Article on the decline of baseball card collecting

[smalls2598]

I saw this article linked from Deadspin. Pretty interesting stuff that reminds me of my childhood.

 

Slate Magazine

sports nut

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.

Dave Jamieson is a writer for the Washington City Paper.

 

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2146218/

 

[knightni]

Thank goodness I got rid of 2/3rds of mine 10-15 years ago.

[shipps]

As a kid I once tried to sell a signed Don Paul baseball card to the Grandstand so I could go buy a taco but they wouldnt buy it.

 

I bought it from them the day before.

[knightni]

Ah yes, The Pope - Donn Pall was quite a setup guy.

 

I had the 1988 Topps set with his rookie in it.

[shipps]

Ah yes, The Pope - Donn Pall was quite a setup guy.

 

I had the 1988 Topps set with his rookie in it.

 

Thats not him! I tried to sell Don Paul! Thats why they wouldnt buy it!

[lostfan]

Man, thinking about baseball cards makes me sad. I went thru so much trouble to score Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, and Sammy Sosa rookie cards (had the Sosa before he really blew up and before people started talking about steroids). My dad had albums he made that were probably worth a few hundred, between the baseball and basketball cards. Now they're probably all worthless.

[Whitewashed in '05]

Man, thinking about baseball cards makes me sad. I went thru so much trouble to score Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, and Sammy Sosa rookie cards (had the Sosa before he really blew up and before people started talking about steroids). My dad had albums he made that were probably worth a few hundred, between the baseball and basketball cards. Now they're probably all worthless.

I had a few decent ones. Can't remember without looking, but I know I got a Ventura rookie card who was my favorite as a kid. I remember getting a bunch of BJ Surhoffs anytime I bought a pack of cards and getting pissed.

[lostfan]

I had a few decent ones. Can't remember without looking, but I know I got a Ventura rookie card who was my favorite as a kid. I remember getting a bunch of BJ Surhoffs anytime I bought a pack of cards and getting pissed.

Each pack would have like 1, maybe 2 players that were really good, then the rest was probably players you heard of if you watched baseball everyday, but there was a lot of random filler too... lol

 

Then looking back on the stats, this was before OPS and such, I can't remember what stats were there. I think it was BA/OBP/SLG.

[shipps]

I had a Sherm Lollar baseball card that was supposedly worth alot of money and my brother ripped it up.

[southsider2k5]

Its sad. The industry destroyed itself. They had a great niche, but they tried to move into the adult sector and turn it into a business by flooding it with all of those "premium" cards. Eventually that was the death of the industry. They lost a whole generation of kids because it became to expensive and too confusing. When it was 3-5 brands, it was pretty easy. After that, it became ridiculous.

[smalls2598]

Its sad. The industry destroyed itself. They had a great niche, but they tried to move into the adult sector and turn it into a business by flooding it with all of those "premium" cards. Eventually that was the death of the industry. They lost a whole generation of kids because it became to expensive and too confusing. When it was 3-5 brands, it was pretty easy. After that, it became ridiculous.

Exactly. I used to always buy Topps, Score, Donruss or Fleer because they were half the price of Upper Deck. Then all of a sudden, there were so many more 'premium' brands that cost more than Upper Deck with less cards per pack. Since i was a kid, and had a very limited income, it didnt make sense to buy Upper Deck or other premium cards. Eventually i switched to basketball cards when Shaq was a rookie, as it seemed like a better chance to get the good cards since there were less teams and players in the league. Of course, even basketball fell victim to overpriced packages, and I just stopped collecting; it was a sad moment.

 

[NorthSideSox72]

In '91, the summer before I went to college, I sold all but three of my cards. I had a feeling they were going to get too easy to copy, and that would cause the market to collapse. Well, the market collapsed, but apparently not for that reason.

 

I kept these cards:

 

--A signed Carlton Fisk rookie card (its actually three players on the card, Cecil Cooper is one, Fisk, and some nobody)

--A 1959 Mickey Mantle card that I found in an alley, in near-mint condition

--A Score card of Billy Ripken - the infamouse "f*** face" card. I actually have one.

 

The rest I sold, pulled down about a grand for them, which seemed like a ton of money at the time.

 

[Steve9347]

Man... I looooooved collecting cards.

[Chisoxfn]

I still have my cards and will probably always have my cards. I loved collecting the cards back in the days and I remember sitting on the lawn with my friends always arguing who was better, Griffey or Thomas and as the resident Sox fan I always had to argue Thomas. We'd trade and trade and than ride our bikes to the store and pine over some cards we'd really want, every once in a great while shelling out a quarter to get some card we liked or shelling out a buck or two to get a back of cards, only to get 10 Bj Surhoffs, haha.

[ZoomSlowik]

I was still collecting stuff until the late 90's when stuff went REALLY nuts. I didn't have a problem with the Fleer Ultra, Topps Finest, ect., it was when you got to stuff like SP Authentic that started costing you $8 a pack/$120 a box and unless you got lucky and pulled a short-printed rookie or a nice autographed card you'd end up with a giant pile of crap. Then every company had like 3 or 4 sets like that (or worse, there were some super-premium ones that were north of $50 a pack with a guaranteed game-used/autographed card) and the only boxes you could get for less than $80 were the basic Topps/Fleer/Upper Deck sets with virtually none of the big time insert cards.

 

I'm not surprised that people got sick of that, I just wish I had realized it a bit sooner. I hate to think of how much money I spent on cards that are now sitting un-touched in boxes scattered around in various cabinets.

[MHizzle85]

Man... I looooooved collecting cards.

 

[The Ginger Kid]

Man, thinking about baseball cards makes me sad. I went thru so much trouble to score Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, and Sammy Sosa rookie cards (had the Sosa before he really blew up and before people started talking about steroids). My dad had albums he made that were probably worth a few hundred, between the baseball and basketball cards. Now they're probably all worthless.

I have the Frank rookie card if you're still looking.

[qwerty]

http://tradedsets.blogspot.com/

[RockRaines]

I have entire draft box sets from every sport for several years, probably worth zero now. Rose, Ripken, Jordan rookie, probably nothing compared to what they were. Dammit.

[santo=dorf]

I gave up on card collecting right after the strike. I'd love to get rid of them for a decent price. Perhaps selling them by teams on ebay would generate the most interest?

 

I'm betting the internet with stats sites sucked away a lot of the life of cards because there's no reason to look at those cards for historical records. Just goofy pictures and players holding "f*** face" bats.

[rangercal]

I remember when Griffey and Thomas were the cards to get.

[knightni]

I remember when Griffey and Thomas were the cards to get.

I have about 5 of the cards that you have in your avatar.

[Buehrle>Wood]

I remember always buying the packs of the top set that had that famous Frank rookie card with no name on it. I finally got one but it had is name on it. So sad. But awesome.

[bighurt574]

The industry blew it, but I also don't think it's a coincidence that the fall of baseball cards coincided with the rise of computers and the internet. To a large degree, pieces of cardboard with a picture and a few stats are an outdated medium and just aren't going to appeal as much to today's generation of kids.

[knightni]

The companies overproduced from about 1987 to 1994. Then the strike killed off the casual collector.