The L.A. Times ran an article the other day about baseball cards. The gist of the piece was "how the mighty have fallen," tied to the big Anaheim collectors' show, which has fallen precipitously in attendance over the years. The article tries to explain the problem:
By the late 1980s, many collectors had embraced a risky strategy. Rather than buying cards of proven players, they spent freely on cases of cards to find rookie cards for promising newcomers, hoping that their value would skyrocket if the players enjoyed successful careers.
Bo Jackson's 1987 rookie cards by Fleer and Donruss sold for $15 to $20 in 1991, according to Card Trade magazine, but his cards plummeted in value after a severe hip injury forced him to retire. Today, they sell for about $1. Todd Van Poppel, touted as a pitching phenom when he was drafted out of high school by the Oakland A's, saw his Upper Deck rookie cards sell for $3.50 in 1991. Van Poppel's career fizzled and his rookie card now sells for less than a dime, according to Card Trade.
Card companies also fed the trading card frenzy by introducing multiple 700-card sets of the same baseball players. "A lot of companies felt like they'd struck gold in 1991," said Don Williams, public relations manager for Carlsbad-based The Upper Deck Inc. "They were trying to get the fast buck by continually putting product out there, which got the marketplace out of alignment."
The industry still is trying to recover from the burst bubble. Last year, Fleer was forced to sell its assets to Upper Deck. And venerable Topps on Friday agreed to nominate dissident shareholders — some of them former card collectors frustrated by the company's business strategy — to its board of directors.
Risky strategies and overzealous companies? Sure, but that's just blaming the symptoms, not the real causes, which were these:
1) Adults got involved.
2) Kids got driven away.
3) Kids found other, more exciting things to play with.
When I was a kid, baseball cards were simple- around about February, the wax packs hit the stores. You bought a few, excitedly looking to see what this year's cards would look like. Then you collected cards all season, inspecting the jumbo cellophane packs- the ones with three stacks dangling from a stapled-on cardboard hanger- back and front to see if they had any you still needed. And that was it.
Then, the adults got into it, because someone decided that cards could be traded not the way we did it- swapping your extra Felix Millan and Rick Wises for an Al Kaline you needed- but for cash. And with the earlier waves of Mickey Mantle cards going for a premium, the adults decided that, hey, this could be a way to make a lot of money. Suddenly, kids were out of the equation- collecting no longer meant getting a complete set, it meant getting the "right" cards.
And that's when the rookie card insanity started, and all the companies dove into the fray, and you started getting ridiculous variants like the "gold" cards and the cards with jersey swatches embedded in them. Meanwhile, kids bailed- video games are a LOT more fun.
There was also the phoniness of the valuations. Forget "mint" or "near mint"- the phoniness was more in what you could ever get for a "valuable" card. What ended up happening was a fool's market- older cards, even cards of Hall of Famers, would carry high valuations but nobody was interested in buying them, while all the real money was being poured into buying rookie cards on speculation. The inherent ludicrousness of this- spending inflated prices for rookie cards when the evidence sat in front of you that when that rookie became a Hall of Fame star, there'd be nobody interested in buying the card from you- never occurred to the speculators.
Me? Years ago, I decided to see what my childhood cards were worth. I put a bunch of highly-valued cards- rookie cards of stars, Hall of Famers, popular guys- into plastic binders and headed to a card show. According to the Beckett folks, I had some valuable cards. According to the vendors in the booths, I had nothing. They wanted that year's prospects, not some old guy like Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Don Drysdale. They wanted the next generation's Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Don Drysdale. I got out of there and put the binders on the shelf.
They're still there.
Maybe baseball cards were doomed by technology and changing tastes anyway. Probably so. But the end was hastened when the adults decided to storm the playground and change the rules. They ended up screwing each other, and the kids ended up playing something else.
And as time goes on, lessons are forgotten. They're doing video game tournaments on TV, and there's big money being thrown around. Where there's money, there are opportunistic adults ready to push the little kids aside. I hope there's someplace else for the kids to go when the greedy adults rule the video game world.
Maybe they'll start collecting baseball cards.
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