Topps Baseball Cards of the New York Yankees

The format is approximately 6.5 inches by 9.25 inches. Approx. 100 pages. Wraps. Profusely illustrated in color, statistical tables. The cover has slight chips, wear and soiling. Color replicas (each measuring approximately 1.25" x 2.00") of baseball cards of the New York Yankees, 1952-1986, along with a summary of the highlights of each baseball season. The New York Yankees are an American professional baseball team based in the New York City borough of the Bronx. The Yankees compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) East Division. They are one of two major league clubs based in New York City alongside the National League (NL)'s New York Mets. The team was founded in 1903 when Frank Farrell and Bill Devery purchased the franchise rights to the defunct Baltimore Orioles (no relation to the current team of the same name) after it ceased operations and used them to establish the New York Highlanders. The Highlanders were officially renamed the Yankees in 1913. The team is owned by Yankee Global Enterprises, a limited liability company that is controlled by the family of the late George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner purchased the team from CBS in 1973. The team's home games were played at the original Yankee Stadium in the Bronx from 1923 to 1973 and from 1976 to 2008. In 2009, they moved into a new ballpark of the same name that was constructed adjacent to the previous facility, which was closed and demolished. The team is perennially among the leaders in MLB attendance. The Topps Company, Inc. is an American company that manufactures trading cards and other collectibles. Formerly based in New York City, Topps is best known as a leading producer of baseball and other sports and non-sports themed trading cards. Topps also produces cards under the brand names Allen & Ginter and Bowman. In the 2010s, Topps was the only baseball card manufacturer with a license with Major League Baseball. Following the loss of that license to Fanatics, Inc. in 2022, Fanatics acquired Topps in the same year. Topps was founded in 1938 by four brothers, Abram, Ira, Philip, and Joseph Shorin. The roots of Topps can be traced to American Leaf Tobacco, incorporated by the Shorin brothers father, Morris Shorin, in 1908. American Leaf Tobacco encountered difficulties during World War I, as it was cut off from Turkish supplies of tobacco, and later as a result of the Great Depression. Shorin's sons, Abram, Ira, Philip, and Joseph, decided to focus on a new product but take advantage of the company's existing distribution channels. To do this, they relaunched the company as Topps, with the name meant to indicate that it would be "tops" in its field. The chosen field was the manufacture of chewing gum. At the time, chewing gum was still a relative novelty sold in individual pieces. Topps's most successful early product was Bazooka bubble gum, which was packaged with a small comic on the wrapper. Starting in 1950, the company decided to try increasing gum sales by packaging them together with trading cards featuring Western character Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd); at the time Boyd, as one of the biggest stars of early television, was featured in newspaper articles and on magazine covers, along with a significant amount of "Hoppy" merchandising. When Topps next introduced baseball cards as a product, the cards immediately became its primary emphasis. The "father of the modern baseball card" was Sy Berger. In the autumn of 1951, Berger, then a 28-year-old veteran of World War II, designed the 1952 Topps baseball card set with Woody Gelman on the kitchen table of his apartment on Alabama Avenue in Brooklyn. The card design included a player's name, photo, facsimile autograph, team name and logo on the front; and the player's height, weight, bats, throws, birthplace, birthday, stats and a short biography on the back. The basic design is still in use today. Berger would work for Topps for 50 years (194797) and serve as a co.…