Baseball Cards as American Language

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So my topic here is sort of a continuance of the last essay… baseball cards as American language. I want to delve deeply into this because this is a very specifically American phenomenon. A 20th century American phenomenon — where the baseball card really emerges as a powerful way of translating and communicating the language of baseball

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to a very large group of people. It's a way of making the images and the meaning of baseball, as well as the figures who constitute it, immediately accessible. What I have here is the Jackie Robinson 1954 Topps card. And I think this is a really great example because this is when the baseball card really becomes institutionalized with the Topps sets of the 50s.

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Before there was a diffuse — there's tobacco, there's candy — there's many different issues that pop up. Bubble gum, the Goudeys, they pop up and they swirl. They're trying to create ground or establish what is the identity or the fabric of the baseball card. And it coalesces in 1950, 51, 52 when Topps buys out Bowman

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and establishes itself as the baseball card creator. And through that you have some of, if not consistently, the most iconic designs in baseball card history. And I would also say, art history and American art history — in these early to mid 50s sets. The reason why I say this is you look at what a baseball card is, it's a very egalitarian form. These are

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highly, highly accessible at the time when they emerged, right? It's obviously different now because they're looked back on as history and as artifacts. These are now quote unquote vintage, but you look back at them now — it's hard to imagine how accessible these were. They're made on cheap pieces of cardboard. These are literally images printed on cardboard. And I want to dig a little more

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into that specifically because I think that's really the key to understanding baseball cards. For a long time — I talked about this in my T3 essay — for a long time in Western art history you have this very aristocratic art sense. The art is being made for kings or being made for rulers or the upper class, the Medici's in

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Italy, for example, in the Renaissance period. These are historical artifacts that are meant to be grandiose. They're meant to be...

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significant paintings that depict significant mythologies, whether that's the Christian myth or religion, whether that's Greek mythology, for instance… you have a really radical shift that happens in America around American mythology, specifically American mythology, as it relates to the art or the images of the civilization and the culture at large; the visual images that represent it — in the way that they're produced and distributed.

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These are cheap pieces of cardboard that are distributed in a highly egalitarian way. There's a lot of these mid fifties Topps sets. We're talking about the mid fifties because this is when the baseball card really solidifies and institutionalizes itself. It declares itself.

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As opposed to the first 50 years of the baseball card and even 70, if you want to go back to the Old Judges, where it's still figuring out what its identity is, who it is, what it is. This card, the 54 Jackie Robinson, is a perfect example of

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American myth and art history intertwining and making a very egalitarian and democratic declaration of what American art is and what American culture is. This is my card that I would choose as representative of all baseball cards period. Not only because of the 54 Topps design, but also because of Jackie Robinson. It is a level of iconic historical

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art history that for me far surpasses anything that happens in America otherwise with Warhol or any of these other people who were active in this period, the mid-century period, before and after. Because what it is is it's a declaration of America's collective cultural identity and its principles. The pop art element of baseball cards has been present since the

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lithographic printing machine method existed, which is all the way back in 1909 with the caramels and the T206s. The flat color, the pop of figures, the strangeness of backgrounds in juxtaposition with the attempt to establish context, whether it's fielding or throwing or hitting — this is very pop art style and you can see it in American baseball cards all the way back to 1909. That in itself is a revolutionary understanding.

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But it's just so very clear in the 1954 set; the coalescing of this emergent design sense in a perfect iconographic vision and presentation. I think a lot of this is for legibility purposes and reasons, as well as just ease of printing. You don't have these very complex, high contrast backgrounds. You can just pull the figure out, slap a flat color in the back, and that prints just a thick sheet of yellow; then you have the contrasting color gradients in the figure itself. Dating all the way back to 1909, flat slabs of color create ease of mechanical use and reproduction of design guidelines.

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I think there's that element. But we're talking about this as a holistic visual language. So there's obviously the components of the image. You have the details on the back. This card talks about Jackie Robinson's philanthropic work with youth in the country; talks about his skill on the field in terms of his bio. You have all of his statistics. This is a way of documenting.

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I want to make that clear. This is a way of documenting history. These are pieces of art. They're declarations of American identity in terms of America as a culture and baseball as America's culture — as well as ways of documenting America's cultural, political, and social history. So if you think of ancient frescoes or you think of

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the writings of Plutarch and these ancient Greek and Roman recoveries of history, we have a process here in real time that's simultaneously mythologizing by way of art images — the American myth itself, baseball — as well as documenting in a historical process of marking time with the cultural achievements of our culture's greatest figures.

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There's something to be said here with Jackie Robinson in terms of the merging of culture and politics, because you have different kinds of history, right? You have a political history, which is typically wars, conquests, power, economic, class-based issues, race-based issues. You have these constellations of civilizations and the way that they create boundaries and borders. This is more of a political history of a country, whereas a cultural history is usually

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for entertainment purposes, for joy and enjoyment. That's what's created inside the insulated bubble of a culture or a civilization — is the cultural history. But you have figures, I think Jackie Robinson bar none is the best example, who cross those borders, right? Who make it clear that there is no such thing as a cultural history without a political one and vice versa. Obviously shattering the color barrier in 1947. It's a huge...

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moment where America's dominant cultural mythology collides with America's political realities and presents you with a full holistic vision and view of why, in a lot of ways, culture is first and foremost the way in which nations or civilizations politically evolved. Culture is the lens through which a nation or a civilization views itself and then through that lens it reflects upon itself.

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So if we're watching baseball and all of a sudden you have a black player on the professional US baseball fields for the first time in decades, you're asking yourself, why did this take so long to happen? Why am I having a positive or negative response to this, et cetera, et cetera. It's a vision, right? The same way that you think about TV or movies. These are visions of ourselves as a collective; ourselves as the collective psyche, composed of individual psychic viewpoints and apertures; composed of the legacies of our culture, familial, and civilizational — enfolded into the present moment. The dominant cultural myths and formations are the way through which civilizations envision themselves.

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I talked about this with Plato in terms of wrestling and the Olympic games, as well as the Greek theater. These are all ways through which civilizations achieve a level of self-reflection. And so when you're looking at the baseball card as specifically American, it's a very, very, very revolutionary device because of how egalitarian it is: the way in which it is produced, and

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the material upon which it is produced. So I talked about the cardboard, which is very cheap, very plentiful, but you have these really high quality and really beautiful art images that are transposed on the cardboard. In addition to that, the egalitarian method of distribution (again, as discussed in the T3 essay) — these are mass produced, widely available, produced through industrial means.

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This is very American economics, American capitalism. Produced through industrial means by companies that become consolidated into a political vision of a cultural product. First, it's to sell cigarettes or sell candy or gum. It becomes consolidated and the cards themselves actually become a product. First, they're a marketing tool and then they themselves are a product. It shows the emergence of an American art form that actually mirrors American values. Its an emergent materialism; a political, social, and cultural invention of a creative product produced en masse which actually visualizes and envisions and accommodates the American myth and vision of self, in real time itself.

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So if you think about the Constitution or the founding documents of American civilization, you can think about that document and then look at baseball cards through that lens, and it's one of the clearest examples, I think, of American ideals being translated over time into real form. And so what I mean by that is that

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you have these very lofty, egalitarian ideals — all men are created equal, they're attempting to establish a secular society where all religions can be respected, or appreciated. They're attempting to create a society which is actually very revolutionary in terms of how inclusive it is, right? And so you look at the development of the baseball card through that lens as a cultural product of America's dominant cultural mythology.

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And you can see broad scale and broad scope through, again, through the material, through the art style, through the way they're produced and distributed — these are all ways of creating that reflection. And this is, it's a complex thing because what we're trying to do here is look at America itself through its primary cultural

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phenomenon, which I would say in its most formative and world politically declaring years, which is the 20th century. Hollywood gets bigger and bigger, but you're still looking at, especially mid-century — Yankees, Dodgers, Giants. The battle of New York City. You're looking at baseball as, patently, the phenomenon in American culture and society. And furthermore, with baseball cards, you're looking at its primary cultural product — the way it makes itself available to its political constituents in physical, possess-able, representative, archetypal cardboard form.

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It's a compound topic. We're not just talking about a art historical declaration. These baseball cards are very clearly pop art and pop art being America's art historical, economic contribution to the

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landscape of art history itself. Everything that pop art represents is the commercialism and the ennui and the confusion of hyper-materialism that in turn represents the American political consciousness, or the American spirit or the American soul. It's this everything can and will be sold, business marketing perspective that's laid on top of a real history of violence and oppression

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in order to establish the economic and political possibilities that we now know as American society or civilization. Its cities, its landed borders, its economic powers of production and consumption. Its nationhood. We're looking at that. But we're also looking at the

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way in which the myth is constituting itself and reproducing itself. Because this is what upholds societies and civilizations. Perpetuations and reproductions of myths and stories we tell ourselves which normalize over time. This becomes ‘everyday life’. It's almost hidden because these baseball cards, they seem very innocuous, right? But at the same time, they are a way of creating mass produced art, as well as a mass produced narrative and story, as well as a way for the culture at large to actively participate, possess, own,

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and engage the myth in a way that is not just ephemeral. They ground down the myth and make it real. These baseball cards last. There's entire catalogs of them. There are

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thousands upon thousands of these cards from different sets, different years. They're almost being mass archived by the cultural collective memory, so to speak. They're being mass stewarded into the future by people who are deeply devoted to not only the baseball game, but baseball cards. These are prized possessions for a lot of people. And so when I think about baseball cards, I think about

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the fact that they're produced on cardboard. This is something that's deeply meaningful to me because it really hits this space — it's almost like a spiritual space between meaning and nothingness. They're not pretending to be some sort of highfalutin art historical artifacts. They're not being proclaimed as foundational cultural artifacts or documents. They're mass produced and they had sticks of bubble gum with them. Stuck in packs of cigarettes sold for nickels to factory workers, laborers; people across class lines. There's a

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element of childishness and even meaninglessness that's associated with them. But I think that's where the beauty really comes from. And it's something that's very different and almost absurd that is so particular to American culture and American social values. Because what you're grappling with in the 50s themselves, and I talked about this, is the existentialist revelation of

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hyper-modern, hyper global society and the fallout of the loss of values that occurs during that period of time. And in a lot of ways, baseball becomes a cultural myth out of almost necessity because you lose a lot of what previously were the traditional values of Western civilization themselves, right? There was a sense of regional boundedness and the regional religious, social and cultural mythologies were very self-contained. They were and remained possible due to the technological and political realities of the time that stabilized locality and pockets where myths sustained themselves in their own bubbles of homeliness, so to speak.

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Through the sport of baseball and through the culture of baseball as an emergent global phenomenon, you have the ability — not only for America — but for countries like Cuba (in its attempt to become sovereign from the colonial empire of Spain) to establish themselves and create a collective cultural identity through that event, through that phenomenon; through that collective experience — much in the same way that the Greeks would gather in the theaters and experience the plays of the great

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Greek tragedians and have collective experiences in Rome in the Colosseum, et cetera. So when you look at that, you're looking at these works of art that are cultural forms of documentation and actually establish and uphold the myth itself in their presence. Because these are moments in time that function to document the ephemeral in the eternal; retain the presence of history in the card itself as a form of cultural remembrance; cultural memory. These are still images that

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are iconographic. This Jackie Robinson, again, a great example. It's an iconographic still image that holds in time something eternal about the ephemeral nature of the game of baseball itself. It's not proclaiming itself to be a major work of art or a major painting or major photograph, what have you. These are not considered typically cultural documents, and that's precisely what's so important about them from a very egalitarian

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social and political perspective. The persistence of them, I think, is incredibly important. That's what I got. That's the riff. I hope you enjoy.