APBA And Mainstream Baseball Card Collecting

A surprising discovery

APBA And Mainstream Baseball Card Collecting

Did you know that APBA card collecting was once treated as another part of mainstream baseball card collecting?

I didn’t until I came across a scan of the second edition of The Sports Collectors Bible, which I believe is the earliest book on the baseball card collecting hobby.

A glance at the table of contents reveals a surprising section:

Tom Heiderscheit, of course, was a very well known contributor to The APBA Journal in those days.

Now, the scan isn’t perfect, though you can make out most of the text:

It’s also interesting to note that Heiderscheit estimated values for old Strat-O-Matic sets, as well as some of the old All Star Baseball discs.

The fact that the Strat card values only reach up to 1974 has me suspicious that this article was exactly the same in the first edition of The Sports Collectors Bible that was published in 1975.

Of course, it wasn’t long after this that mainstream collectors forgot all about sim cards.

When I was a kid, I owned an old book called Baseball Cards: Questions And Answers. I think it was originally published in 1988 or 1989, back during the heyday of the baseball card collecting craze. Anyway, this section always drove me nuts:

The part about how “surprising” it is that people collect “pictureless cards” always makes me laugh. Honestly, collecting sim cards makes more sense to me than collecting bubble gum cards, since you can’t really do anything with your old Topps and Bowman cards other than look at them. Anyway, the $5,000 quoted for the original 1950 set would be an absolute steal today.

There’s a mention of Strat-O-Matic in the back of that book, by the way:

At least they had the courtesy of mentioning that Strat-O-Matic continued to create card sets. And, unfortunately, those Strat games from the 1970s with 4 teams are much more common than many of us would like to admit.