Baseball card collecting: A pastime with suicidal tendencies

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Baseball card collecting, a pastime that seriously tried to kill itself about 25 years ago, has found new life in engineered scarcity, but will that last?

Baseball card collecting is an MLB adjunct activity that simply refuses to die despite what basically amounts to multiple suicide attempts. Periodically, this results in what might be called think pieces, articles popping up maybe once a decade in “serious” or important sports publications.

One of these was Luke Winn’s article in Sports Illustrated called “The Last Iconic Baseball Card,” published in 2009, a piece asserting that Ken Griffey Jr’s 1989 Upper Deck rookie card is the last trading card worth owning. The subhead for this article referred to “the beginning of the end of a once-thriving industry.”

And yet, baseball card collecting – as well as gathering football, hockey, and even soccer cards – persists, and even garners a little attention here and there if a high-profile card is sold, or, say, a major league player confesses enthusiastically to collecting.

The latest think piece on baseball card collecting is Eric Moskowitz’s “How Baseball Cards Got Weird” from the November issue of The Atlantic, and ten years after SI basically declared card collecting to be on its deathbed, Moskowitz’ subhead refers to an analog hobby that has found a way “to thrive” in our digital age.

The writer runs somewhat quickly over the decline of card collecting in the mid-’90s resulting from the glut of cards produced in what could be called a Renaissance of card collecting that hit in the mid-80s. This rebirth of the activity was basically fueled by adults, as opposed to the kids who actually collected cards in the 1950s and ’60s.

As the 1990s dawned, the several competing card companies simply produced too many cards in total, and specifically, too many rookie cards, the real prizes for collectors at one time. Derek Jeter had eight, for example, but that was a manageable number – sort of. As the century ended, however, there seemed no real reason to collect rookie cards if there were, in fact, 43 different items that could claim the title for a given player – the actual number of Albert Pujols rookie cards, by the way.

Moskowitz’ updates things for the 21st century, accurately reporting on new developments, such as podcast case breaks, for which people pay fees to claim all the cards for a given team as 4000 cards are tediously exposed to the light of day for the first time, and other developments in collecting that amount to engineered scarcity, such as “relic cards,” and the growth of professional, third-party card grading services. (For non-collectors, relics include small pieces of game-used bats and uniforms.)

The case breaks are, as Moskowitz suggests, particularly weird developments – partly borderline “entertainment” and partly borderline gambling. Relic items are also arguably strange, involving the goofy initial activity of reducing a bat or uniform to tiny pieces of itself – the destruction of something of value to create a number of items that, in the aggregate, are worth more, or so it is hoped.

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Baseball card collecting: A pastime with suicidal tendencies

No Longer a Kid’s Game

Such developments are extensions of the reality of card collecting since the ’80s – the activity is no longer a kid’s game or pastime. It is simply too expensive for all but the wealthiest kids in the neighborhood, or maybe no kids in your neighborhood.

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In other words, card collecting is something arguably childish that adults spend money on for fun, hoping to buy into a situation that turns the activity into an investment. The problem is that the money spent is largely unlikely to be recouped. To begin with, the cards themselves, a penny apiece 65 years ago now cost anywhere from 35 cents to several dollars apiece, and few if any cards in a given pack are worth the average cost put out.

Second, the engineered scarcity involved in having a given card professionally graded in the hope of gaining a certified “gem mint” evaluation for your favorite Derek Jeter card involves the expenditure of even more money for protecting that card and then gambling on mailing or shipping it to the professional grader.

Which brings us back to the suicidal tendency of the card collecting industry. Twenty-five years ago, the card makers nearly died by producing too many cards, running totally counter to an important notion for any collecting activity – a rarity. Now, though, the card companies are flirting with the edge of the cliff by over-engineered scarcity, some of which involves searching the backs of cards for serial numbers in tiny fonts, and some (not quite as aggravating) that involves looking for cards with somewhat minor variations on their faces.

I will use a football card I own myself as an example. This is a red variation of the 2018 Panini LeSean McCoy card, which means that the card has a partly red border that on the regular issue McCoy is entirely white and that the brand name (Score) is also printed on the card face, inside the red portion of the border, in a metallic red. This, by the way, makes the brand name almost unreadable, but whatever.

Such variations are typically three to ten times as rare as the regular presentations, although sometimes card companies print actually unique cards. Do you hear the folding money flapping in the wind as it flies out of your wallet? Some of those dollars will pay for internet or hard copy lists of cards with all their variations, and then some more money will chase serious alcohol consumption while you try to understand those variations.

The engineered scarcity Moskowitz writes about will eventually die the death of the four-dozen rookie cards phenomenon. It will not continue to “thrive.” The question is whether that death will be the final, successful suicide attempt for card collecting altogether.

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See, I don’t have very high hopes for my McCoy card – entirely aside from the fact the guy is basically a talented jerk. He had already rushed for over 10,000 yards before the card was even made. I don’t see the red variation making up for the late-career nature of the item.

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