Negro League cards never produced or didn't survive

[bcbgcbrcb]

Interesting, Kenny. My guess on something like that is a cut-out from a broadside.

[bcbgcbrcb]

Jason:

One thing to remember, for the Negro League teams to promote themselves by having baseball cards printed, there is a cost there and many of the teams were barely able to stay solvent as money was very tight. This may have been why that never happened. Also, the primary means of promotion in the Negro Leagues seemed to be broadsides, probably paid for by the hosts of the games. These were much more prevalent than in Major League Baseball.

[bcbgcbrcb]

Regarding the 1896 Page Fence trade card, that team was probably created with the primary purpose of promoting the Page Fence company (or the company went to the already established team and asked them to promote their product) and thus a card promoting the players would make sense. Throughout the true Negro League era, all of the major teams operated independently with no one representing a company for promotional purposes. Their sole purpose was to excel on the baseball field so I think that was an anomaly and unlikely to have been repeated again.

[novakjr]

I think one thing to consider is the time period of the 40's, that you mentioned, is the effect that ww2 had on baseball and the economy in general(especially in regards to paper). Which is one of the reasons that we don't even see a whole lot of Major League issues during that time period. You'd also have to figure that by the time cards started to be produced in larger quantities again, that integration had already begun..

So realistically, I'd think that the cost of producing cards during this time period would've been too much for the negro league teams to take on, and then by the time costs started to come back down, the negro leagues were already in a downfall due to losing many of it's best players to the major leagues..

Just a coupla thoughts..

[cardaholic]

I would not be surprised if some paper advertising had been created using the pictures of Negro League stars for businesses that served black customers, and I would expect this to be most likely in the formally segregated South (I'm guessing restaurants as the most probable advertisers). These might well have been limited to ephemera that most of us would not now consider as cards - newspaper ads, etc. Stand-alone advertising flyers would have been reasonable, and those of us with broader definitions of cards might deem those to be cards.
It certainly would seem worthwhile to investigate - Birmingham, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, and Chattanooga black newspapers would be the most logical starting point. New York black newspapers would be sensible too. Of course, if you were to find in a library archive an ad featuring a Negro League star as a pitchman for some local restaurant, then you'd have to try to find some other copy you could purchase (unless you're Barry Halper, in which case you'd pay someone to steal it). [Granted, you could find a nice niche market in reprints of a newspaper ad if you think you can do it without fear of a copyright lawsuit.]

[bcbgcbrcb]

Any other thoughts? There were some interesting theories here until the thread got sidetracked.

[Hankphenom]

Sorry, Phil, I couldn't resist. The answer seems simple enough, though, with a much smaller (5-10%) population base with much less disposable income not creating enough of a market to make it worthwhile to produce anything to sell. As for team or stadium issues, they played far fewer games at their home ballparks than their white counterparts, again making for a much smaller potential market.