[bmarlowe1]

My understanding is that MLB does have a pretty strict definition of what a baseball card is and they are highly protective of their intellectual property with respect to this. If one tries to distribute what they consider a card depicting major leaguers (NL or AL) of any era in major league uniforms without a license they are not happy.

There was an unofficial SABR project to produce colorized cards of early players for distribution to members. Hundreds of different cards were produced (yes - they are a set) and they are amazingly good, glossy and all. In the end (at least so far) they could not be distributed.

Of course we can distribute images of players among the membership in many forms (newsletters, magazines, books, etc.) with no problem. Perhaps, instead of cards, we should try making a set of CDVs.