Third in a new series
Why do people collect? And in baseball, particularly, how are they different, if at all, from fans? This is the question I ask about Jefferson R. Burdick, about whom so much has been written. He was a hunter-gatherer, a historian, a listmaker — in sum, a dweeb like me. He was just the sort of person I like, who devotes as much attention to his hobby preoccupation as a professional ballplayer might to his occupation … so the difference between jock and nerd, slung at each other in derision, seems scant.
Although a handful of others may lay claim to preceding him as a collector, Jefferson Burdick is my choice for the pioneer. James Whyte Davis, George Ellard, and Nuf Ced McGreevy collected memorabilia from the clubs with which they had long attachments: respectively, the New York Knickerbockers, Cincinnati Red Stockings, and the two Boston clubs. Arthur Folwell was the first to write about his boyhood collection of tobacco cards, for The New Yorker in 1929. Benjamin K. Edwards, a lumber magnate who bequeathed his cards to the Library of Congress, collected these gaily colored cigarette-pack stiffeners even before the subject of this week’s column.
But Burdick is emblematic of the breed. The art collector may pursue a Rembrandt or a Picasso, a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. But the card collector is an inadvertent historian of popular culture, filing away pasteboard prizes for future swaps or sales. In the words of A. Hyatt Mayor — the Metropolitan Museum curator who accepted Burdick’s donation of 306,353 cards, in large batches from 1947 to 1963: “The commonest print always becomes the scarcest. Anybody can buy a Whistler etching, but try to find a Victorian matchbox.”
Burdick remains a hero to a hobby he may be said to have created. Indeed, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) honors one individual each year with its Jefferson Burdick Award. Like Ernie Lanigan, a famous encyclopedist of baseball’s early days, Burdick may have seen only a few professional games. (Of Ernie, Fred Lieb wrote, “After he spent some two weeks with me in the Giants’ and old New York Highlanders’ press boxes … I never again saw him in a major league ball park.”)
For Ernie, the baseball life was about the stats and the stories; for “Jeff” it was about the cards, as testament to an age gone by. As he wrote in Hobbies Magazine in March 1936, when not even the T-206 Honus Wagner would fetch a price in four digits: “Age and obsolescence have given the cards a dignity not usually accorded an advertising medium, but then, I feel that the cards were originally more than advertising….”
Burdick was born in 1900 on a farm in Central Square, New York, 25 miles north of Syracuse. Like other youngsters of that era, he asked his father to purchase various brands of cigarettes so he could get different cards. Though he went on to get a two-year degree in 1922 and stopped collecting for a while, once he was diagnosed with arthritis, his decreased mobility reawakened his interest in cards. In 1939 Burdick issued the first number of The United States Card Collectors Catalog, later retitled The American Card Catalog.
He created an indexing system for American trade (and trading) cards in that publication. The ACC system, as it is now known, uses an alphanumeric code, with N indicating nineteenth-century cards and T identifying twentieth-century cards. The letter is followed by a number that designates the discrete card set. Other collectors widely adopted — and still follow — Burdick’s system.
(Keith Olbermann, a notable collector since the age of 11, offered a different history in a personal exchange: “The N162 and similar with N standing for Nineteenth Century? Burdick did not use it. When we were doing the Sports Collectors’ Bible in 1975 Bert Sugar asked me if there was a good reason 19th Century tobacco cards had no prefix. I said no. He said… “let’s use N for nineteenth” and I said “sure” and since I was the one typing up all the checklists I added it. Burdick named Old Judge ‘172’ and Bert and to a lesser degree I renamed it ‘N172.’”)
A co-worker at Crouse-Hinds and Burdick’s best friend, John DeFlores, recalled that the pioneer’s arthritis was so severe that he could not drive a car; proudly, he insisted on walking without a cane, but his range was limited. DeFlores said that Burdick’s arthritis was so severe that he couldn’t open his mouth wide enough to insert a ball of hard candy. “All he was interested in was his cards … that was his life’s work.” In 1959 he left his job in Syracuse and moved to New York City so he could index his cards more easily and paste them into albums at the Metropolitan Museum.
On January 10, 1963, as the Met’s curator would later describe it, Burdick “twisted himself into his overcoat” and said goodbye, adding, “I shan’t be back.” He admitted himself to New York’s University Hospital the very next day and died two months later. His sister had died, and he left no descendants.
Lanigan the statistician and Burdick the collector are both patron saints of SABR. Whether driven by a desire to recapture their youth, or to experience the drive and intensity of sport in sublimated form, each made a unique contribution to our game. Collectors today, legion in their number where once they were few, may focus on scarcity and star power and value — like comics collectors — in a way that Burdick never did. No, he was a historian, like the men who founded SABR and remain most active in the pursuit of its odd angles and stray bits. Amateurs by definition, they did what they did for love.
PIONEERS: Jefferson Burdick was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.