1940s Baseball Card Print Numbers
This might surprise you
1940s Baseball Card Print Numbers
While doing research for an upcoming post, I came across this old Net54 Baseball Card Forum post:
This information apparently came through a court filing by Bowman during its lengthy litigation with Topps at the time.
And, yeah, you’re not seeing things. The estimated total print run of all 1951 Bowman cards is 200,000,000. That would be 200 Million.
Somebody else calculated the total number of each card that would have been printed at that rate:
Now, there’s a problem with these numbers. 1948 Bowman baseball is actually a very scarce set, as everybody with experience in collecting cards from that era knows. It’s hard to believe that there were ever over 1,300,000 copies of each card printed for that set.
Complicating matters is also the fact that 1948 Bowman baseball was released in two series — something that another Net54 post confirmed several years ago.
And, incidentally, if you follow that discussion closely, you’ll start to believe that 1948 Bowman should actually be called 1948 Play Ball. This is what the wrapper looked like:
Back to the original post. Another poster argues that the numbers can’t only be for baseball, and cites PSA graded numbers to prove his point:
Because we don’t have great data on non-baseball cards from the era, I don’t know precisely how many non-baseball sets Bowman made. I do know, however, that Bowman came out with a football set in 1948:
These cards look extremely similar to 1948 Bowman baseball:
Bowman also came out with a basketball set:
Bowman’s 1948 basketball cards look a lot like the 1949 baseball cards. The color on the front stands out right away.
Anyway, the football set included 108 cards; the basketball set had an additional 72. If you add those 180 cards to the 48 cards in the baseball set, you wind up with 228 total cards.
If there were 63.6 million total cards printed out among those 228 different players, you’d wind up with a print run of about 278,947 per card — certainly less than 1949 Bowman.
It doesn’t fit the difference in PSA population between 1948 and 1949, however. My guess is that Bowman’s baseball print run in 1948 may have been small as the company started producing cards again for the first time after World War II, and that a larger percentage of the cards printed went to the football and basketball sets.
If you keep this exercise going, you’ll need to adjust the total print numbers per card for the other football sets that Bowman printed. The company printed a football set every year from 1948 through 1955. Basketball, meanwhile, wasn’t printed again after 1948.
Let me know what you think and if you have any other thoughts or ideas behind this. I’m a bit shaky on my knowledge of the history of non-baseball cards, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other card sets printed by Bowman that I simply didn’t know about.