Every baseball card should have its own QR code

Imagine displaying your entire physical baseball card collection online. But how? Manually searching and typing each baseball card? Too much work. Scanning in each baseball card? That’s even more work! Googling each card to find an image?

There needs to be a solution to showing your baseball cards online. Enter QR codes. It would be cool if all baseball cards had a QR code on them so you can easily add them to your digital collection. Every single card in existence could have its own QR code. For instance, every Shawon Dunston 1991 Rifleman card would have its own QR code/serial number. Much like how every dollar bill has its own serial number.

These unique serial numbers could then be like a Where’s George. You would then be able to track the ownership history of every single baseball card. The art world functions much like this with expensive workds of art. You can trace the history of ownership of each artwork.

Ok, so all the existing baseball cards do not have QR codes, so this wouldn’t work. But Topps could start putting unique QR codes on all their cards starting in 2013. If the baseball card industry is looking for ways to innovate the industry and to grab collector attention, this is surely a fascinating idea.

Have you ever seen an entire year’s worth of cards from one set online? I haven’t. I imagine Topps frowns upon this, because they would think it deters people from collecting the real physical object. If I could have a webpage full of all the Shawon Dunston cards, why bother getting the actual object? I would argue the opposite. If I had a whole webpage full of the virtual objects, that would get me more engaged with baseball cards and would intice me to start collecting the actual real objects.

Plus, if each individual card had it’s own serial number, then that would further the desire to have the actual object. Since the ownership is tracked, I would want to further trade my cards so that way I can get more deep into the historial ownership records.

Let’s get QR codes on baseball cards!