Apps Take Positions in the Topps Baseball Lineup - NY Times

By AMY CHOZICK

This baseball season, one of the game’s most beloved and bygone traditions will try for a comeback: the baseball card.

For men (and some women) of a certain age, baseball cards evoke childhood memories of stuffed shoeboxes stored beneath the bed and the flutter of cards clipped to bicycle wheels. But today, as Angry Birds and iPads beckon, the baseball card has fallen out of favor with children.

Now the Topps Company, the leading baseball card manufacturer, is trying to breathe digital life into a once-cherished hobby. On Thursday, Major League Baseball’s opening day, Topps, the 74-year-old company in a business with roots in the tobacco cards of the 1800s, introduced two apps intended to appeal to a more techcentric youth market.

The apps are Topps Pennant, a data-based platform for statistics fans, and Topps Bunt, an interactive game with many of the characteristics of fantasy leagues. Currently, the apps are available only for iPads and iPhones, but they will eventually be introduced for Android phones and tablets, the company said.

They represent important pieces of a larger strategy intended to slowly expand the fading baseball card business into a broader media company complete with digital offerings, and potentially shows, movies and clothing lines.

Behind the strategy is Michael D. Eisner, the former longtime head of the Walt Disney Company, whose private equity firm bought Topps for $385.4 million in 2007. Never a card collector himself, Mr. Eisner said he had initially scoffed at buying Topps, which he described as being in “a postboom era in a rust belt industry.”

Then he started thinking about the brand. “In the world of media, there’s Disney,” Mr. Eisner said in an interview. “In the world of beverages, there’s Coke, but it’s very hard to find companies that have the emotional brand of Topps.”

The company’s finances had suffered because of the decline in baseball cards but “say the word Topps and someone will tell you how their mother threw out their baseball cards from the garage,” Mr. Eisner said.

Last year the company’s main competitor, Panini America, introduced video trading cards with National Basketball Association players that recreate the real thing. But in devising its own digital strategy, Topps chose not to reinterpret the baseball card too literally in its app form.

Instead, Topps hired a former Microsoft and Nokia product designer, Michael Bramlage, to create apps that capture the whimsy and nostalgia of a pack of cards.

“They evoke Proustian memories for generations of American men,” Mr. Bramlage, Topps’s vice president for digital operations, said as he showed off the apps in a conference room at Topps’s headquarters in Manhattan’s financial district. On the walls were giant images of sought-after baseball cards, including Manny Ramirez’s draft card.

“Our goal was to take that D.N.A. and reconstitute them to new platforms,” he said.

At its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s the baseball card industry produced about $1 billion in domestic sales, compared with about $200 million today, according to the Major League Baseball Players Association, whose players receive royalties from the sales.

The market became glutted in the boom years, with more than half a dozen companies selling cards. But at the same time, the baseball memorabilia business was beginning to take off, transforming the nature of card collecting from childhood hobby to big business and grown-up obsession.

To stand out, card companies began to focus on higher-end collector cards. Adults began buying expensive, autographed versions and storing them away as investments.

Collectors began to think of cards as little shares of stock, said Dave Jamieson, author of “Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession.”

Children, priced out of the market for trophy cards, found that affordable cards were becoming more scarce. Many of the local pharmacies and gas stations that sold baseball cards stopped carrying them. Only a few major card manufacturers survived.

Today, the market for baseball cards in the United States is made up of about 70 percent adults and 30 percent children, according to industry estimates.

“The bottom fell out and ever since then the card makers that are still around are trying to get their footing back,” Mr. Jamieson said.

In 2009, Major League Baseball struck a deal that gave Topps exclusive rights to manufacture and sell cards with its logos and players. The commissioner, Bud Selig, said in a statement at the time that the partnership would “restore baseball cards as the game’s premier collectible.”

A thriving baseball card industry in any form is in the interest of the game, because cards engage children with baseball early on, said Evan Kaplan, director of licensing and business development at the M.L.B. players association. “Certain businesses could go away for us, but baseball cards will always be essential,” he said.

Started in 1938 as a bubble gum company, Topps introduced its trademark baseball card, with a player’s photo on the front and biographical information on the back, in 1952 — a practice reminiscent of the tobacco cards inserted in packs of cigarettes in the 1800s. Topps stopped inserting gum in regular packs of baseball cards in 1992.

Mr. Eisner, 70, took Topps private when his company acquired it five years ago, and declined to discuss financial information. But according to a company release, Topps employs more than 400 people in nine countries and in 2010 had revenue of more than $400 million, half of which came from candy products like Bazooka bubble gum, Push Pops and Ring Pops.

In addition to baseball, Topps sells cards featuring National Football League players, W.W.E. wrestlers, European soccer players and Indian cricket stars.

“They’ve focused a lot of their production on creating more of an entertainment experience through the packs,” said Rich Mueller, editor of Sports Collectors Daily.

In 2008 one of Mr. Eisner’s other entertainment ventures, the production studio Vuguru, produced a Web comedy series called “Back on Topps” that satirized his takeover of Topps. He plans more television series pegged to Topps products and a movie tied to the Bazooka Joe character who appears on comics inside gum wrappers.

To run the company, Mr. Eisner tapped Ryan O’Hara, a Harvard M.B.A. who previously held senior executive roles at several of News Corporation’s cable and pay television assets, including the TV Guide channel and BSkyB in Britain.

Mr. Eisner said he sees similarities between Topps now and the Walt Disney Company in 1984 when he took over as chairman and chief executive, a post he held for 21 years.

“We’re not starting with a company as big or worldwide as Disney,” he said. “But Disney was also in postbubble decline and a lot of time had passed since a new product had come out.”

The new apps represent the start of Mr. O’Hara’s digital strategy. The plan calls for a couple of new apps annually that will each require an investment “in the mid-six figures,” according to Mr. O’Hara.

The Pennant app offers detailed interactive graphics on every play in every major league game played since 1952, accompanied by a simple design of team logos and the baseball diamond. “Jorge Posada hit into an out” and “Alex Rodriguez walked” appear on the screen as users scroll through game details.

“This is our more pastoral app,” Mr. Bramlage said, as he scrolled over the statistics of his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers, for 1968. (A year, coincidentally, when the Tigers won the World Series.)

The second app, Bunt, features rows of baseball cards with players’ photos assembled like a board game, rotating as if three-dimensional to reveal biographical information. It allows users to build teams, trade players and compete with other users, much the way fantasy baseball and football work.

The Topps Bunt app is free and the Pennant app costs $2.99 to download to the iPhone or iPad, a little more than the price of the average pack of baseball cards. “We wanted to keep it within a kid’s allowance,” Mr. O’Hara said.