The SABR Baseball Playing cards Committee is happy to announce that the winner of the 2025 Jefferson Burdick Award is perennial nominee Anson Whaley. Anson is thought to many people as @prewarcards on Twitter in addition to @prewarcards.bsky.social on Blue Sky the place he shares, educates, and conjures up along with his enthusiasm about pre-war card gathering.
Anson’s web site prewarcards.com grew to become the go-to supply for checklists and details about pre-war card units of every type. With that website’s sale final 12 months it grew to become extra of a accomplished challenge (to the extent that something like this may ever be thought of full) worthy of recognition by itself as a repository of data and data.
The checklists and set profiles although are merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of describing how Anson has made gathering rather more enjoyable. For many people, pre-war playing cards are at greatest an enigma if not outright intimidating. They had been the playing cards we grew up hoping to glimpse, by no means ever contemplating with the ability to really personal one. Anson has served as a information, not solely eradicating that layer of unattainability however educating and provoking individuals into discovering how great the pre-war card world is.
His new web site prewarcollector.com is rather more constant along with his function as a information the place he highlights the issues he loves and has been choosing up. The fervour he has for these playing cards is infectious and his generosity and willingness to reply questions is aware of no bounds.
This committee additionally appreciates how his work with pre-war playing cards situates baseball playing cards themselves as a part of the bigger gathering universe which existed within the first half of the 20th century. Baseball playing cards by no means existed in a vacuum and one of the crucial wonderful issues about them is how they hint a direct path to the beginning of photography and print culture. Baseball exhibits up in non-sport sets, foreign sets, and other unexpected places.
The truth that there could be a baseball toehold in any set is likely one of the guiding inspirations of this weblog. As a lot as we’re about baseball playing cards units, we’re additionally about the way in which baseball exhibits up in tradition—each American and worldwide—and the way in which it creeps back into cards once more.
