Conlon Baseball Cards Were Special

Andrew Godfrey, April 19, 2009

Charles Conlon baseball cards don’t have all the flashy borders and artwork of  the baseball cards today. The cards centered on the face of the players in most cards.

These were faces of players that had worked most of their life on farms and coal mines and many other trades.

Cards from the 1991 Charles Conlon baseball card set reproduced from his original photos.

The faces on these players say it all with most of them looking very serious including the Casey Stengel card.  I wish they would make cards like this today for the modern players.
Most cards today have action photos which don’t focus on the player’s face. As far as I know nobody has produced any baseball cards similar to the Conlon cards.

If you want to capture the feeling of what it was like to play baseball in the first half of the 20th century this book; Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon will take you back to this time period by letting you look at the players of the past who showed on their faces the lines of a hard scrabble life before and during their years of playing baseball.

These players weren’t playing for millions of dollars like the players of today. They played for the love of the game and to be able to put food on the table for their families.

Babe Ruth was the only player getting paid well during this era. The owners were getting rich while the players got by on what little pay they received from the owners who were hard to bargain with at contract time.