Through his first years in organized baseball Robinson had kept the promise he made to Branch Rickey: whatever was said to him, whatever was thrown at him, he would not answer. By 1949 the promise had run its course, and he said so. Then he went out and had the best year of his life. He led the National League in hitting at .342 and in stolen bases with 37, drove in 124 runs, and was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player.
Bowman had put out its first baseball set the year before, 48 cards, and Robinson was not in it. This is the company’s first card of him, from its second set: 240 cards, each just 2 1/16 by 2 1/2 inches, small enough to lose in a coat pocket. The fronts are black-and-white photographs tinted with color and set against a single flat background. His is red. He is in a Brooklyn cap with the B on it, smiling straight at you, the Dodgers script running across his chest.
The front carries no name at all. Nobody buying a pack in Brooklyn in 1949 needed to be told.
Card 50 comes from the early part of the set, and like most of the cards in those first numbers it carries no name on the front — the name, the biography and the statistics are all on the back. Bowman would put names on the fronts later in the run, and reissue some of the early cards with them. On this card the picture is the whole thing. Nobody buying a pack in Brooklyn in 1949 needed to be told.
The 1948 Leaf is the card the hobby calls his rookie, and it is the one at the head of his page here. The 1949 Bowman is the card a great many more boys actually held. Bowman was the national brand, the packs were everywhere, and this is the first time Robinson’s face went out to the whole country in a gum wrapper alongside everybody else’s.
A card this small forgives nothing. The white border is narrow, so a centering drift that would pass on a larger card reads at once. The flat red behind him shows every chip at the edge and every rough corner, and the tinting sat on the photograph with varying care, so the color can stray from the shapes it was meant to fill. A sharp one with even borders and the color in its lines is a scarce thing.
