Baseball Cards

The news is that Major League Baseball made an exclusive deal with Topps for baseball cards, effectively putting out of business the competitors (although Upper Deck can put out cards with players, but without using team logos). A couple of things of interest: the CEO of Topps is Michael Eisner (!), the one-time poobah of Disney, and the sales numbers for baseball cards are down a whopping eighty percent in the last fifteen years (from right before the disastrous strike-shortened season of 1994).

This suggests to me that the baseball card business is one of those that are on borrowed time, like the daily newspaper. The days of kids buying packs of cards are over, at least for sports stars. I know that my nephews avidly collected Pokemon cards some years ago, but were profoundly uninterested in baseball cards. The market for cards these days are adult collectors who pack them away in secure places, either for an investment or just out of a compulsion to own an entire set. Because of this, the value of cards is minimal. Unless you have one of the celebrated rare cards, from the days before this obsessive collecting, you haven't earned much.

Baseball cards were an integral part of my childhood. I collected them starting in the late sixties until the mid-seventies or so. Like most kids, I collected them pack by pack, eagerly going through each one hoping for a big star, and bemoaning cards I already had (having duplicates of a player were called having "doubles," or even "triples"--I remember having "quadruples" of Sandy Alomar, Sr.). They were kept bundled with rubber bands and kept in shoeboxes. As with comic books, they were essentially a disposable item--we traded them with our friends, played games with them by pitching them against walls, and some kids put them in the spokes of their bicycles. I didn't have a bike then, and I wasn't that destructive with my cards.

In the mid- to late-eighties, I had a renaissance of collecting, but I didn't buy packs, so the cards didn't have that pink dust from the gum that was included. Instead I ordered the entire set via mail order. When I got them I would sort alphabetically by team, put them in plastic sleeves and specially designed binders, and then never look at them again. I still have them on a shelf in my hall closet, with each card worth a few cents each. For a while my Dwight Gooden rookie card was worth quite a bit, at least until his coke bust.

I suppose if there are enough collectors Topps could sustain modest gains, but I think the days of selling to kids in convenience stores are rapidly waning, if they're not gone already. I guess there's something kind of sad about that, but time marches on.