On Another Field: Baseball Cards Are Back
BaseballDigest.com writers, editors, and staff read other sites. When we find something compelling, we will bring it to you and ask for your opinion as well. I call it “On Another Field” and today, we find the Denver Post reporting that the collecting industry is on the way up. Here is what they have to say:
Kids used to put baseball cards in the spokes of their bicycles to make for a flashier trip around the neighborhood block. For what Leonard Kim was paid for one baseball card on eBay last weekend — $16,403 — he could have bought bikes for his entire neighborhood in Burke, Va. Baseball cards, it seems, are back.
With the consolidation of the card-making industry to just one licensed vendor — Topps Inc. — startling sums are again being paid for single cards, such as the one-of-a-kind Bowman 2010 “Chrome Superfractor” card of Washington Nationals pitching prospect Stephen Strasburg that Kim sold Saturday.
That’s not all.
A card enthusiast paid $743.98 for a 2005 SPx Ubaldo Jimenez autographed 8/10 (eighth out of 10) rookie card on eBay on Sunday. A 2010 Topps Pro Debut Jason Heyward Futures Game 1/1 card was up to $455 Tuesday with a little under four days left in the auction. A check of card sales on eBay showed thousands of recent cards selling for upward of $100.
Does that mean baby boomers and Generation X’ers can expect big paydays for their boxes of baseball cards stacked in the closet, the ones that Mom didn’t toss out? Probably not.
“When people come in with their sets of cards from the ’80s and ’90s and think they’re going to cash in, it’s always tough to see. There was just too much product out there then,” said Bill Vizas, owner of Denver’s Bill’s Sports Collectibles, one of the few area sporting-goods memorabilia stores to survive a decade of tumult in the business. “Sales of packs of cards have been better this year because there’s less product now. It’s more sane. People can actually decide what they want to collect now and collect it.”
That’s because only Topps is now licensed by Major League Baseball to make cards of its players. That scarcity of cards is driving up the value of the class of 2010 sets. In years past, multiple other licensed card companies would have produced their own versions of the Strasburg rookie, diluting the value. According to Dave Jamieson’s recent book “Mint Condition,” as many as 81 billion baseball cards were produced in some years during the baseball-card boom of the late 1980s and ’90s. That glut ultimately made the cards not worth the paper they were printed on.
Read more about the industry’s past and the attempt to rebound from it by clicking here and heading over to the Denver Post.
Topics: Baby Boomers, Baseball Card, baseball cards, Business Sales, Denver Post, Ebay, Game 1, Generation X, jason heyward, Neighborhood Block, Paydays, Pro Debut, Rookie Card, S Sports, Spokes, Sports Collectibles, SPx, Strasburg, Tumult, Washington Nationals
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With all due respect, I wouldn’t exactly say that baseball cards are back, per se. It depends on the perspective you look at it from.
From an industry perspective, you could probably say it is back because people are coughing up big bucks to get top rookie cards.
From a pure collector’s perspective, you could say it’s not necessarily back yet. I view the sales of packs as an indication of whether or not collecting is back. Buying packs is collecting; buying singles is merely just shopping.
I stopped collecting back in 1998 because I was sick and tired of the rising prices of packs of cards. I don’t care for the overly valued inserts at all. To me, collecting was about trying to get complete sets, getting rookies and learning more about the players you know little or nothing about.
If Kurt Abbott were in his prime and playing baseball again today, odds are you wouldn’t find him in many – if any – packs of baseball cards.
The card industry has moved away from having a Kurt Abbott, Ryan Bowen, or Dave Martinez in their packs of cards and shifted into overloading their packs with players such as Derek Jeter. While that may sound like a good thing, I personally don’t think it is.