From nothing to ‘stat backs’

It took more than 40 years, but the Exhibit Supply Company finally put players’ info and statistics on the backs of the company’s baseball cards in 1962. Think about what that means today, in this era of sabermetrics and analytics. ESCO produced more than four decades worth of cards without any information about how good, or bad, a player played.

And beginning in 1921, ESCO produced a lot of baseball cards. In his several articles on Exhibit Supply cards, Sports Collectors Digest writer George Vrechek writes that it took Topps until 1996 to surpass ESCO in the number of years its manufactured baseball cards.

The way analytics has taken