bxbomb Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 Ahh the good old days , stealing wax packs while playing video games at the local stationary store . Anyone collect ??, i wasnt a big collector for investment purpose , just love havin em. And im glad i didnt buy them for investment purposes as that market peaked 10 yrs agaoPretty cool article on cards from Slate, think im gonna go home and go thru my old cards.Requiem for a Rookie CardHow baseball cards lost their luster.By Dave JamiesonPosted 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hehateme Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 well, i didnt have to steal them, but yes, i was into them when i was a tyke Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bxbomb Posted July 25 Author Report Share Posted July 25 well, i didnt have to steal them, but yes, i was into them when i was a tykedid u get beat up as a kid Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calebdead Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 I was realllllllllly into them when I was about 12-13 years old. Baseball, basketball, college basketball, and football cards, esp.Every month I couldn't wait to get the new Beckett to see how much my cards had appreciated. I loved that shit. I remember trying to save up and buy a whole box. Sitting there and opening up the whole thing was fucking great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bxbomb Posted July 25 Author Report Share Posted July 25 . ". 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.Codica?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hehateme Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 no, but the kids that did steal usually did a lot of the beating-up and now are making fine gas station attendants, plumbers, airconditioner repairmen, etc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Felix_Leiter Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 i think i have my mcquire rookie card somewhere... gotta nice set of cards from the 80s Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fkornre Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 I was realllllllllly into them when I was about 12-13 years old. Baseball, basketball, college basketball, and football cards, esp.Every month I couldn't wait to get the new Beckett to see how much my cards had appreciated. I loved that shit. I remember trying to save up and buy a whole box. Sitting there and opening up the whole thing was fucking great.hellz yea...but i started at like 7 and went till around 17...i used to have em all...but then they started to make too many cards...it became rediculous to keep track of...i still have my upper deck frank thomas with him giving the finger...i remember i got all the raghib ismail cards cause i thought when he left ND for the nfl they would be worth something...boy was i wrong... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bxbomb Posted July 25 Author Report Share Posted July 25 no, but the kids that did steal usually did a lot of the beating-up and now are making fine gas station attendants, plumbers, airconditioner repairmen, etc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bxbomb Posted July 25 Author Report Share Posted July 25 i think i have my mcquire rookie card somewhere... you have any Mcgwire cards also? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Felix_Leiter Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 you have any Mcgwire cards also?for you.. i got a nice dennis "oilcan" boyd card Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bxbomb Posted July 25 Author Report Share Posted July 25 and for you a nice david cone card ...since he played for both ny teams Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vicman Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 i gotta rookie tony gwynn card. better said, i hope i still have it and it hasnt been thrown away like a lot of my childhood shit has. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Felix_Leiter Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 i liked baseball cards.. but once i got into comic books it was over.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vicman Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vicman Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 thats a big card . . . mine was smaller though, but just like that one. gotta <3 the mustard uni's. they should use those again. GO PADRES! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fkornre Posted July 25 Report Share Posted July 25 i liked baseball cards.. but once i got into comic books it was over..wait till you grow up and discover porn... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lucky13 Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 Good article. I collected cards from about 1987 until around 1991. I remember when Topps, Fleer, and Donruss cards were the only ones around. I remember when Upper Deck cards came out in 1989 and I think that was really the beginning of the end of the card industry. We used to pay 40 cents for a Topps wax pack, and then you had Upper Deck cards going for $1.00. Soon afterward, all sorts of junk came out and people began to lose interest. I used to go to card shows almost every Sunday. I ended up trading a bunch of cards away (Mattingly rookie, Canseco rookie, and others plus some cash) for a '64 Mickey Mantle card. I always liked the old cards. I still have that one. Probably the only card I have that has any real value. The others just have sentimental value. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fkornre Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 Good article. I collected cards from about 1987 until around 1991. I remember when Topps, Fleer, and Donruss cards were the only ones around. I remember when Upper Deck cards came out in 1989 and I think that was really the beginning of the end of the card industry. We used to pay 40 cents for a Topps wax pack, and then you had Upper Deck cards going for $1.00. Soon afterward, all sorts of junk came out and people began to lose interest. I used to go to card shows almost every Sunday. I ended up trading a bunch of cards away (Mattingly rookie, Canseco rookie, and others plus some cash) for a '64 Mickey Mantle card. I always liked the old cards. I still have that one. Probably the only card I have that has any real value. The others just have sentimental value.exactly...once topps came out with their "higher" end cards with the gold trim in them i stopped...it was getting ridiculous with the prices for just cards...i hated tho when i used to get a good card and it was ruined by stale gum stuck to it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thehype Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fkornre Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 did anyone on here (besides me) watch the baseball card shows on sat night after midnight...when don west used to give away every card under the sun for like $20.00 and each order got a gem mint 10 mark mcgwire rookie card with it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lucky13 Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 did anyone on here (besides me) watch the baseball card shows on sat night after midnight...when don west used to give away every card under the sun for like $20.00 and each order got a gem mint 10 mark mcgwire rookie card with it...Yep; he was always offering some kinda "once in a lifetime" buying opportunity on something every week. I used to get a laugh out of hearing his voice; the way he got so enthusiastic about everything. He would be a good car salesman!Guess the card market has really hit bottom since he now does coin shows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fkornre Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 Yep; he was always offering some kinda "once in a lifetime" buying opportunity on something every week. I used to get a laugh out of hearing his voice; the way he got so enthusiastic about everything. He would be a good car salesman!Guess the card market has really hit bottom since he now does coin shows.he also does tna wrestling...he has the best voice for sales...and yea he got so excited and everything was a once in a lifetime opportunity...but he would do the same exact deal the following week...i dont know if you listen to opie and anthony but anthony has been doing impersonations of him for years...i laugh so much when he does it cause he is right on...is the card show even on anymore??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kfitz73 Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 he also does tna wrestling...he has the best voice for sales...and yea he got so excited and everything was a once in a lifetime opportunity...but he would do the same exact deal the following week...i dont know if you listen to opie and anthony but anthony has been doing impersonations of him for years...i laugh so much when he does it cause he is right on...is the card show even on anymore???Ever rip a line with your Gooden / Strawberry rookie cards?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fkornre Posted July 26 Report Share Posted July 26 Ever rip a line with your Gooden / Strawberry rookie cards?? funny you asked...i did lines off of the plastic cover of my strawberry starting lineup figure... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.