Vintage baseball cards you can use!

Now that baseball is in full swing, let’s pause between innings to go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when pro ball included teams like the Boston Beaneaters, pitchers threw underhanded and gloves were optional. This would be in the mid– to late 19th century, when the game wasn’t yet America’s pastime and guys were still sorting out the rules. This was also the time when baseball cards, like gloves, were getting to be a thing. The Library’s marvelous Benjamin K. Edwards collection, featuring some 2,100 baseball cards from 1887 to 1914, are part of the Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of copyright-free images that you can use any way you’d like. There are more than 100 sets that have been curated, including posters from the golden age of travel, the art of the book, real and imagined aircraft and so on. Baseball cards in this era often came in cigarette packs, as did our hero image above of Mike Mattimore, he of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1888, posing here in more the suggestion of a slide than the actual thing. Old Judge cigarettes was one of the first companies to make trading cards (they at first…

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