According to the Beckett database, there have been nearly 3.8 million baseball cards produced over the last 50 years.
That’s not a total number of cards printed – nobody knows that with any certainty – but it is the number of cards created, and that’s a lot. Yet among those millions stand 10 cards that have helped shape collecting in some way over the last half-century.
The task of identifying those 10 was more difficult than you may think. I asked three of my colleagues – Brian Fleischer, Ryan Cracknell and Sam Zimmer – for their input and each offered a thoughtful list of possibilities. Over the course of multiple conversations and e-mails, we ultimately narrowed the field to the 10 cards highlighted in this issue. We then gave them a ranking. Again, easier said than done.
The next order of business was giving the list a name. Important? Key? Significant? Dominant? What exactly was the basis of this rather ambitious list?
We settled on Impact.