Apps Take Positions in the Topps Baseball Lineup An iPhone showing the Topps Pennant app, costing $2.99. This baseball season, one of the game's most beloved and bygone traditions will try for a comeback: the baseball card. Topps executives with iPads showing Topps's new apps: Ryan O'Hara's, left, has Pennant, and Michael Bramlage's has Bunt. For men (and some women) of a certain age, baseball cards evoke childhood memories of stuffed shoeboxes stored beneath the bed and the flutter of cards clipped to bicycle wheels. But today, as Angry Birds and iPads beckon, the baseball card has fallen out of favor with children. Now the Topps Company, the leading baseball card manufacturer, is trying to breathe digital life into a once-cherished hobby. On Thursday, Major League Baseball's opening day, Topps, the 74-year-old company in a business with roots in the tobacco cards of the 1800s, introduced two apps intended to appeal to a more techcentric youth market. The apps are Topps Pennant, a data-based platform for statistics fans, and Topps Bunt, an interactive game with many of the characteristics of fantasy leagues. Currently, the apps are available only for iPads and iPhones, but they will eventually be introduced for Android phones and tablets, the company said. They represent important pieces of a larger strategy intended to slowly expand the fading baseball card business into a broader media company complete with digital offerings, and potentially shows, movies and clothing lines. Behind the strategy is Michael D. Eisner, the former longtime head of the Walt Disney Company, whose private equity firm bought Topps for $385.4 million in 2007. Never a card collector himself, Mr. Eisner said he had initially scoffed at buying Topps, which he described as being in "a postboom era in a rust belt industry." Then he started thinking about the brand. "In the world of media, there's Disney," Mr. Eisner said in an interview. In the world of beverages, there's Coke, but it's very hard to find companies that have the emotional brand of Topps. The company's finances had suffered because of the decline in baseball cards but "say the word Topps and someone will tell you how their mother threw out their baseball cards from the garage," Mr. Eisner said. Last year the company's main competitor, Panini America, introduced video trading cards with National Basketball Association players that recreate the real thing. But in devising its own digital strategy, Topps chose not to reinterpret the baseball card too literally in its app form. Instead, Topps hired a former Microsoft and Nokia product designer, Michael Bramlage, to create apps that capture the whimsy and nostalgia of a pack of cards. "They evoke Proustian memories for generations of American men," Mr. Bramlage, Topps's vice president for digital operations, said as he showed off the apps in a conference room at Topps's headquarters in Manhattan's financial district. On the walls were giant images of sought-after baseball cards, including Manny Ramirez's draft card. "Our goal was to take that D.N.A. and reconstitute them to new platforms," he said. At its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s the baseball card industry produced about $1 billion in domestic sales, compared with about $200 million today, according to the Major League Baseball Players Association, whose players receive royalties from the sales. The market became glutted in the boom years, with more than half a dozen companies selling cards. But at the same time, the baseball memorabilia business was beginning to take off, transforming the nature of card collecting from childhood hobby to big business and grown-up obsession. To stand out, card companies began to focus on higher-end collector cards. Adults began buying expensive, autographed versions and storing them away as investments. Collectors began to think of cards as little shares of stock, said Dave Jamieson, author of "Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession." Children, priced out of the market for trophy cards, found that affordable cards were becoming more scarce. Many of the local pharmacies and gas stations that sold baseball cards stopped carrying them. Only a few major card manufacturers survived. Today, the market for baseball cards in the United States is made up of about 70 percent adults and 30 percent children, according to industry estimates. "The bottom fell out and ever since then the card makers that are still around are trying to get their footing back," Mr. Jamieson said.