Some collectors consider baseball-themed postcards as a subset of baseball cards. Several teams have issued their own sets of player cards over the years, many featuring single players. Many players have used their own photographs for autographs (I featured a Yogi Berra postcard here), and postcards have even been used for hobby-related subjects (Here's a reprinted photo, and here's a show announcement). Even Exhibit cards were sometimes used as postcards.
While going through my images, I found a few that are baseball-related postcards:
Postcards appeared shortly after the postage stamp in the 1840s and printed pictures showed up in the 1870s. In the U.S., private companies weren't permitted to offer their own postcards until 1898, but they caught on pretty quickly after that.
At first, the U.S. Postal Service held the right to the word "postcard," so they were called "souvenir cards" and required a notation that they were private mailings until 1901. After that, they were divided on the postage side (which allowed the mailing address to take up one side) in 1907.
While the previous images were only related to baseball in a generic way, I like this one because it's more specific to the sport. Plus, it's humorous rather than sentimental:
I count them as cards and they are the bane to my Virdon collection. The team issue ones are hard to find and the nationally produced ones are highly collected and expensive.
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