Booknotes: A House of Cards by John Bloom
A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture
Finished 10/4/20
A rich and interesting study that links collecting, popular culture, structural analysis, sports studies, and historical memory.
This book is the result of Bloom’s PhD research, in which he attempts to locate Baseball card collecting as a site of meaningful, if contradictory social processes. As he notes in the opening chapter, he is interested how " the popularization of baseball nostalgia throughout the past one hundred years illustrates not only conflicting ways of appreciating sports but also the conflicting positions men often feel themselves assuming within modern structures." In other words, he explores baseball card collecting as a mechanism through which men grapple with what it meant to be men once, and what it might mean to be a man today.This is a unique approach to the study of collecting, which often side-steps the structural nodes of meaning that hover over collections in favor of a focus on economic value, or on the idiosyncratic (and individualistic) meanings that collectors place upon their own collections. Indeed, Bloom writes cogently about the ways in which value itself was a site of tension within baseball card collectors as a group, and how the increasing commoditization of a youthful and emotaionally affective hobby brought about contradictions in the ways in which collectors understood themselves and their collections.
Chapter 1 surveys the history of baseball cards from an industry and production standpoint, as well as setting some of the terrain for discussing the organized baseball card collecting world. As he notes, baseball cards (spear-headed for most of the 20th century by the Topps candy company) are a multi-million dollar industry even before the issue of secondary collecting, trading, and valuation markets. This has some important consequences for the subsequent analysis. For one thing, there is no pure period preceding collecting in which baseball cards are not commodities. Whether they were ancilliary to candy marketing, caught up in anti-competitive monopolizing by Topps, or refocused on adults due to demographic and marketing research changes, baseball cards have never been purely emotional or personal objects.
Chapter 1 also sketches some of the primary means through which baseball card collectors form an organized hobby. He discusses collecting journals and newsletters, such as Sports Collectors Digest. He notes that the proliferation of collecting as an economic activity, with major media news stories about the high prices fetched by rare cards, were a source of consternation for many collectors, who saw themselves as engaged in a pre-economic hobby that should not have been commodified. Likewise, the growth of newsletters and journals into mass-media organs required a level of control and professionalism that often rankled collectors as impersonal and alienated.
Chapter 2 foregrounds Bloom’s ethnographic research at baseball card shows in the upper midwest in the late 1980s. Such shows, in which dealers, hobbyists, sports stars and others mingled, sold and traded memorabilia, and socialized were useful points for examining the meaning of baseball cards because though fans attended such shows “out of a sense of belonging, …this also meant creating distinctions of who belonged and who did not, particularly as adult collecting grew increasingly pluralistic, its boundaries ever harder to define.” Such tensions were particularly visible around the dismissive treatment of children at shows, despite most adult male dealers nostalgia for their own childhood collecting, and the treatment of women, who were largely in supporting roles to male dealers or collectors. Bloom also discusses how the growth of the Midwest Collector’s club embodied issues of inclusion and exclusion, as the growth of the hobby built around monetary exchange exascerbated tensions around race and class and expanded competitive sentiments between supposedly amiable collectors.
Chapter 3 builds on this ethnographic account with a focus on collecting sets of cards, either creating complete sets of older cards or purchasing brand new sets whole in the hopes of finding valuable cards therein. Set collecting provides a vantage point for exploring how collectors who began the hobby as children understood its growth and transformation as they continued into adulthood. Particularly for completist set collectors who were attempting to construct sets they had as children, meticulous set collecting provided a way of nostalgically continuing a childhood hobby, but with a rationalized focus that prevented accusations of it being childlike. Bloom argues that the distinctions between the affective and emotional bonds of childhood baseball card collecting stand in contrast to the more rigid, competitive world of adult collecting, and that the masculine tension inherent in “becoming a man” required a reconfiguration of the nature of this childish hobby that in some ways, drained it of the qualities that made it emotionally rich for them as children.
Chapter 4 cotinues this focus on the tensions between collecting as a youthful hobby to an adult masculine one by examining sports collecting newsletters in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps most provocatively, Bloom argues that the growth of professionalized sports card collecting during this time functioned to culturally shield men from the challenges to their authority wrought by the protest movements of the 1960s. The nostalgia inherent in card collecting for childhood was also a nostalgia for a pre-political past in which white patriarchal authority was unquestioned. But he also is quick to point out that such nostalgia belies the ways in which race, class, and gender were themselves in flux in the 1950s. As an example, the growth of baseball cards as the medium through which boys experienced baseball was a function of white flight, which took families away from urban ballparks and into distant suburbs; baseball cards became a commodity that stood in for park attendance, and cards themselves frequently deployed television as a design language that suburban TV watching viewers would have appreciated. And baseball’s centrality as a “national pastime” that unified rather than divided, was a conceit that was actively promoted by team owners and players, but belied by a racially segregated game.
In the conclusion, Bloom restates his thesis that card collecting allowed middle-class white men to make meaning of their relationships to their own masculinity and class position, even as both were in states of flux. Such practices allowed for creativity and self-expression in the often soul-destroying work environments that such men inhabited, functioning as a kind of adult play, even as it reified ideas of patriarchal authority, men’s social and cultural distance from women, and an ethic of individualist competition that inhibited or complicated male-to-male friendship and solidarity. Bloom draws parallels to this kind of conservative nostalgia and the growing (at least in the 1990s) affection for Conservative (capital C) talk-radio and the growth of the middle-class right. But Bloom is also sympathetic to the ways in which fan culture, even one rut with nostalgia, can be a source of genuine pleasure and affective bonding between men, noting “sports remain a powerful component of popular pleasures that many men have a hard time abandoning.”
The book is rich in insights about the relationship between sports, fandom, and masculinity, and locates such relationships both within the political-economic and cultural milieu of the late 20th century, as well as within specific contexts of midwestern sports card collectors. It’s a really fascinating study both for its insights into material culture and collecting, as well as into patriarchal and class structures as they manifest in popular culture.
