During the last 15 years Topps has sourced many of their photographs via Getty Images. The images are typically well documented and a great resource for historical information & details including photography credits. My favorite facet of the image collection is it allows me to tie a trading card to a specific date.*
Recently I have learned that Getty Images has a “Board” option which is basically a bulletin board or folder in which one can “store” images. I have created a Board titled “SABR Baseball Cards” using this function. The board can be viewed using this link.
I have added a few dozen images to the SABR Baseball Card Board which are related to cards—mostly Phillies.
The Board function also allows comments. For each image added to the Board I have also posted a comment that has the related card year, set and card number. If there is a column written on the card (either here at SABR Baseball Cards or elsewhere) and/or photo I have also added a link to that posting.
Research Process
Researching Card Photos can often be tedious and disheartening. For instance if one goes into Getty Images and searches “Bryce Harper 2025” it returns 4829 images. That is 36+ Photographs for Every Game he played last year (8+/PA). Finding a card in that ocean is just this side of needle/haystack territory. But it can be done:
Let’s work our way through a recent column on Reed Johnson written by John Racanelli.
The best thing about Reed Johnson’s 2012 card (for this type of research) is the seagulls. Searching “Reed Johnson” on Getty returns 3045 images.
“Reed Johnson Seagulls” returns THREE.
And one of those jumps right off the page as the one at the top of John’s column.
Notice the text above the photo gives us a bit of information. We have the Date and Location Wrigley Field June 18 2011. Johnson’s number and position are listed as well as the Cubs opponent, the Yankees. At the end we get the photo credit David Banks—who I am betting is the person that also added “Seagulls” to the description and greatly helped our search.
Editor—Save Authority
If you have editing privileges for the SABR Baseball Cards Board a “Save+” button appears below the photo. This is how we add an image to our Board.
Here is where Editors can add the above mentioned comments.
This is a couple of images I have added to the library. Note below each image there is both a place for a note and there is a count of the number of comments added to the image. Reed Johnson has two, The remainder have one. There is also a notes function that shows where I have duplicated the information for Johnson. I am debating whether to just use this area rather than comments. This is all new and a work in progress.
CrowdSource
There are, of course, tens of thousands of baseball cards. To make this a valuable research tool will take the work of many volunteers. The link above is read-only, if there are any SABR Members interested in contributing to the SABR Baseball Card Board please reach out via a comment below and I will share the edit link.
*Getty Images Misinformation
We should note that the text accompanying a Getty Image is not always accurate, particularly for earlier photos that are often default dated as January 1 of a specific year. This JasonCards column on a Hank Aaron Heritage set notes a number of possible differences we may see between what is on a Trading Card and the data stated within Getty Images. There’s also the Al Kaline story which caught co-chair Nick Vossbrink as well as Topps.
