Baseball Card = Toy?

So says the Hall of Fame

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Received a surprise email on Friday from the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame & Museum, the surprise being that The Dope either didn’t know or had forgotten that it was on the mailing list. The NBHOF, it turns out, is unveiling limited-edition bobbleheads of the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey, just in time for you to place on your mantel as the conventions open.

I know what you’re thinking, so let’s get to the important part first: Yes, there is a National Bobblehead Hall of Fame & Museum. It’s located on the second floor of a building on 1st Street in Milwaukee that also houses a Stack’d Burger Bar (really good) and Colectivo Foundry, a hip coffee joint that buys from local roasters.

The NBHOF was created by two guys in 2014, because why not. The museum opened five years later. Here’s the website. You can visit for five bucks anytime you’re in Milwaukee, which you will be if you’re attending the Republican National Convention this summer. The Democrats are gathering in Chicago. Driving time from their convention to the NBHOF on 1st Street above Stack’d Burger Bar in Milwaukee: About an hour 45.

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I like these bobblehead guys even though we’ve never met, and the collection itself is said to number more than 6,500 bobbles, which is, you know, weird. But not uncool.

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Anyway, the email reminded me that I also once looked into a thing called the National Toy Hall of Fame, and yes, there is one of those as well. This hall is more established, having been created in 1998. It has grown and even changed locations, and it now resides as part of the Strong National Museum of Play — usually just called The Strong — in Rochester, New York.

Because the Toy Hall of Fame is older, it already has had many years of enshrinees. The criteria for induction include iconic status, longevity, discovery and innovation, all part of The Strong’s larger mission of documenting and studying the history of play.

This place looks amazing — hundreds of thousands of items and exhibits. Even the outside of the building that houses all of it, including the toy museum, is awesome:

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Still, I was taken aback when glancing at the most recent Toy Hall of Fame inductees. Here’s the 2023 Class:

Nerf Toys.

Fisher-Price Corn Popper. (The one you pushed like a lawn mower.)

Cabbage Patch Kids.

and,

Baseball Cards.

I think I speak for the group here when I say: Hold up with this last one.

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Is it possible that, all these years later, many of us never realized we were playing with a toy when we ripped open a new pack of baseball cards? I’ve never remotely considered baseball cards to be a toy, but I suppose I can’t argue that I didn’t spend hours playing with them as a kid.

The Toy Hall of Fame acknowledges the cards’ slightly unsavory history — they were originally given away with tobacco products in the 1880s, an enticement to buy stuff that would maybe eventually kill you — but notes that baseball cards became definitively their own great thing.

“By the 1940s and ‘50s, kids, mostly boys, saved the cards on purpose,” the Hall’s citation says. “They certainly traded them, learned baseball statistics, played games with them, and used them as noisemakers pinned to the spokes of their bicycles.”

I mean, yeah. But two of the 2023 Toy Hall of Fame finalists that didn’t get enshrined were Slime and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure set.

The universe makes no sense.

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Considering how many adults trade baseball cards, speculate on their value and try to make money buying and selling, you can make a decent argument that the cards are as much a business as they are a toy. But maybe we’re just hung up on terms here.

After all, the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2020 included sidewalk chalk. Chess, as in The Queen’s Gambit, was inducted — remember, “Toy” Hall of Fame — in 2013. And there was the memorable kerfuffle of 2005, when “Cardboard box” became an enshrinee.

I guess what constitutes a toy ultimately goes to your personal sense of wonder — and that, inarguably, lies at the heart of play. Also, because of hours spent peering at the backs of baseball cards, attempting to divine God in, say, Ted Simmons’ batting average, I can do simple math calculations almost effortlessly. It’s all good.