Lots of kids and adults still enjoy the hobby of collecting baseball cards, but it is doubtful that many of them have ever thought about exactly how they are made. The largest and perhaps most popular manufacturer is Topps baseball cards. There is a lot of work that goes into creating new ones every year and the process often involves almost 200 people to make just one set of them. A great deal of care goes into every detail to make certain that each and every one has a quality photo, appealing design, and factual information. It is quite astonishing to realize how much time is spent just in planning and deciding upon which players to include and making sure the final product is produced as it should be. Each summer, the manufacturing companies start producing the collections for the next season while also beginning to plan for the ones that will come out in the next year after that.
The whole process starts when photographers who take lots and lots of player’s pictures during spring training and throughout the entire season until the completion of the World Series. Company editors then choose the finest images after looking at hundreds of pictures.
Deciding what to print on the back of each picture is done by writers who must look up information about a player’s statistics as well as additional facts that sports fans would be interested in. It might not sound like a very difficult job, however the work must be done quickly because the information must be ready in just a month after the end of the season.
While the information is being compiled, others are busy working on designs. Sometimes several dozen designs are created and adjusted before the one that looks best is chosen. Computers are used to combine the photograph, design and information and stored on a disk.
During production, computers are again used to position the images into large sheets which are called forms. A form looks kind of like a large poster and can hold about 110 different players on each one. The next step takes place at the printing plant where a proof is made of each of the forms. Everyone who took part somewhere in the process, designers, writers, photo and word editors, then carefully review each form keeping a keen eye out for any mistakes.
Before printing can occur, a photograph is taken of each form and then a printing plate is made when the image is burned onto a piece of metal using ultraviolet light. The printing plate is put into the huge printing press where it presses ink into the paperboard. First, the side with the picture on it is printed onto the board and after the board gets flipped over, a different plate containing the player’s information is then put into the press to print the backside.
A cutting machine cuts the printed sheets into the precise size because if it is cut incorrectly, the final product looks terrible and as a result will not be as valuable. So that there will not be multiple copies of the same player in a pack, a machine separates and mixes them up. Then the stacks move into a machine that wraps and seals each pack. Finally.
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