As I get older, I read obituaries more often. Today, let me offer a doffing of the symbolic cap to Sy Berger, the man who invented the modern baseball card. He made my life a misery. I collected them like any self-respecting American boy (and Brooklyn Dodgers fan) of the 1950s, but I could never teach myself how to flip them accurately so that they would come up matching fronts or backs to the card some friend had flipped, which meant, to my utter frustration, I regularly lost parts of my collection to better flippers. So, Sy, you made an irresistible object and and then turned my life with it into a micro-hell on Earth. May you rest in peace. Tom Sy Berger, who transformed a boys’ hobby into a high-stakes pop culture niche as the father of the modern-day baseball trading card, died on Sunday at his home in Rockville Centre, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 91. His death was announced by his family. Baseball cards date to the 19th century, but for Mr. Berger, the decade after World War II was the perfect time to revitalize them. The Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants dominated baseball, providing a fertile marketing climate aimed at youngsters in the New York metropolitan area who had been born in the immediate postwar years. And throughout the United States, the arrival of television made it possible for youngsters to watch their baseball heroes in action. In the 1950s, Mr. Berger turned the Brooklyn-based Topps company into a name synonymous with those pieces of cardboard that children could flip (calling out front or back), pitch (nearest to a wall wins), trade, or simply admire and store in a shoe box. nytimes/2014/12/15/sports/baseball/sy-berger-91-dies-created-the-modern-baseball-trading-card.html
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 22:14:00 +0000