Many people may not know that baseball cards are rooted in the tobacco industry.
The earliest baseball cards were placed inside packs of cigarettes. “Cigarette companies used cards with images of baseball players to stiffen their packs of loosely packed tobacco and thin paper wrappings as early as 1888,” according to the Stanford University Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA).
For many years, some players were depicted on the cards with a bulge of chewing tobacco in their mouths, making them spokespeople for Big Tobacco.