Why Leaf Stopped Issuing Baseball Cards After 1949
An interesting look back at history
Why Leaf Stopped Issuing Baseball Cards After 1949
It all started when I came across this snippet the other day:
Now, if you haven’t searched for terms like “baseball cards” in old newspapers (and I’m pretty sure you haven’t), you need to understand something. Articles about the baseball card industry from before the early 1970s are not just rare. They’re practically nonexistent.
Your “baseball cards” search will give you a bunch of results for “baseball card,” which refers to the slate of baseball games for the day. This use of “card” still exists in some sports circles, mostly in boxing, wrestling, MMA, and the like.
Occasionally you might run into articles about illegal gambling operations in which gamblers filled out cards with predictions of how each game would transpire. Those articles tend to refer to “lottery cards” in a way that can be confusing for the would be researcher.
But an article like this about the industry? It’s pretty rare.
As you may or may not know, the Leaf company of Philadelphia produced a baseball set in 1949. This date is commonly referred to as 1948-1949 in the industry, though, as we’ll see later in this article, it really should be just 1949.
This is the traditional understanding of the history of the 1949 Leaf set as described in a late 1980s publication:
Now, the story behind the lawsuit, which hasn’t been frequently told in hobby circles, is that Bowman quickly got a judge to issue a temporary restraining order against Leaf, preventing Leaf from selling its product. Presumably, this would be the reason why about half the cards in this set are so scarce. With no income, Leaf wound up settling with Bowman, agreeing to stay out of the industry until 1951 at the earliest.
According to John Racanelli, who I consider to be the expert on this subject, Leaf tried to work with Topps around 1951, but was brushed aside.
But how do we know that Leaf’s set actually came out in 1949?
Well, we have Racanelli to thank for that bit of information as well.
It turns out that Leaf’s filings in that court case show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Leaf set was not sold until 1949. See, for example, this excerpt from the court documentation:
There’s also this promotional sheet for that Leaf set:
Note in particular the “Copyright 1949” language on the bottom left.
Now, the source of the confusion comes from the fact that a number of the cards have “Copyright 1948” text on the back. For example:
Regardless of what the back says, the undisputed truth is that the set was not sold until March 1, 1949.
See more in this excellent blog post, which is the best source of information on the subject I’m aware of.
The other noteworthy thing about 1949 Leaf is how poor the printing process apparently was. The Complete Guide to Collectible Baseball Cards was correct in saying that the cards aren’t really all that attractive. Actually, the cards also demonstrate a complete lack of consistency in the printing process, as evidenced in this Net54 thread.
For example, consider these extreme printing variations for Stan Musial:
And then there were cards that apparently featured no background color at all for whatever reason:
It’s not unusual to have crazy error cards and bizarre printing variations in first issue sets. However, the variations and the errors you can find in 1949 Leaf put 1981 Donruss and 1981 Fleer to shame.
In the end, it’s probably a good thing that Leaf stopped printing cards. Topps wound up being a much more capable alternative to the Bowman monopoly.