The History of Trading Cards

4 Elements

2010-09-29T19:22:00.001-07:00

1) Bibliography
2) Electronic Communications Tool – Emailed question to BaseballCardBuyer.com
3) Notetaking Tool – Awesome Highlighter
4) Productivity Tool – Comic Life

My comic book, A Brief History of Baseball Cards and my bibliography can be found on my Google Site: https://sites.google.com/site/s574project1/.

To download the PDF of the comic, click on the link inside the document “Link to Comic Book.doc”.

Wishing

2010-09-26T19:37:00.000-07:00

The biggest strength of this project was the volume of material written about the subject. Obviously, the fall of the baseball card industry affected many others in the same way it affected me, and they were moved to write about it. Jamieson’s book, Mint Condition, is the perfect example. I read his bio and learned that he graduated from college in 2001. He also talks about how he was into collecting during the same time frame that I was, so I’m guessing that we are pretty much the exact same age. Reading his book, I could feel the same emotional ties to his baseball card memories that I have to mine. We seem to have been affected in much the same way.

If I were to point to a weakness in my inquiry, it would be that, like I mentioned earlier, it seems that every author/source has reached a consensus on the issue. There doesn’t seem to be any wondering just what went wrong…not much room left for speculation. But I don’t know if that really qualifies as a weakness…it’s more like, “Alright, mystery solved!”

I envision a similar inquiry being more difficult if the evidence had not been so one-sided. In this instance, the card companies seemed to realize their mistakes, and really never tried to place the blame elsewhere. An inquiry into some other past event could potentially prove more difficult if there was more conflicting evidence or more he said/she said type of arguments.

I would like to think that the personal inquiry experiences of students, especially young adults, would very closely mirror my own. This was my first official attempt at a personal inquiry, but the process made me realize that I’d been doing inquiry on a smaller scale for a long time. A good example of this is the process by which I found Williams’s Card Sharks. I already had Mint Condition, so I used a technique that I often use when searching for new books for pleasure reading…I consulted Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature. Mint Condition led me directly to Card Sharks. This boils inquiry down to a very basic level. Callison (2003) explains how inquiry encourages you to work “from general background resources to provide a beginning for understanding the topic before tracing the more specific resources” (p. 26). I realize that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” is very basic, but it’s a good way to see connections others have made to a certain subject area. Additionally, Callison & Preddy (2006) explain that the “foundation for evidential considerations comes from a review of associated literature” (p. 402). Many of the suggestions, or “associated literature” linked to Mint Condition dealt solely with baseball, or the history of the game, etc., but I was able to sift through the suggestions and I found Card Sharks, which deals with the exact aspect of baseball cards I was inquiring into. (As it turned out, Jamieson actually cites Williams in Mint Condition.)

Callison, D. (2003). Key words, concepts and methods for information age instruction: A guide to teaching information inquiry. Baltimore, MD: LMS Associates, LLC.

Callison, D. & Preddy, L. (2006). The blue book on information age inquiry, instruction and literacy. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Waving

2010-09-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

My department at work consists of three people, and we’re all guys between the ages of 32-34. We’ve had several discussions over the years about how we all collected baseball cards. It’s always seemed like we cite the exact same reasons for why we stopped collecting…a mix between the fact that cards were getting too expensive and we were more interested in girls. I can actually pinpoint the exact second I stopped collecting baseball cards and comic books. I was going to have the house to myself, and I invited a girl over for the first time (don’t tell my mom!). I was trying to tidy up my room, and I thought to myself, “Oh man, I CANNOT leave these comics lying around!” I stashed all my comics and cards in my closet, and never got them back out.

Eventually, I started reading comics again. To this day, I’m a huge fan of graphic novels, but despite the great love I had for it, I never did get back into card collecting. What factored into it more than just how much they cost was how little all the cards from my childhood were worth. We were going on the assumption that these cards were not only fun, but they were a good investment.

Back to the guys at work…It will be interesting to revisit some of our earlier conversations and tell them about some of the stuff I learned from this inquiry. We all three have mentioned how it is our belief that adult collectors were solely to blame for wrecking our favorite hobby. But it’s a bit clearer now that much of the blame falls on the baseball card companies, and they’re the ones who I think ended up suffering the most. Fleer ended up going out of business (http://www.tradingcardcentral.com/articles/2005/05/24_001_001.php). And now, because of the Topps monopoly, Upper Deck (http://www.upperdeck.com/) and Panini (known as Donruss when I collected) (http://www.paniniamerica.net/) have shifted their focus to football and basketball cards and sports memorabilia.

I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with the guys at work, but I don’t see myself taking it any farther than that. My baseball card memories are something that I’ll always cherish, and I feel like trying to analyze it any more will only serve to tarnish those memories.

Wrapping

2010-09-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if the information I’ve gathered will be of much use to anyone besides me, but that wasn’t my intent in the first place. I just needed to bring closure to some ill will I felt towards certain people and situations from my childhood. I’ll be more knowledgeable in conversations that I know will inevitably pop up in the future about baseball card collecting. And who knows, maybe I’ll be able to assuage the contempt others feel towards the adults they believe ruined their childhood hobby. I’m sure there are others out there like me!

As for my final project, I’m finishing up a comic book I created in Comic Life entitled “A Brief History of Baseball Cards”. I will post the link as soon as I get my Google site up and running.

Weaving

2010-09-26T19:15:00.001-07:00

To organize my ideas, I created several word documents with labels about what they contained. I did use Awesome Highlighter (http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/) to mark several passages on websites I knew I was going to use for my final product. As far as any analysis, it was mostly internal for me. This inquiry was not only a journey of information, but an emotional journey into my past. I was forced to reconcile this newly-acquired knowledge with my memories and the judgments I’d made long ago.

As I was reading, I kept an eye out for any mention of adult collectors, and paid close attention to how their role in the “downfall” was portrayed. In my mind, they were the villains, but much of what I read depicted them as victims of the baseball card frenzy of the early ‘90s.

BaseballCardBuyer.com

2010-09-26T19:00:00.001-07:00

I mentioned that I emailed a question to David Hobson, ‘Baseball Card Buyer’ (http://www.baseballcardbuyer.com/pages/iwantaquote.html). Well, when I work up on Sunday morning there was a response in my inbox. I judged the response to be a stock answer, “Due to the higher availability of post-1968 baseball cards, BaseballCardBuyer.com is unable to place bids on these items.” That was it!

Wiggling

2010-09-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

The information I’m finding is really interesting, but there’s an aspect to it that I can only define as “eerie-feeling”. The industry/authors seem to have reached a consensus on the issues at hand.

As I reflect on my childhood obsession with baseball cards, I can remember sensing the onset of the “downfall”. Prices were going up every year. My friends and I used to bring our collections to school and trade cards during recess…fewer and fewer of us seemed to be into collecting as time went on. For almost 20 years now, I have placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the adult collectors of that time. I can even pinpoint the exact moment when I realized things were changing for me.

It was 1991. A teacher at my school was a big card collector, and decided he would put on a card show. Card shows were big back then…a dealer would rent a space and buy unopened packs in bulk to resell to kids, and also put on display their card collections for purchase and/or trade. This guy also happened to be a friend of our family, so he invited me, along with the children of a couple other families he knew to his show the night before it opened so we could have first dibs. As was the custom, we all brought our collections along in case there was a trade to be made. “The Dealer” (as I will call him) was looking through my collection and came across an old Yogi Berra card that I had purchased from a baseball card shop in Greenwood for $10.

He pulled it out of my box and said, “I’ve got to have this one.” He gave me a “good deal”, I think about $20 or $30 worth of new cards, but that’s not the point. I didn’t want to trade that card. There was something very wrong about the whole scenario. Other than The Dealer, there was no adult supervision on hand, and I remember feeling pressured into making the trade, like I had no say in the matter. I left knowing I had been ripped off by an adult collector who, even at such a young age, I felt had no business messing around in my hobby.

Since that time, I’ve imagined similar scenarios playing themselves out across the country. I envisioned millions of little kids getting ripped off by adults who planned on getting rich investing in baseball cards. In reality, though, there was more to it than that.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed the trend towards adults investing in cards. The baseball card companies, especially Upper Deck, took notice in a big way. Jamieson (2010) describes how Upper Deck was born because its founders “recognized the moneymaking potential of a slick, high-end card”, which they produced and marketed directly to adults “who were driven by investment rather than fun or nostalgia” (p.164).

Other card companies tried to emulate the success of Upper Deck, and Jamieson does a nice job of describing how the market flood was caused by all companies involved. Williams’s Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child’s Hobby into a High-stakes, Billion-dollar Business, however, places the blame solely on Upper Deck. Williams (1995) explains how the founders of Upper Deck got into the trading card business after the publishing of an article in Money magazine that cited a research study that found that “from 1980 to 1987, baseball cards had a compound average return of 42. 5 percent, outperforming all other comparable investments” (p. 54).

At the Ellettsville Branch of the Monroe County Public Library, the children’s nonfiction and adult nonfiction books are all shelved together. So as I was searching for Mint Condition on the shelf, I noticed Eyewitness Baseball by James Kelly (2005). I pulled it off the shelf and checked it out. My sons like reading the DK Eyewitness books. In what I thought of as an unlikely source, perhaps Kelly best summed up the “crash” as he explains the baseball card craze in terms children can easily understand. “Dozens of companies produce millions of cards each year, making the chances of finding a rare (card) pretty rare indeed” (p. 36).

Jamieson, D. (2010). Mint condition: How baseball cards became an American obsession. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Kelly, J. (2005). Eyewitness Baseball. New York: DK Publishing, Inc.

Williams, P. (1995). Card sharks: How Upper Deck turned a child’s hobby into a high-stakes, billion-dollar business. New York: Macmillan.

Yogi Berra scan taken from: http://www.deanscards.com/Product/349494/-1A-Yogi-Berra-COM---1961-Post.aspx

Webbing

2010-09-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

In the back of my mind, I could remember reading two separate articles in the past year dealing with the decline of baseball cards, so that’s where I decided to begin my search. The first one I remembered coming from the Freakonomics blog. A quick search on the Freakonomics homepage (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/) led me to the March 26th entry, entitled “The Great Baseball Card Bubble”: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/the-great-baseball-card-bubble/

The blog posting was really short, really just an introduction to Dave Jamieson’s book, Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession and an article by the same author: http://www.slate.com/id/2224864/. My public library had two copies of the book, so I went and checked one out. I’m feeling really good about the discovery of Mint Condition. It seems to deal with the exact things I’ve been wondering about…the fall of the baseball card industry.

The second article I remember reading dealt with how Major League Baseball had just signed an exclusive contract with the Topps trading card company. The implications of this deal were that no other card company could produce cards with any team logo on them. Other companies were free to seek deals with players, but they could not be shown in their uniforms! Through a Google search I located the original article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/sports/baseball/06cards.html) and many more dealing with the same topic.

I began searching keyphrases such as “baseball card prices” and state of baseball card industry”, and I stumbled across a guy who has set up a business where he invests solely in baseball cards (http://www.baseballcardbuyer.com/pages/iwantaquote.html). I noticed that his website states that he’s only interested in pre-1968 cards. He lists his email address, so I posed as a potential seller and asked him the questions, “Why are you only interested in pre-’68 cards? Do you ever by newer cards? I have over 50,000 cards from 1982-1993 I’m looking to sell.” As of 9pm Friday, I haven’t gotten a reply. He also lists a phone number, so if I don’t hear back by Sunday night, I plan on calling him on Monday.

Nostalgia

2010-09-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

I've been reading my old issues of Beckett, and it's weird...I'll see an article and I can remember reading it the first time so clearly. There's one in particular that explains how to calculate a pitcher's ERA. I remember trying to keep stats of our neighborhood Whiffleball games so I could calculate my ERA if I was pitching. And here was that very article!

I'm glad I chose trading cards as my inquiry project. It wasn't the first thing that popped into my head, though. My first idea was comic books and/or graphic novels, which I still read to this day. But graphic novels are gaining in popularity in such a way that it's as if the academic writing market is becoming flooded. So I scratched comics off my list. My next ideas centered around video production...maybe the history of broadcasting or media law or something like that, but I do video all day long every day and the thought of then researching video just didn't appeal to me. I already did that for my degree.

My thoughts turned back towards comics and they eventually lead earlier into my life and my trading card years. The nostalgia immediately began creeping in, and I knew I had my topic.

Wondering

2010-09-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

I've been reading articles on the Internet on the history of trading cards (mostly just baseball cards -- nobody seems to care about basketball or football cards!), and it's easy to find a basic history. Tobacco cards to Bowman to Topps... When I was younger, I subscribed to Beckett Monthly, a baseball card magazine and price guide. I recently retrieved them from my old closet at my mother's house and have been reading through those. That's brought back a lot of great memories. I had an Indianapolis Star paper route, and I spent every last cent I made on baseball cards. I got into a nostalgic mood and started wondering, "Where did it all go wrong? Why don't kids care about baseball cards anymore? Why do baseball cards cost so much?" I think adults killed baseball cards.

Watching

2010-08-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

I started collecting baseball cards in 1983. I don't remember the exact amount, but I think they were 25 or 30 cents per pack. I do remember that once I started really collecting hard core in 1987, the price went up 5 cents per pack every year until I stopped collecting around 1993. Cards were between 60 and 75 cents per pack for between 15 and 20 cards.

I have two sons entering "collecting age", but they haven't expressed any interest in sports cards. I was at the store a while back and I noticed the trading cards display. I went over to browse, and was shocked at what I found. The cheapest pack of baseball cards they had was $4.95 for 8 cards! Somewhere the train left the tracks!