SELECTED BY
MARK LAMSTER
JOHN M. WARD BASEBALL CARD, 1887
DESIGNER
UNKNOWN
Like so many boys, my first prolonged exposure to a piece of graphic design came in the form of baseball cards. These nonfunctional objects are pure works of design, and even in my adolescent years, I had a tendency to evaluate them as such. While I always put a premium on acquiring star players from my favorite Yankees, I also went out of the way to pick up cards and sets that I found visually compelling, immersing myself for hour after hour in their every typographic and compositional detail.
A few years ago, after writing a book on the early history of the sport, I picked up a facsimile of the first great baseball card, an 1887 John M. Ward, one of ten baseball players in Allen & Ginter’s “World Champions.” Allen & Ginter made a newfangled product called cigarettes and stuck the cards in the packs to push sales. Only much later were they sold with gum. Ward was a particularly compelling figure. The star shortstop of the New York Giants, he was a tabloid fixture on the order of Derek Jeter. He was also a lawyer, trained at Columbia University, who founded the first baseball players union. In 1889, he led the players in that union to form their own upstart league, the Players’ League, in competition with the established National League. That was a failure, but he continued to play professionally. He is now in the Hall of Fame.