Pat Neshek and his Shohei Ohtani trading card remorse

A Dying Hobby and Investment Vehicle?

It has been nearly nine years now since those know-it-alls at Sports Illustrated essentially declared the notion of baseball card collecting dead. In an article called “The Last Iconic Baseball Card,” Luke Winn laid out the terminal illness of the pastime enjoyed by so many kids in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

His article asserted the ’89 Upper Deck Ken Griffey, Jr. card is the last baseball card worth owning. This small piece of cardboard is the true rookie card for a superstar untouched by any stain from the steroid era.

Here’s what happened. Baseball cards had a true Renaissance in the late ‘80s, and early ‘90s as more and more card companies sprang up. What were Baby Boomers’ toys seemed to become analogous to rare coins or stamps.

Collectors began to differentiate between first cards and rookie cards and seal their best cards in screw-down plastic holders — an industry developed in grading the cards. (Is my Aaron Judge rookie card a true mint or merely near mint?) Nice distinctions exploded, and some bordered on the ridiculous because all the cards available were gorgeous in comparison to many of the cards from the ‘50s.

Those quaint items sometimes showed substantial evidence of awkward, manual cut-and-paste jobs. Following a trade, a player could appear in one team’s uniform, but in a cap for the team he’d been traded to. The caps were clearly slapped onto old photos and simply re-photographed.

None of that occurred during the Renaissance. The photos were sharp. Some great action shots decorated some sets, and designers played with adventurous borders. Nearly no cards were poorly centered. Poor centering equated to an automatic devaluation.