Get Your World Series Programs Here!

By KEN BELSON

They feature some of the nation’s most famous players, managers, owners, stadiums and even presidents. There are pictures of elephants, bears and tigers, as well as cartoons of babies and spacemen. Some graphics are Baroque, while others scream Art Deco.

The World Series program has been a chronicler of the ages, a mirror not only of baseball’s biggest stage, but also of the game’s link to the world wars, the Great Depression and the optimism of the space age.

Starting Wednesday, fans in St. Louis can get their hands on the latest in a line of programs that date to the first modern World Series, in 1903. They will spend $15 for a glossy volume of about 300 pages that is stuffed with articles about their team’s favorite players and their opponent’s. It will include seven blank scorecards — one for each game — for those who track each inning by hand.

The programs will also be faint reminders of the versions printed a century ago, when they were little more than a thin scorecard with basic information on the teams and cost 10 cents. Back then, the programs were local productions, designed as each team saw fit. Now, they are a lot more corporate, designed by Major League Baseball rather than the teams involved. In fact, there are now three programs for each World Series: one modeled for each team’s fans and a third, more generic, version for the public at large.

Major League Baseball also produces the programs for the two league championship series, while the eight teams in the first round of the playoffs make the programs themselves.

Baseball took control of the process in 1974 to standardize what had been an ad hoc approach and to generate additional revenue for all of its teams, not just those in the postseason. It was also an acknowledgment that the program was the most popular World Series souvenir and an increasingly coveted item by serious collectors, and therefore deserving of a more organized approach.

“The World Series is the big megillah for us, and programs are probably one of the most important licensed products we make,” said Howard Smith, the senior vice president for licensing at Major League Baseball. “When a Phillies fan’s team makes the playoffs, he wants to be part of it. We customized clinching shirts and hats, so customizing the programs was a natural.”

Digital publishing technology makes customized programs possible. The league designs programs for each potential World Series matchup weeks before the postseason begins. Within minutes of the final out in the league championship series, the final three versions are sent to Quad/Graphics in Sussex, Wis. Within two hours, the first programs are on trucks headed for the city serving as host for Games 1 and 2.

This helps ensure that fans in St. Louis will have programs to buy when they show up Wednesday night at Busch Stadium for Game 1 of the World Series between the Cardinals and the Texas Rangers. It is so important to Major League Baseball that programs be on hand before Game 1 that drivers are told to check in every few hours on their way to the drop-off point.

Smith declined to disclose precisely how many programs are sold each year, but he noted that more programs were sold at the first game of the 2005 White Sox-Astros World Series, at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, than there were people in the stadium, which has a capacity of about 41,000.

Last year, program sales were strong because the Rangers were in the World Series for the first time. Even after the San Francisco Giants captured the Series in Game 5 at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, dejected fans stuck around to buy multiple copies of the programs, Smith said.

These days, World Series programs have a longer shelf life, at least in the winning team’s city, because retailers like Modell’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods will sell them after the Series is over. They often stay on the shelf through opening day the next year, with a bump in sales around Christmas.

“Baseball fans have a sense of history, and not everyone does these days,” said Ira Mayer, the editor of The Licensing Letter, which tracks the sale of licensed sporting goods. Of the World Series programs, he said, “It’s physical and tangible, and everything else is here and gone.”

The first programs were physical and tangible, too, but relatively few exist because fans in those early days rarely thought of them as collectibles. The World Series was new and the programs were primarily scorecards that fans used to keep track of the games in the days before scoreboards started to make them redundant.

In the earliest years, the programs included little more than team photographs, brief player profiles and, of course, advertisements, said Tom Shieber, senior curator at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The covers of the programs in the Hall of Fame collection from 1903, 1909 and 1925, which all involved the Pittsburgh Pirates, included no references to the World Series. The programs were printed by the home teams (or their concessionaires, like Harry M. Stevens) and, with a few exceptions, everyone charged a dime.

The price held until 1913, when the New York Giants charged 25 cents for the first time. The cover that year showed John McGraw, the manager, shaking hands with a Revolutionary War patriot, an allusion to the Philadelphia Athletics, the American League opponent. “Congratulations, John!” it reads, “Five Championships in Ten Years!”

Gradually, the program covers became more elaborate. In 1917, months after the United States entered World War I, the Giants chose an illustration of President Woodrow Wilson throwing out the first pitch. It includes the inscription, “A big enough boy to enjoy the national game — and — a man big enough to guide our country through its greatest crisis.”

A photograph was included on the cover for the first time in 1924. When teams played each other in consecutive years, as the Yankees and the Giants did between 1921 and 1923, the covers looked very similar. The covers during the Depression sometimes show steely-faced players in an Art Deco design.

In 1938, the Chicago Cubs experimented with a type of laminated program that, Shieber said, has withstood the years well. The next year, the Yankees chose a likeness of Lou Gehrig, the first time a recognizable player was included. In 1942, the program cover urged fans to buy war bonds. Few programs from this and earlier eras exist, partly because fans contributed many of them to the paper-collection drives for the war effort, according to Chris Ivy, the director of sports auctions at Heritage Auctions in Dallas.

That, of course, has driven up the value of those programs that remain. Last year, a program from the 1903 World Series sold for $96,000, Ivy said.

Prosperity returned after the war, and teams started charging 50 cents for World Series programs in 1947. In 1960, the Yankees used a wraparound photograph of the team on the program’s cover. In 1966, the Baltimore Orioles became the first team to charge $1.

In 1974, the league started producing a single program for both teams. The content inside was expanded to include material on all four teams in the postseason. The price was doubled to $2, and steadily escalated until 2003, when $15 was charged for the first time.

So many World Series programs are printed these days that there is a good chance that someone who buys one never attended any of the games. But it was that connection that made the older programs, which could be bought only at the stadium, so appealing and meaningful.

“This is the most obvious keepsake, especially because you kept score in it,” said Shieber of the Hall of Fame. “In a sense, it was autographed by you and it had a tie to a moment.”