Welcome To 1950 Bowman Baseball Cards

Bowman Gum first started manufacturing cards in 1939-1941. They began making cards again in 1948 when the war had ended and there were no longer restrictions on the products needed to make cards. Bowman was the only major sports card maker in 1950 and had a monopoly on trading cards. However, Topps was formed in 1950 and began producing cards as well.

Bowman made mainly baseball cards, but had their hand in making football cards as well. They also made a variety of non-sport cards. They made a set of basketball cards in 1948, but did not make another one until 2003. The 1950 Bowman football card set was a set of 144 cards. The 1950 Bowman non-sport cards included Blony Paper Novelties and Wild Man cards.

The 1950 Bowman baseball card set was a set of 252 cards. They had a monopoly on baseball cards that year, and it would be their last. In 1950, Topps was founded. The 1950 cards were much smaller than what we now consider a standard sized card, measuring 2-1/15 X 2-1/2 in.
The design of the cards had improved greatly this year. The front of the cards in 1950 had a hand-painted color reproduction of an actual photograph of the players. This replaced the 1049 machine-added colors used. There is a white boarder around the pictures and no names or words are present.

The backs of the cards remained basically the same. The only difference is that they appear horizontally. The ads had also been removed from the backs. However, the player's names, team, position, and some biographical information are still present along with the Bowman logo.
Since Bowman did not have any competitors this year, they had most of the major starts of the era in the set. However, the set does not have many big-name rookie cards, which hurts the sets value.

Unlike most sets where the higher numbered cards are harder to find and more valuable, the lower number ins the 1950 Bowman set are harder to find. This includes cards 1-72. The 181-252 cards can be found with or without the copyright on the bottom of the card. The ones without the copyright are not as common.

This set also included non-player manages. Leo Durocher and Casey Stengel had cards. Picturing manages was not new, but featuring them on their own card was new.