Baseball Cards: Did You Know?

Baseball Cards: Did You Know?

Jefferson Burdick is widely considered to be the father of baseball card collecting. He was an electrician from Syracuse, New York, who surprisingly never attended a Major League Baseball game. Yet he collected more than 300,000 printed items, especially baseball cards and postcards, dating back to 1860.

In 1947, Burdick starting donating the first batches of his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was so careful with how his collection was displayed that he was given permission to move a little oak desk from his home into the museum and compile the collection himself into albums. In all, Burdick put together the single most important group of baseball memorabilia outside of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

For additional information, please visit this link:

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/drawings-and-prints/burdick-collection