Seymour ‘Sy’ Berger
July 12, 1923 – December 14, 2104
Sy Berger, the man who made our hobby what it is today, has died aged 91.
You might well ask who Sy Berger is. Well, you owe him a debt every time you hold your slabs of NRL, AFL, cricket, baseball, NFL or NBA card.
An employee of Topps for over 50 years, Sy was the man who designed the 1952 Topps Baseball card. This set is now credited as the birthplace of the modern age of baseball cards.
Berger’s simple and clean design – player’s name, facsimile autograph, photo, team name and logo on the front; card number and key stats on the back – is the one most sports manufacturers utilise to produce their cards to this very day. Not only that, he standardised the size of a trading card at 2.5 x 3.5 inches. And like all classic designs, it came from Sy toying with a number of differing ideas on his kitchen table while looking for something fresh. With a pair of scissors, slices of cardboard and a pot of glue, Sy and his Topps co-worker Woody Gelman fixed upon the classic design that would win over baseball fans, card collectors and style enthusiasts for decades.
Not only that, Sy Berger was canny enough to entice major league baseballers to sign with Topps so they could reproduce their images on their annual releases. It quickly became a badge of honour for established players and a rite of passage for rookies to be selected by Topps to have a baseball card. And picture this – players were paid a $75 fee, which was usually in the form of white goods or home appliances, or items from the Topps catalogue. Quickly gaining players’ respect, Sy became embedded in the baseball fraternity, claiming many high profile baseballers of the era as dear friends.
To think Topps began life as a chewing gum company, packaging their gum with the baseball cards in wax wrappers to win market share, add value and entice gum chewers. Millions of children have busted a pack of baseball cards, wadded the gum in the corner of their cheek and sat on the porch with their chums to say ‘got it, got it, need it…swap you!’. It seems ridiculous from such simple beginnings arose a hobby that is a multi-million dollar industry with multiple manufacturers and releases each and every year. And no gum!!!
Crazier sill, the 1952 Topps set contained the rookie Mickey Mantle, but overproducing the cards saw Sy still giving the ’52 cards away in the late fifties. It was so bad, that by 1960, with so much ’52 stock left over, Sy Berger arranged to have it taken out on a barge and dumped in the ocean just off New York city. And despite thousands of cards being thumbed, traded, flicked and wedged in to the spokes of bicycles, those cards that survived over zealous parents turfing them out now make a handy investment.
As the years went by, Topps ventured in to other sports and during the 1970′s and 1980′s won many lucrative licensing deals to release movie tie-in trading sets such as the Star Wars trilogy and my personal favourite from the 1980′s – the Garbage Pail Kids. While imitation is the highest form of flattery, most collectors wouldn’t even know that that slab of Derek Jeter, Michael Jordan, Luke Skywalker, Michael Clarke or Cameron Smith is sized and set out, all thanks to Sy Berger.
Topps, baseball card collectors and the cardboard collecting hobby as a whole owes a massive debt to Sy Berger, the ‘father of the modern baseball card’. They say a ‘classic design’ is one that goes unnoticed by most people, but when it changes, everybody notices.
Vale
Writer: Christopher Lauchlan
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