On a recent Sunday at Knollwood Mall in Hopkins, a dozen or so baseball card dealers and traders huddled grimly behind folding tables as the occasional stray shopper passed by. A mere two or three years ago the weekend card shows were several times the size of this one, and prices were astronomical. Not anymore. How to cope with the newly diminished state of affairs? One seller at the Hopkins gathering, a surly balding man named Rick with a ridiculous haircut, actively trumped the customers disinterest with his own. In those rare moments when anyone asked to see the wares stacked in his locked display case, he only glared at them and demanded to know which card they were looking for. No listee, no lookee.
Thirty years ago, before the “serious” card collector’s market existed, only one company—Topps—was still making baseball cards. And because they were for kids and modestly priced, most of them wound up in the trash eventually. If you bought cards and saved them, you might possess something genuinely scarce. The modern collector’s market was born in the late 70s and early 80s as nostalgia-starved baby boomers started paying hefty prices for these talismans of their youth. By 1989, when a company called Upper Deck rolled out its first series, there was suddenly an unprecedented number of new or resurrected baseball card lines.
It was Upper Deck that almost single-handedly transformed the business, first with its glossy production values and later with its proliferation of specialized high-end card lines and marketing innovations such as autograph cards and memorabilia cards, the latter featuring embedded snippets of “game-used” this or that—jerseys, bats, caps, balls, bases, stadium seats; even, in one case, game-used dirt.
The advent of autograph and memorabilia cards changed the industry in a couple ways. It gave manufacturers a direct piece of the top-end collectors’ business, which previously had been an after-market that took years to ripen as cards aged and grew scarce. And it turned baseball card collecting into a species of gambling. These cards were seeded into packs at exceedingly low rates; Upper Deck’s first memorabilia cards typically appeared at rates of one in 2,500 or more packs.
As they exploded in popularity (and purported value—anywhere from $20 to over $1,000 apiece according to the monthly Beckett price guides), these specialty cards came to drive the industry. Predictably, the card companies rushed to give buyers more of what they wanted. By now it’s become common for the higher-end products to contain autographs and memorabilia at rates of one, two, three per box, even one per pack in premium lines. The trouble, of course, is that this glut has destroyed the cards’ book value. Meanwhile the manufacturers’ suggested retail prices have only kept climbing. As a result, it’s not at all unusual to pay $150-$200 per box for the chance to glean a card you would be lucky to get $30 or $40 for at a show. It’s a sucker’s bazaar. Lottery scratch games offer better odds.
And the suckers are catching on. Tim Smith has toiled in these vineyards of human abasement for seven years as the proprietor of the Sports Card Exchange in Robbinsdale. Nowadays, though, his retail shop accounts for barely a third of his income. The rest comes from card shows and Internet auctions. Smith pines for the days when card-collecting was not the near-exclusive province of aging, obsessive white men with too much money. “Ever since Pokémon,” he laments, “kids have abandoned sports cards and not looked back. And they really couldn’t afford most of the products if they did want them.”
It is a strange and dispiriting business, he admits. “It’s the only retail industry I know that’s dictated by price guides. They’re the ones who tell us every month what our product is worth.” He shakes his head. “And nobody believes them anyway.”
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