Baseball cards are the subject of a feature story in The Atlantic, one of the few surviving magazines that actually pre-dates the first baseball cards.
The piece is called “How Baseball Cards Got Weird: A very analog hobby finds a way to thrive in the digital age.”
Writer Eric Moskowitz chronicles the changes in collecting over the years, with an emphasis on the impact of case breakers. He creatively opens with his own experiences participating in a break. It’s a well-written story of how a hobby that’s well over 100 years old has somehow managed to not only survive, but thrive in a world that has seemingly moved on to more interactive pursuits.
“Baseball-card collecting really ought to be extinct,” he writes. “ It’s an analog hobby in a digital world, an expression of fandom in a sport whose attendance is in slow decline and whose cultural relevance is in free fall. But as my experience in Billy Byington’s break suggests, the hobby has not only persisted; it’s found effective, if peculiar, methods of adapting to an inhospitable environment.”
You can read the entire article online but you can also find it in the November print edition of The Atlantic.
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