{"id":171,"date":"2014-03-21T01:39:06","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T05:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=171"},"modified":"2015-10-17T21:16:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-18T01:16:20","slug":"md-sy-berger","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=171","title":{"rendered":"Memories & Dreams: Sy Berger"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a bubble gum card story that begins at the kitchen table. Like many tales of \u201coff the field\u201d baseball, it\u2019s a sweet story.<\/p>\n

Sy Berger, a Bucknell University graduate and a World War II veteran, was a young hire at the Topps Gum Company. He made his presence felt from the start, for he was an unusually bright fellow who could work a spreadsheet long before people knew what a spreadsheet was. He was a business whiz kid around the time the Phillies were baseball\u2019s Whiz Kids, winning the 1950 pennant. That was Sy. A man of great intellect and great charm.<\/p>\n

The Shorin brothers, who owned Topps and who worked out of a harborside warehouse\/factory on 36th Street in Brooklyn, sized the young man up and saw the promise in him. At the same time, Berger saw in Joseph E. Shorin, the president, \u201cthe smartest man I ever met.\u201d It was a perfect match to grow the business.<\/p>\n

The company went back to 1938, with its principal product being Topps Gum. \u201cDon\u2019t Talk Chum, Chew Topps Gum\u201d was a World War II expression, telling people not to accidentally release secret wartime information. Despite sugar rationing, the company stayed in business during the war, and then afterwards, sought to expand their base and introduced Bazooka Bubble Gum, named after an odd musical instrument of the day (not after a bazooka gun).<\/p>\n

The company also experimented with including little trading cards in packages of gum, beginning with Frank Buck \u201cBring \u2018em Back Alive\u201d cards, and by 1950, Hopalong Cassidy cards, after the radio and TV show. Modest success, if any.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Bowman Gum had begun packaging small cards of black and white photos of baseball players in their product as early as 1948. The cards had no design quality and didn\u2019t especially catch on. The Shorin Brothers considered baseball an opportunity and appointed their whiz kid the task of taking on the product.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted the cards to help sell more gum,\u201d says Berger, now retired at 86, and living in Long Island. \u201cThat was the whole idea. We didn\u2019t think the cards would take off like they did. We even put \u2018Year\u201d and \u201cLife\u201d for the stats because we thought we might be selling the same set for several years and didn\u2019t want to put \u20181951.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Baseball cards had been around since the 19th century, although except for an occasional set that came and went, the first half of the 20th century had not produced any products that caught on with enough market strength to have a long life. Berger and Topps would change that.<\/p>\n

In 1951, Sy began to work the clubhouses at Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. He got friendly with the players, especially a Giants rookie named Willie Mays. He would bring Bazooka Gum for the players (and helped ween some of them off chewing tobacco). He talked to them about producing a more handsome card product than the one they were seeing from Bowman. He began to sign them up – $125 for an exclusive contract, $75 for non-exclusive. Sy was there, working the clubhouses, and Bowman had no one who could get into the clubhouses. His personality was winning them over.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe created a contract largely with the help of Jerry Coleman of the Yankees,\u201d he says. \u201cEventually, we paid them in merchandise, which they liked because they would be gifts for their wives, for their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next step was designing the cards. And that was where Sy would use his love of baseball to create, for 1952, the \u201cmodern baseball card.\u201d He sat at his kitchen table and designed (with the help of Woody Gelman), the 407 cards that made up the \u201952 Topps set. The front would have color images of the players, names, team logos, positions. The back would have height, weight, bats, throws, hometown, a sentence or two about the player\u2019s accomplishments or hobbies, and stats \u2013 games, at bats, runs, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, RBIS, average (in the case of hitters). For many fans, even today, those are the ones that matter, even with so many more measurements of a player\u2019s performance available. Those are the ones they grew up with, courtesy of Topps.<\/p>\n

Sy was creating a product that would let the fans \u201csee\u201d the players up close, in color, with backgrounds of the ballparks, and the stats and bio information otherwise unavailable<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were some reference books, but they were inconsistent on personal matters. We like to think we standardized it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Topps baseball cards took off. The \u201952 Mickey Mantle card came to be considered his \u201crookie card\u201d despite Bowman having put out a \u201951. Maybe that is all you need to know about the Topps-Bowman battle. Eventually, Topps bought out Bowman and had the market all to itself from the fifties until the late \u201880s.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome thought we were a monopoly, and there were lawsuits,\u201d says Sy. \u201cIn the judges final decision, we were not a monopoly. We were simply the only company that could package cards with gum \u2013 or without gum. It turned out, others could have competed all along (according to the judge), if they had included a puzzle piece or a cookie or a decal. And that\u2019s what came to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eight years after the release of the \u201952 set, during a spring cleanup at Topps, Sy guided a garbage scow into the East River and dumped stacks of uncut sheets of the not-yet-valuable set into the water. There went the coveted Mantle rookie cards to the depths of the river, all part of Sy Berger\u2019s \u2013 and card collecting \u2013 legend.<\/p>\n

Sy\u2019s friendship with the players was among the most loyal the sport provided. He became not only a popular figure in the clubhouses, always renewing contracts, providing cards, and always keeping the clubbies supplied with Bazooka. It was a case of one man\u2019s honesty and personality maintaining loyalties over decades. Mays liked so much that Sy remains Willie\u2019s advisor to this day, and accompanies him to Cooperstown on Induction Weekend.<\/p>\n

Sy\u2019s business prowess wasn\u2019t limited to baseball. He made deals with the NFL on a handshake and went to London to make a deal for Beatles cards with their manager, Brian Epstein. He spent two days at Neverland Ranch with Michael Jackson, selecting photos for a set of cards, with Jackson pointing to photos on the wall to make his choices. He made deals with the NHL, and the NBA. All the while, he never retreated from the hard work of renewing contracts, establishing new friendships, and overseeing the business of making Topps baseball cards a success. He was named \u201cKing of Baseball\u201d at the Winter Meetings of 1982, the first person not on the payroll of \u201cOrganized Baseball\u201d to receive the annual award.<\/p>\n

For this, the hobby world appropriately considers him the \u201cFather of the Modern Day Baseball Card,\u201d something that gives him great pride and satisfaction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe only wanted to sell more gum,\u201d he says. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know that this would become such a part of America\u2019s popular culture. But today, when you think of a player, especially from the \u201850s, \u201860s, or \u201870s, you picture his card. It was the most \u2018up close and personal\u2019 you could get before television really showed you the color of his eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel This is a bubble gum card story that begins at the kitchen table. Like many tales of \u201coff the field\u201d baseball, it\u2019s a sweet story. Sy Berger, a Bucknell University graduate and a World War II veteran,… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2269,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-template-full.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-171","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4s5bl-2L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2419,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/171\/revisions\/2419"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}