Mint Condition

How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession

De: Dave Jamieson

Narrado por: Kevin Young

When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson's parents sold his childhood home a few years ago, he rediscovered a prized boyhood possession: his baseball card collection. Now was the time to cash in on the investments of his youth. But all the card shops had closed, and cards were selling for next to nothing online. What had happened?

In Mint Condition, his fascinating, eye-opening, endlessly entertaining book, Jamieson finds the answer by tracing the complete story of this beloved piece of American childhood. Picture cards had long been used for advertising, but after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into cigarette packs as collector's items. Before long the cards were wagging the cigarettes. In the 1930s cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression. In the 1960s royalties from cards helped transform the baseball players' association into one of the country's most powerful unions, dramatically altering the game. In the '80s and '90s, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing, surviving today as the rarified preserve of adult collectors. Mint Condition is charming original history brimming with colorful characters, sure to delight baseball fans and collectors.

©2010 Dave Jamieson. The author would like to thank The Topps Company, Inc., and The Upper Deck Company, LLC for permission to reproduce their card images. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Learned Some Cardophile History

This was well written and performed. It touched on many aspects of the baseball trading card industry. Giving a diverse 10000 Ft view of the past ,future, good, and bads of baseball cards. Enjoyed it!

Really informative

Great story about baseball cards and their beginngs till what the hobby has become today.

great memories

awesome book. so glad I stumbled upon it. highly recommend to anyone that grew I with cards

How Mint Condition Turned Me Back Into a 10-Year-Old Baseball Fan

I just finished Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession by Dave Jamieson and man… this book got me right in the childhood.

Because I don’t just love baseball — I love baseball culture. The arguments, the myths, the legends, the box scores, the stadium smells, the dusty commons, the glossy stars, the cards shoved in shoeboxes under beds, the ones in plastic sleeves you barely dare touch, the ones you flip through a thousand times even though you already know every stat line by heart.

This book understands that.

Jamieson doesn’t treat baseball cards like some sterile investment portfolio thing. He treats them the way collectors actually experience them — as tiny pieces of history, little cardboard time machines. You open a pack and suddenly you’re ten years old again. You remember where you were when you pulled a certain card. Who you traded with. Which guy you swore was going to be a Hall of Famer. Which cards you ruined in bike spokes. Which ones you protected like museum artifacts.

That’s what this book is about. Obsession in the best way.

I loved how deep he goes into the weird, quirky, sometimes ridiculous stories behind the hobby — the early tobacco cards, the gum-stained classics, the printing errors, the short prints, the collectors who basically turned basements into private Cooperstowns, the boom years, the crash, the comeback, the grading companies, the arguments about what “mint” even really means. It’s funny and kind of insane and also totally American.

And the whole time I kept thinking about my own collecting.

I literally went back and bought the full 1987 set — the same one I tossed when I quit baseball after the ’94 strike. Which, in hindsight, feels like committing a minor crime against my younger self 😅. But getting that set again wasn’t about value. It wasn’t about flipping cards. It was about reconnecting with the version of me who loved the game before labor disputes and cynicism and adulthood got in the way.

That’s what this book made me realize.

I’m not collecting for money.

I’m collecting for memory.

For honoring players. For the mythology. For the art on the cards. For the poses and the airbrushing and the weird backgrounds and the team logos that no longer exist. For the feeling of flipping through pages in a binder and going, “Oh yeah… that guy.” For remembering rookies that burned bright for two seasons and legends that lasted twenty years.

Some of these cards are going on my walls. Framed. Not because they’re worth thousands, but because they mean something to me. Emotional value. Artistic value. Nostalgia value. A reminder of why I fell in love with the sport in the first place.

Jamieson nails that spirit — how the hobby keeps reinventing itself but still circles back to the same core truth: fans want to feel close to the game. They want to hold a piece of it. Literally.

By the time I finished, I was digging through boxes, pulling out stacks, reorganizing, Googling old sets, remembering which cards I chased for years and never got, and which ones I still can’t believe I own. That’s how you know a book hit you — it makes you do something afterward.

This isn’t just a book about baseball cards.

It’s a book about fandom. About memory. About obsession. About how a stupid little rectangle of cardboard can carry entire eras of baseball inside it.

Beautiful book. Honestly.

If you love baseball — and especially if you’ve ever loved ripping packs, trading at lunch tables, alphabetizing binders, or protecting your best cards like museum pieces — this one is a must.

Very thorough story of baseball card history!

I started collecting baseball cards in the early 80's. Somewhere along adolescence I grew out of the hobby but with the recent boom my interest have been rekindled. I loved this book. It tells the complete history of baseball and sport cards in general. As detailed as it is, it also refrains from becoming slow or boring as some statistical readings tend to do. The narrator was good and very easy to follow. My only hope is that with the current market popularity the author would revisit this and maybe add an additional chapter covering the current rise in popularity.