Baseball's Founding Documents up for Auction

One of the cool things about T-206 cards is the journey through time they take you on.

Today's baseball is so slick, manicured, expensive, and media-driven that it takes away much of the "romance" of the game.

T-206 takes us back to a simpler age, when a bunch of guys went out and had fun, got drunk, and gambled! There were no high stakes, no multi-million dollar contracts, no tabloid coverage of anyone's love life. It was just baseball.

The actual story of baseball wasn't quite so romantic though! It wasn't as pure as many make it out to be. Dan Imler, vice-president of SCP Auctions, said baseball “was a rocky endeavor. It was fraught with corruption, mismanagement and gambling was rampant. Professional baseball was really in peril.”

John Thorn, a Major League Baseball historian, said: “Drunkenness, open pool-selling at the ballparks and game-fixing were commonplace.”

At a crucial point in baseball's history, a man named William Hulbert decided to make the game more orderly, a little more respectable, so that it might have a legitimate future.

William Ambrose Hulbert was a grocer and coal trader. He loved baseball and became owner of the Chicago franchise. He grew frustrated with mismanagement and players jumping from team to team during seasons, selling their services to the highest bidder. He convinced other owners that baseball needed regulation.

Hulbert’s secretary, Nicholas Young, summarized the 1876 meeting, and baseball founding luminary Harry Wright took minute-by-minute notes. Fifty years later, in 1926, Young’s son Robert turned over those founding documents to the National League. Later, they were given to the family of a National League executive.

 These documents are now up for auction. It is expected to go for several million dollars.