Come to think of it, making triangle baseball cards is such a bad idea we don’t really need to devote any more time discussing it.

3. Circles

The circle in both the US and Japan is really the only shape other than the rectangle that has been used with some frequency for baseball cards over the years.  This is particularly the case in Japan, where in the early years (1930s-1950s) the rectangle and circle were about equally popular as a shape for baseball cards (menko in those days).  It was only in the late 50s that the rectangle started to edge the circle out and not until the 1970s that it really dominated.  In the US the circle never seriously challenged the rectangle for dominance like that, but during the tobacco era in the early 20^th century there were several circular sets, and of course more recently in the 1970s and 1980s there were a number of “disc” sets put out by various food makers.  


The circle’s (relative) success is a bit hard to square (ha! shape pun there) with the shape’s virtues as a medium for a baseball card.  Production wise they are way more complicated than rectangular cards, since they have to be punched out of a cardboard sheet rather than just requiring a straight line cut.  Also the sheets are a bit inefficient from a cardboard use perspective, wasting more than rectangular cards do and thus increasing the cost of production a bit.  


The circle’s near dominance in Japan is pretty much entirely explained by the fact that the circle is an ideal shape for playing the game menko, which requires you to throw and try to flip over cards lying on the ground.  American cards were never intended for that purpose, which would have dented the attractiveness of the circle.  Still though, circles are pretty cool.  They roll, for example, which rectangles can’t do.  Maybe kids would have found a use for that function if they had been given the chance?  


Storage wise, circles probably aren’t ideal, but consider this benefit: no corners to ding!  That, of course, wouldn’t have been much of a consideration prior to the 70s, but I wonder if modern collector concerns had dominated back then it might have tipped the hobby into backing circular over rectangular cards.

4. “Other” shapes

Die cut cards were a third category of shapes that cards could take in both the US and Japan, though much more so in Japan in the early days.  These could be in the shape of human figures, or airplanes or pretty much anything.  They pretty much died off in Japan in the early 1950s, much earlier than circles did.  In the US they appeared in a smattering of pre-war designs and the odd novelty or insert set in the modern era, but were never really part of the mainstream.  


Its not hard to see why they never took off.  Production wise they were probably much more expensive and difficult to make.  And while they look cool they have a lot of bits that can get broken off or dinged, which makes storage a nightmare (even for kids who don’t care too much about condition).  


Conclusion

So what makes the rectangle so special?  The answer I think is….nothing special.  Basically the shape is only marginally better than the square or circle as a medium for baseball cards and that small difference, combined with the simple fact that the earliest makers made them rectangles thus establishing an idea that "baseball cards are rectangles" in everyone's mind, was enough to push it over the top.  Rectangles are easy to make, they fit in your hand OK, they aren’t a pain to store.  That’s about it.  A mundane answer to a mundane question I suppose, but one that I think was worth considering nonetheless!

I'm not sure but anyone have any other suggestions for why rectangles have so long dominated the baseball card hobby?

The Kamikaze Outfielder

Being on the losing side of World War 2 gives the player biographies of a lot of Japanese players from the 40s and 50s some really unique (often tragic or horrifying) twists.

Hiroshi Ohshita is one of them.  He had a hall of fame career beginning in 1946 in which he won three batting titles, three home run crowns and one Pacific League MVP award.

But the oddest thing about his biography is that in 1945 he was serving in the Imperial Japanese Army and volunteered to join the "Special Attack Unit" (Tokubetsu Kougeki Tai), more commonly known in English as the Kamikaze units.  He actually underwent training in how to pilot your airplane directly into an enemy ship and get yourself deliberately killed in the process.

Thankfully for Ohshita and Japanese baseball, the war ended before he had to go on his suicide mission.  The Japanese military in the last months of the war was actually safeguarding its kamikaze pilots, saving them up to defend against an expected invasion of the Japanese main islands which never came thanks to the surrender. So oddly enough a lot of kamikaze pilots like Ohshita actually survived the war.

That gives Ohshita's career a very odd origins story which is hard to wrap your mind around.  In August he would have found himself sitting in the cockpit of a plane that he planned to die in.  A mere three months later, he signed his first professional baseball contract and five months after that he made his pro debut.  From terrified suicide pilot to happy pro ball player in the span of 8 months.  Crazy, but also kind of an inspiring reminder that sometimes one's fortunes in life can take radical turns for the better even when you don't expect them to.  One minute you think you are going to die horribly, but the next you are saved from that fate and given one that sees you enjoy a long and happy life and career instead (relatively speaking, he passed away in 1979 after suffering a stroke).

The above card is from the 1949 JCM 108 set.  I like that set a lot, all the cards are horizontally oriented which gives them a cool look.  The card has Ohshita holding a yellow bat, but he is famous for having used a blue bat during the 1947 season in contrast to his rival Tetsuharu Kawakami who used a red one.  Their colorful bats were a hit with fans, but were banned after that season so by the time this card came out he would have been using a regular bat, though I'm curious if there are any cards of him out there depicting him holding a blue bat!

Some Extremely Colorful 1958 Uncut Sheets of Menko

I just picked up a couple of sheets of very colorful menko!

The above are two sheets of 8 cards each from the 1958 Mitsuwa set (JCM 129) which, as you can see, have a pretty distinctive look to them.  

I like these a lot.  The set has 16 cards and I thought I would get the whole set when I first saw the two sheets for sale, but actually there are three cards which are duplicated on both sheets.  Strangely the duplicate cards appear at completely different positions with completely different neighboring cards on each sheet so I'm not sure how they organized the printing of these, but its an interesting observation.

The card backs have both a playing card and a military themed image on them.  According to Engel the ink used to print the backs varied and as you can see, my two sheets use different shades of brown.

The key cards in the set are two featuring Giants slugger Shigeo Nagashima and Tigers hall of famer Yoshio Yoshida.  A lot of the cards in the set feature odd pairings of players from different teams like this.  Being issued in 1958 these cards would count among Nagashima's rookie cards (though I'm not sure what Yoshida being on them might do to that status).  Luckily for me one of them is among the three cards that were duplicated across both sheets, so I have doubles of a Shigeo Nagashima rookie card now!

400 game winner Masaichi Kaneda also appears on a couple of cards. One of them is his alone, the other he shares with Dragons pitcher Tsutomu Ina.

All in all a very colorful and neat set.  I need three more cards to complete it and I'm hoping to find them in an uncut sheet someday since it would be kind of awkward to have most of the set in uncut sheets and the rest in singles, though we'll see how that works out!

The oddest of oddball sets

I picked up a really odd set the other day: the JRM 38 1960 Oh and Nagashima Menko set.

This is a picture of the entire set - at just four cards its not a hard one to complete even though it is a bit scarce (in my case I got all four in one go).  It features two cards each of Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima.  According to Engel they were able to date the set thanks to the uniform Nagashima is wearing on the biggest one, which was the Giants' 1960 uniform.  On the other three they are all wearing uniforms from 1959.

 What really makes this set odd though is that none of the cards are the same size as each other.  They get progressively bigger, with Nagashima being on both the smallest and the largest, while Oh is on two that fall in the middle, but aren't the same size.

I don't know of any other card set out there where this is the case.  Even in the bizarre world of Japanese cards from the 50s and 60s, while there are a number of sets which have cards of differing sizes in most of those there are several cards that share the same size (like my good old JRM 8s). I think this is the only set where each single card is of a unique size.

Having acquired the set I now have to figure out what to do with it.  How in god's name are we meant to store these things?  Can't put them in binder pages, can't put them in regular card boxes, can't put them in holders (except the two smallest ones, the larger ones are too big).  I do have a folder for my oversized cards, so they'll probably be temporarily housed in there, but it isn't the best in terms of displaying the cards so I will need to work on that.

Storage issues aside I do really like these cards, they all have pretty good images of Oh and Nagashima on them, with striking background colors.  So its a cool set to have!

Have I Somehow Screwed Myself Over (Japanese Card Collector Edition)?

Its been a few months since I did an update post on my monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set.  There are a lot of reasons for that but the main one is simple: I haven't made any progress in that time on it.  I'm stalled at a little over 70% of the way there.

The frustration at the drying up of the well of cards-that-I-need has caused me to question whether this might actually be 100% my own fault.

Basically my question boils down to this: Did just me buying up cards for this set cause the prices to explode?

Normally this wouldn't be possible, but this isn't a normal set. There aren't a lot of people out there collecting it, and there also aren't a lot of cards from this set on the market.  Low demand but also low supply.  When that type of market exists, even just having one more person enter it can have a huge effect on both supply and prices.

I went on a real tear for a year or so, roughly from mid-2018 to mid 2019, buying up as many singles for the set that I needed as I could find, particularly focusing on the scarce regional or short printed series.  I made good progress, I have more than half of the Dragons and Carp regionally issued series from 1975, and I made some progress on the Carp regional issue from 1976 (the Red Helmet Series) and also the high number series (1400-1436), but still have a lot of holes in those that I need to fill, as I outlined in a previous post.

What I noticed though is that prices on those regional issues shot up dramatically after I entered the market for them.  When I started last summer I could find singles for the two 1975 regional issues for about 1,000 Yen each, and singles for the 1976 regional issue for about 2,000-3,000 Yen each.

Now though you can't get those cards for those prices anymore.  The 1975 regional issues have starting prices about 2,000 Yen each, doubled in a year, and I can't find any of the 1976 Carp issue for under 10,000 Yen (though these are through a seller with very high starting bids.  Still, even in an auction with a low starting bid these cards go for way more than what I was paying last year for them).

With more commonly available cards it would be unlikely for a single buyer to have much effect on price.  But with cards like this, I have this feeling:

I think when sellers see a given series of cards being bought up at 1,000 Yen each, and there are only a handful of them available at any time, they take that as a sign that they are undervalued and up their prices accordingly.  I know for a fact that some of the sellers I bought from did this (and I don't blame them, I'm just observing that this is what they did).  Likewise having another determined buyer competing in auctions forces the other bidders to up their high bids if they want to win, which also has an inflationary effect.

You wouldn't see one person having this effect in the market for more readily available cards, like say US cards from the 50s or 60s, but with the extremely limited number of 1970s Calbee cards out there for auction (a large proportion simply aren't available at all at any given moment on Yahoo Auctions and the ones that are generally might only be 1-2 copies of it) the market is quite different.

So I'm pretty sure I'm personally responsible for having made these cards more expensive, which is a double edged sword.  On the one hand, it kind of validates my earlier purchases since they are selling for more than I paid for them last year.  But way worse than that, as a set collector, it means that buying the remaining cards that I need is going to be a way more expensive task than I had been planning for it to be!

My Shigeo Nagashima Rookie Card

 

Shigeo Nagashima has a LOT of rookie cards from his first season in 1958.  This is not surprising since unlike his team mate Sadaharu Oh, Nagashima's career caught on fire pretty much right away - he hit 29 home runs in his first season and cruised to the rookie of the year award.

The two of them do make an interesting comparison from a menko era card perspective though.  Nagashima's rookie cards were issued in the 1958 sets, while Oh's came the following year.  I haven't counted and don't know anyone who has, but each of them has several dozen cards from their respective rookie seasons which count as rookie cards.  I'm guessing Nagashima probably has more, since he had an entire 40 card set (JCM 32b) devoted to him in his rookie year, which Oh never had.  Their presence seems to make the sets from those two years a bit more popular than the ones from subsequent years which lacked debuts of players of similar stature.

Having picked up an Oh Rookie card over the summer, I also set about trying to find a cool Nagashima one.  I settled for this 1958 Doyusha card (JCM 30a) which has a pretty cool image on the front of him heading home after rounding the bases on one of those 29 long balls he hit that year.  I kind of like the borderless look of this set too.

The back is cool too, with Nagashima's name on it and basically the same design as the 1959 Doyusha set which features Oh's rookie card.

Value wise the Nagashima rookie cards are a lot more affordable than the Oh ones, despite Nagashima arguably being the more popular player (in Japan at least).  This probably reflects the purchasing power of American collectors who are way more likely to go after Oh cards than Nagashima ones.  It also probably reflects the fractured collector interest that having dozens of rookie cards creates.  Individually they are all pretty scarce, but collectively there are a lot of them out there without any one being considered a "definitive" card that collectors can focus their attention on with laser like precision.  So if you've got 10-20$ and a bit of patience you can probably score a Nagashima rookie card on Yahoo Auctions when one shows up!