Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child's Hobby into a High-Stakes, Billion-Dollar Business

Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child's Hobby into a High-Stakes, Billion-Dollar Business by Williams, Pete. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780026290616.

Taking the reader from the birth of sports cards in the 1880s to the present, Williams investigates the success in the shady world of baseball cards. At the center of the industry is Upper Deck, the largest manufacturer, with sales of over $260 million each year. Williams exposes how the power brokers in the game of baseball have changed this once-innocent hobby forever. Published in 1995 when Williams was a writer and columnist for USA Today Baseball Weekly, Card Sharks has been frequently cited by other authors and remains the definitive investigative look into the trading card business.