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How baseball cards lost their luster

metirish Jul 25 2006 09:02 AM

I'm guessing most here collected cards so I thought I would post this article. ] Requiem for a Rookie Card How baseball cards lost their luster. By Dave Jamieson Posted Tuesday, July 25, 2006, at 6:31 AM ET Last month, when my parents sold the house I grew up in, my mom forced me to come home and clear out my childhood bedroom. I opened the closet and found a box the size of a Jetta. It was so heavy that at first I thought it held my Weider dumbbells from middle school. Nope, this was my old stash. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of baseball cards from the 1980s. Puckett, Henderson, Sandberg, Gwynn, and McGwire stared back at me with fresh faces. So long, old friends, I thought. It's time for me to cash in on these long-held investments. I started calling the lucky card dealers who would soon be bidding on my trove. First, I got a couple of disconnected numbers for now-defunct card shops. Not a good sign. Then I finally reached a human. "Those cards aren't worth anything," he told me, declining to look at them. "Maybe if you had, like, 20 McGwire rookie cards, that's something we might be interested in," another offered. "Have you tried eBay?" a third asked. If I had to guess, I'd say that I spent a couple thousand bucks and a couple thousand hours compiling my baseball card collection. Now, it appears to have a street value of approximately zero dollars. What happened? Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They've taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn't get out of the game took a beating. "They all put product in their basement and thought it was gonna turn into gold," Alan Rosen, the dealer with the self-bestowed moniker "Mr. Mint," told me. Rosen says one dealer he knows recently struggled to unload a cache of 7,000 Mike Mussina rookie cards. He asked for 25 cents apiece. For someone who grew up in the late 1980s, this is a shocking state of affairs. When I was a kid, you weren't normal if you didn't have at least a passing interest in baseball cards. My friends and I spent our summer days drooling over the display cases in local card shops, one of which was run by a guy named Fat Moose. The owners tolerated us until someone inevitably tried to steal a wax pack, which would get us all banished from the store. Then we'd bike over to the Rite Aid and rummage through their stock of Topps and Fleer. Card-trading was our pastime, and our issues of Beckett Baseball Card Monthly were our stock tickers. I considered myself a major player on the neighborhood trading circuit. It was hard work convincing a newbie collector that Steve Balboni would have a stronger career than Roger Clemens. If negotiations stalled, my favorite move was to sweeten the pot by throwing in a Phil Rizzuto card that only I knew had once sat in a pool of orange juice. After the deal went through, my buddy wouldn't know he'd been ripped off until his older brother told him. He always got over it, because he had no choice: Baseball cards were our common language. In the early 1990s, pricier, more polished-looking cards hit the market. The industry started to cater almost exclusively to what Beckett's associate publisher described to me as "the hard-core collector," an "older male, 25 to 54, with discretionary income." That's marketing speak for the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Manufacturers multiplied prices, overwhelmed the market with scores of different sets, and tantalized buyers with rare, autographed, gold-foil-slathered cards. Baseball cards were no longer mementos of your favorite players—they were elaborate doubloons that happened to have ballplayers on them. I eventually left the hobby because it was getting too complicated and expensive. Plus, I hit puberty. It's easy to blame card companies and "the hard-core collector" for spoiling our fun. But I'll admit that even before the proliferation of pricey insert cards, I was buying plastic, UV-ray-protectant cases for my collection. Our parents, who lost a small fortune when their parents threw out all those Mantles and Koufaxes, made sure we didn't put our Griffeys and Ripkens in our bicycle spokes or try washing them in the bathtub. Not only did that ensure our overproduced cards would never become valuable, it turned us into little investors. It was only rational, then, for the card companies to start treating us like little investors. The next wave of expensive, hologram-studded cards didn't ruin collecting for us—we were already getting too old for the game. It ruined baseball cards for the next generation of kids, who shunned Upper Deck and bought cheap Pokémon and Magic cards instead. This year there are 40 different sets of baseball cards on the market, down from about 90 in 2004. That's about 38 too many. When there were just two or three major sets on the market, we all had the same small pool of cards. Their images and stats were imprinted on our brains. The baseball card industry lost its way because the manufacturers forgot that the communal aspect of collecting is what made it enjoyable. How can kids talk about baseball cards if they don't have any of the same ones? Seeing as the cards I once prized now fetch a pittance on eBay, I decided not to sell my collection. I figure my Boggs rookie is worth more as a keepsake of my card-shop days than as an online auction with a starting bid of 99 cents. The worthlessness of my collection gave me an idea, though. The card manufacturers and the Major League Baseball Players Association have launched a $7 million marketing campaign to remind a generation of children that baseball cards exist. Instead of spending all that money to tell kids that cardboard is cool, Topps and MLB should convince everyone that cards are worthless, suitable for tacking to the wall, flicking on the playground, or at least taking out of the package. In that spirit, the other day I opened three Topps packs that I'd stowed away as an investment in the late 1980s. I even tried the gum, which was no staler than I remember it being 20 years ago. And as I flipped through my new cards hoping to score a Mattingly, I felt that particular tinge of excitement that a generation of kids have missed out on. http://www.slate.com/id/2146218

Johnny Dickshot Jul 25 2006 09:06 AM

Hey! I wrote that article in 1987!

metirish Jul 25 2006 09:09 AM

Iin Ireland growing up the thing was to collect soocer players, but they were not like baseball cards, what you would do is by an album that had all the teams and then you'd buy packs of stickers and try and fill in each team, and of course you'd swap with friends to try and fill the collection.

Vic Sage Jul 25 2006 09:18 AM

Despite my comicbook-collecting fetish, i never actively "collected" baseball cards. Oh, sure, i had some. Who didn't? And I "flipped" cards with the kid next door, Stewie. But even as i was lovingly bagging and cataloging my Silver-age and Bronze-age Marvel comics, i had my baseball cards tacked to my bulletin board, or stuffed roughly into desk drawers, or loosely scattered amongst my dirty laundry. And its not like i was unaware of the collectibility of the cards. I had a cousin with a very impressive collection of late 50s-early 60s cards of NY players (Yanks, Dodgers, Giants, Mets), including a Mantle rookie card in very nice shape. I just didn't care about them. Unlike comics (or SF/fantasy paperbacks, which i also hoarded), the cards had no intrinsic value to me. There was no entertainment value in them, beyond the static picture and blurb on the back, with some stats. It took all of 1 minute to drain a baseball card of all its entertainment value. Whereas a story took time to read, and could be re-read on ocasion, or shared and discussed with friends. "The Hulk could kick Thor's ass!"... "No way that gay viking puts a dent in the Hulk! Hulk is strongest one of all!" I'm not suggesting that card collecting is or was any more or less valid or fulfilling as any other hobby. I'm just saying i was never into it. I did save alot of my Mets yearbooks though.

Edgy DC Jul 25 2006 09:26 AM

Kids should stay out of speculative marketplaces.

KC Jul 25 2006 09:33 AM

I'll read the column later when I have more time, but I can't help but chuckle over the title of the thread. If anything, cards have way too much luster now and that's why I've lost interest.

Vic Sage Jul 25 2006 09:35 AM

they should certainly stay out of businesses where they are trying to compete entreprenaurily (sp?) with experienced adults, with superior judgment and resources. I remember renting tables at comic conventions when i was in 13-14, buying and selling my collection. It was all very exciting, but i wasn't much of a businessman, and i'd get emotionally involved with acquiring certain books (thus overpaying) or needing to shed myself of others (thereby underselling). And the adults in the room were more than willing to take advantage of the stupid kid who just HAD to have that badly damaged Spidey #1 and hated the new X-Men so much he was willing to sell Giant-Sized X-Men #1 for a pittance. But some kids i knew made good business decisions, and it proved valuable lessons for their future careers. To be good at it, though, you had to treat the thing you loved like a commodity and distance yourself from it. I couldn't do that. And i agree its not generally a good idea to encourage kids to do that, either. And when the baseball card and comicbook industries turned their sights on the "serious collector", they sabotaged their businesses to a degree that neither of them have truly recovered from.

Benjamin Grimm Jul 25 2006 09:40 AM

I remember knowing somebody who was hoarding Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, figuring to one day cash them in to pay for his kid's college tuition. I said, "Don't you realize that there are many people doing this? And because of supply and demand, those cards are going to be virtually worthless, even if Jefferies becomes the next Ty Cobb?" Deaf ears. If Mickey Mantle is worth thousands, then so must Jefferies. When I was very young, I thought that each of my comic books would become very valuable thirty years later, since Golden Age comics were selling for so much. I wasn't much past my tenth birthday when I realized that the supply of Marvel Two-In-One would always be high, but the demand would always be low. Supply and demand is a worthwhile thing for people to understand. And it's not even a difficult concept.

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 10:13 AM

="Yancy Street Gang"]I remember knowing somebody who was hoarding Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, figuring to one day cash them in to pay for his kid's college tuition. I said, "Don't you realize that there are many people doing this? And because of supply and demand, those cards are going to be virtually worthless, even if Jefferies becomes the next Ty Cobb?" Deaf ears. If Mickey Mantle is worth thousands, then so must Jefferies. When I was very young, I thought that each of my comic books would become very valuable thirty years later, since Golden Age comics were selling for so much. I wasn't much past my tenth birthday when I realized that the supply of Marvel Two-In-One would always be high, but the demand would always be low. Supply and demand is a worthwhile thing for people to understand. And it's not even a difficult concept. Heh, good point, look at that Piazza card I posted some time ago. Considering Mikey's place in history, regardless of the fact that Carlos Delgado is putting up "HOF consideration" numbers as well, Piazza's Topps rookie card should be right around what Johnny Bench's card currently goes for. But because of the same market winds that hurt the Jefferies market makes that card available for less than a buck these days. For a guy who is easily top 5 all time catchers in MLB history (Bench, Berra, Cochrane is up there, peeps will put Gibson on that list, see how the steroid era shakes out to put Pudge Rodriguez on the list) and a very popular player in both largest markets in the country, (LA and NY) not to mention playing on the second most popular team in the sport's history (Dodgers behind the Yankees), that truely is a pathetic sign of how speculation destroyed the hobby

sharpie Jul 25 2006 10:22 AM

There were too many kids starting in the '80's who cared not at all about baseball but only got cards as "investments." Took all of the joy out of it. Lenny collected cards for about a year, then stopped.

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 10:46 AM

And thats why the big money now is in the stuff that is infused with things like cut signatures, swaths of uniforms, bats, balls, gloves, ect The base set now has been rendered irrevelant. Good news though for guys like me who perfer now to collect specific team cards with no plans for investments Though it does stink for completits because now there is more products for retired players when 10-20 years ago, once the player retired the new product they'd be on would just be a trinkle, maybe one of the big sets puts out a small "Greats" subset or a regional company or a small company (Conlon, Ted Williams, ect) (or store) puts a small set out, now retired player sets come out routinely from the big companies, including the special infused cards which means completits of retired players now have more products to try and find every year as opposed to a finite number.

KC Jul 25 2006 10:57 AM

SJR: >>>that truely is a pathetic sign of how speculation destroyed the hobby<<< Is there anything sports you're not an authority on, Steve? Bench's rookie card is worth more than Piazza because it's from the late 60's when there were tons less cards made there are fewer around. It's not a measure of where he stacks up in "greatest hitting catcher of all time race". Substitute the word 'saturation' for 'speculation' and then you'll be getting somewhere.

RealityChuck Jul 25 2006 11:22 AM

Hell, by the 80s, only a fool would think current cards would be worth all that much. Prior to 1970, maybe, but that was because people would throw out their cards. Older cards were rare, which made them valuable. But by 1980 everyone knew not to throw out their cards. So no rarity, no value. BTW, this pattern has occurred in other hobbies. Stamp collecting, for instance, went through something similar in the 60s or so: stamps became valuable, bringing in speculators, inflating the prices and driving out the casual collector, and, when the bubble bust, leaving the hobby a shell of its former self. I was lucky -- the majority of my cards are from 1970 or older. I assume they have dropped a bit in value, but I do see my Bill Denehy Rookie Card is currently over $200 on eBay.

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 11:26 AM

Good point with the saturation. I should have included that as well. Thats why as Yancy said you had all those Jefferies cards being hoarded, there were more of those on the market than there were of a Johnny Bench, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan back in the day. Over production does not equal higher demand, just means you are left with a ton of Mackey Sassers and Randy Milligans as well as your Cal Ripkens and Dennis Eckersleys. Hell at the height of over production of the market Leaf-Donruss actually boasted about having the most Frank Thomas (the current one) cards in their products than any other company (Thomas was under license so clearly they wanted the most bang for their buck) and had multiple Thomas cards all over the base sets and various chase and subsets Popularity of a player though does come into play somewhat as well though, which is where the Piazza on the all-time list comes from. Steve Carlton rates higher than Nolan Ryan on anyone's all-time list yet Ryan has more popularity, hence his card values are greater.

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 11:28 AM

RealityChuck wrote: Hell, by the 80s, only a fool would think current cards would be worth all that much. Prior to 1970, maybe, but that was because people would throw out their cards. Older cards were rare, which made them valuable. But by 1980 everyone knew not to throw out their cards. So no rarity, no value. BTW, this pattern has occurred in other hobbies. Stamp collecting, for instance, went through something similar in the 60s or so: stamps became valuable, bringing in speculators, inflating the prices and driving out the casual collector, and, when the bubble bust, leaving the hobby a shell of its former self. I was lucky -- the majority of my cards are from 1970 or older. I assume they have dropped a bit in value, but I do see my Bill Denehy Rookie Card is currently over $200 on eBay. Heh, wonder what Jerry Koosman's rookie card is up to now. Jerry likes to kid the fella he shares it with about the value

Edgy DC Jul 25 2006 11:33 AM

]BTW, this pattern has occurred in other hobbies. Stamp collecting, for instance, went through something similar in the 60s or so: stamps became valuable, bringing in speculators, inflating the prices and driving out the casual collector, and, when the bubble bust, leaving the hobby a shell of its former self. I wonder how may kids sitting on a pile of beanie babies that their collector's guides said was worth $40,000 were bitterly disappointed.

seawolf17 Jul 25 2006 11:47 AM

I think I'm the only active baseball card collector here in the Pool, but my active collecting is of things I like, not things that necessarily have any value. I'm now working on amassing Kevin McReynolds, Keith Hernandez, and Pete Harnisch collections -- my two favorite players as a kid and the one guy from my high school who made it to the big time -- and none of those are really of any value other than to me. Everyone's points are correct; the market is very different today then it was many years ago. It got too crazy too quickly in the early 90s, and the people who grew up on it lost a lot of interest. It became more about the big dollar than the enjoyment of ripping open wax packs. Now Topps and Upper Deck sell packs for upwards of $200. Swing through your local card shop some day; you'll be astonished at prices. Hell, they're not even available in every store the way they used to be; I used to get a 35-cent pack of cards every time my mom took me to the drugstore, or the supermarket, or the stationery store, or wherever. Obviously, times change, but you can see why kids would rather play video games sometimes. Admittedly, though, I still dig it. I'm active on a card trading board, [url=http://www.thebenchtrading.com/thebench/index.php?referrerid=3495]The Bench[/url], which I'm using to finish off the things I need. And I started last year completing just the Topps base sets. I also just started a Mets card project for MiniWolf, collecting nine cards from each Topps set since 1962. It's something I can use to talk about Mets history with him, and something we can build every year as the new sets come out. (What nine do we put in this year?) (In case some of you have old Metsies you're looking to donate to a nice home, the cards I need can be found [url=http://www.freewebs.com/seawolf17/metsprojectneeds.htm]here[/url].)

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 12:05 PM

From the A-P Baseball Card II thread ]SteveJRogers 437) Pumpsie Green 3B, 1963 Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 649 Posted: Sat May 06, 2006 1:27 am Post subject: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a pretty darn good card, and you can get it pretty cheap. Really, thanks to overproduction of base sets and the High End craze of paraell (sp) sets and memorabillia/autograph cards and Lord knows what else, you can find this first apperance in a Topps base set of one of the top 5 catchers of all time as well as a borderline HOFer Also an ex-Met for 4 games before becoming another nameless and faceless backup backstop and a fellow drafted by the Yanks who never played a single MLB game! I'm not as serious as Seawolf, but I do know my stuff, I'm not the Mike Francesa of this board or anything

Benjamin Grimm Jul 25 2006 12:19 PM

We've seen you fly off the handle. You're more Mad Dog than you are Mike.

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 12:20 PM

Yancy Street Gang wrote: We've seen you fly off the handle. You're more Mad Dog than you are Mike. Heh, you should've seen me after the Roaster walked in the winning run in 1999!

Frayed Knot Jul 25 2006 01:44 PM

I remember an investment advisor suggesting I buy stock in one of the baseball card companies (forget which one). I got the idea he wasn't a sports fan and I told him I wanted no part of it since most of the companies in it were fly-by-night and a shake-out in the industry was sure to follow since the value of those things was based almost entirely on the fact that people thought the value would forever increase. One of the few good moves I've made in my life.

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 01:59 PM

Frayed Knot wrote: I remember an investment advisor suggesting I buy stock in one of the baseball card companies (forget which one). I got the idea he wasn't a sports fan and I told him I wanted no part of it since most of the companies in it were fly-by-night and a shake-out in the industry was sure to follow since the value of those things was based almost entirely on the fact that people thought the value would forever increase. One of the few good moves I've made in my life. Heh, so true. Topps and Upper Deck are the only real "safe" companies

HahnSolo Jul 25 2006 02:06 PM

Page Two Chimes in on baseball card memories (pay attention to the DJ Gallo portion, he must be Yancy's buddy): http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=baseballcards/060725

ScarletKnight41 Jul 25 2006 02:09 PM

As with any collectible item, once it hits "craze" status, the time to get in there and make money is long past.

metsmarathon Jul 25 2006 02:37 PM

i love my two thousand or so 1987 topps baseball cards, wherein i think i have about twenty ben ogilvie's and nowhere near a complete set. ugly ass wooden cards.

SteveJRogers Jul 25 2006 02:42 PM

metsmarathon wrote: i love my two thousand or so 1987 topps baseball cards, wherein i think i have about twenty ben ogilvie's and nowhere near a complete set. ugly ass wooden cards. Hey a Brewers fan would pay up to...uh...15 bucks...err cents for those! Heard a story about couple of years ago though where this real cretin of a card seller actually told a kid I know that he was getting a complete set of 1987 Topps at a bargin since it had "Barry Bonds' Rookie Card" when in actuality the kid bought it around book value.

Benjamin Grimm Jul 25 2006 02:46 PM

More on this topic from April, in the All-purpose baseball card thread Scroll down to the article I pasted from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

ScarletKnight41 Jul 26 2006 11:02 AM

[url=http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=caple/060726]Caple has a column on the subject[/url]

Edgy DC Aug 12 2006 05:08 PM

I clipped this from... somewhere. The New York Mets are teaming up with Topps and Hyundai to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1986 team that won a World Series title. On Aug. 19, the first 25,000 fans to enter the stadium will receive a set of cards in the style of 1986 Topps cards. The set includes Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Ray Knight, Davey Johnson, Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell, Keith Hernandez, Sid Fernandez, Ron Darling, Howard Johnson and Roger McDowell.