What is unquestionably most significant about the famous 1869 Peck & Snyder Cincinnati Red Stockings card is that it was the very first commercially manufactured baseball card ever produced, the trailblazing pioneer pasteboard of our cherished hobby! The presented example, guaranteed Authentic by the leading authority in sports collectibles, may not be thee very first baseball card ever made, but it's probably among the first few hundred, definitely the first few thousand. We'll never know precisely how many original examples were actually produced, but we do know that hardly more than a dozen have survived, which the learned reader might find rather puzzling. The first officially recorded baseball game, after all, had taken place nearly a quarter century earlier in 1846 in Hoboken, NJ, when Alexander Joy Cartright's Knickerbockers club routed the "New York Nine" in a 23-1 four-inning afternoon affair that displayed, for the admiring throng, Cartright's recently codified "Knickerbocker Rules," which would form the basis for the modern game (three strikes to an out, three outs to a side, no "soaking" or pegging the base-runner, to name a few). An immediate hit with residents in and around the NY metro area, publications of the day had started calling baseball our "national pastime" as early as 1856. The following year would witness the founding of the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), which would number over 100 clubs within the next decade. At this point, at about the same time that the NABBP banned African Americans, it began, not coincidentally, to realize its commercial potential, and in 1869, Harry Wright, the so-called "father of modern baseball," organized the first fully professional team: a squad of 10 men paid to play a game for eight months of the year, from March 15 to November 15. With Harry Wright at the helm and with the support of his talented younger brother, George, who'd won the 1868 Clipper Medal as the best shortstop in baseball and was widely considered the best player of his day, the team would go 57-0-1 against other Association teams throughout the country, from Boston to San Francisco, from New York to the war-ravaged south.
A commercial venture from the start, the tour was massive in scope and naturally produced a number of promotional and commercial byproducts for the purpose of generating revenue: tickets, schedules, handbills, broadsides, programs, and, one of the more recent developments in popular culture, CDVs, or carte-de-visites. Patented in France in 1854 and making their way to American shores by the 1860s, CDVs typically consisted of a 2-1/8 by 3-1/4 inch albumen print pasted to an approximately 2-1/2 by 4 inch board. Measuring the same size as a visiting card, they became popular among friends and visitors boasting of places they'd seen and of people they'd met. Their massive popularity quickly gave rise to the publication of CDVs depicting prominent persons from all over the world, in a period that would come to be known as "cardomania" and that would last until about 1870, when the popularity of the CDV gave way to larger "cabinet cards," which would remain popular well into the twentieth century.
Importantly, some of the finest baseball card collections in the world house a handful of CDVs depicting the game's famous pioneers, first stars, and popular clubs of the 1860s, but none served a commercial purpose like the 1869 Peck & Snyder, which survives in both a small and large format, with the smaller format being about 3 times as rare as the larger. To date, PSA has graded just 2 examples of the former and 6 of the latter, with SGC grading a total of 8 mixed copies (unspecified in its pop report). With at least a few of those cards probably changing holders between companies over the last two decades, it's surprising that so few examples of the first commercially produced baseball card have survived the last 140 years, despite baseball's early popularity. Then again, the US Census of 1870 reported a resident population of just 39,818,449, an astounding 22.6% increase over the 31,443,321 persons counted in 1860. We were a young nation dominated by a tremendous class of recently-arrived immigrant laborers pursuing the American Dream. My point is that there were far, far fewer Americans sipping tea and trading CDVs in their Victorian parlors than there were in Europe and elsewhere around the world, far less than our modern perspectives could ever conceive, so maybe the paucity in surviving Peck & Snyder Reds cards isn't that puzzling after all. Indeed, several other factors can help explain the mystery. First, with the growing prevalence of cabinet cards and eventually mass-produced lithographic cards, CDVs quickly became outdated, much like the vinyl record would give way to 8-tracks, tapes, and eventually CDs. Second, like visiting cards, match boxes, and other insignificant paper products of the 19th century, CDVs were generally considered disposable items, much like American mothers from all parts of the country would consider their children's baseball cards nearly a century later. Third, the various US war efforts over the last 140 years often entailed paper drives to make up for limited paper production in favor of more important manufacturing. And the list goes on...
Finally, while some enthusiasts and auctioneers may claim to favor the more common large format Peck & Snyder card, it is our position that the smaller format issue offered here most likely preceded the larger format, if only by a few years, or even just a few months, and is therefore much more desirable. This makes perfect sense when one follows the historical progression of smaller CDVs to larger cabinet cards at the end of the 1860s. Still another magnificent virtue of the smaller format, however, is the fact that its standard CDV size is almost identical to the standard that would at first be utilized by Topps nearly a century later to usher in an entirely new age of baseball cards, and this correlation in card size between the two periods of "cardomania" is, in our honest opinion, no mere coincidence. In more ways the one, the 1869 Peck & Snyder small version really is the first baseball card ever made! But what more can we say about this Cooperstown-worthy relic from the very first days of professional baseball? Sure, we could easily compare it to other hobby masterpieces like the '52 Topps Mantle or the T206 Wagner, which reports approximately 60 known specimens compared to the dozen or so Peck & Snyders, but why bother? They frankly have nothing to do with each other. Should we estimate its future value 10 years from now? No, although the winning bidder's fortune will unquestionably expand with this acquisition, we can't claim to be fortune tellers. What we can do, however, is leave our readers with an accurate and down-to-earth description of the card's surprisingly resilient condition. Without question, the highlight of this treasured relic of yore is its impossibly well-preserved albumen print, which features such remarkable contrast and precision of image that the admiring enthusiast can easily perceive the individual laces of the players' boots as well as the details of their outrageously styled mustachioed faces. Anyone even remotely familiar with the Old Judge cards produced in the 1880s, which are also albumen prints, can clearly see that the largely unfaded contrast and relatively precise focus of this Peck & Snyder issue is more than admirable. The photo does show some subtle, self-evident stains, but there are no other noticeably significant imperfections: no cracks, creases, paper loss, or other casualties. The photo is particularly well-centered to its pasteboard, which boasts as many virtues for its faults. Excepting the self-evident top right corner, the perimeter rates at about the VG/EX level, with tolerable traces of paper loss to both the bottom left corner on the front and the top right corner on the back, with some unobtrusive soiling around the peripheries of both surfaces. Importantly, there are absolutely no traces of creasing on the front, while the reverse shows a subtle 3/8 inch surface wrinkle extending from the center of the right edge to the "E" of McVEY and an even smaller line, perhaps just a light scratch, directly beneath the upper left apex. The profoundly bold purple print of "The Red Stocking B.B. Club" roster mirrors the obverse image in its glorious state of near impeccable preservation, and the absence of any Peck & Snyder advertising is further proof that this "Small" variation predates the larger ad card, which most likely entered production after the Red Stockings gained national exposure from their successful tour. Unfortunately, despite its success, the team lost its sponsor the following year (perhaps because they didn't produce and distribute enough of their baseball cards!), and Harry would famously move to Boston upon invitation from Ivers Whitney Adams, the founder and president of the Boston Red Stockings, Boston's first ever professional baseball team. Harry brought with him three players from his Cincinnati squad, including George, and together they would win 4 consecutive pennants (1872-1875) in the brief 5-year existence of the National Association, the game's first ever professional league, shortly thereafter replaced by the National League in 1876. And the rest, as they say, like the offered item itself, is history.