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Posted By: davidcycleback

Back in those days, CDVs of popular subjects (Abe Lincoln, Queen Victoria) were sold at stores and collected by regular citizens. Matthew Brady had two galleries were you could buy his photos. So the idea of an average citizen purchasing CDVs of baseball teams would not have been a strange idea at the time.

In 1870, the average baseball fan had not seen the Reds or Atlantics play in person and had never seen an actual photograph of the teams or perhaps even any of the individual players. Newspapers, magazines and sporting goods catalogs didn't have the technology to print photo-realistic images. For many, purchasing one of these CDVs was the first chance to see what the players really looked like ... This is one reason why the Old Judges were popular. A card was the first time a kid or adult saw an actual photograph of the player.