Baseball Cards: Geek Life

In honor of the start of the Major League Baseball Playoffs, the seventh installment of Geek Life focuses on Baseball Cards and when the great All-American hobby for youngsters everywhere turned to a hobby of the privileged and rich.

The Fall of the Baseball Card Collecting Dynasty

Ah, Baseball Cards…  The mere mention of the term makes you think back to when you were ten years old hoping to get the card of your favorite player or that one elusive card in your collection.  To me, the mention of the term makes me think about Babe Ruth in those old grainy films slugging dingers and those innocent days of apple pie and the American dream.  But not anymore…

Now, I just think about the hobby being about the same as having a gambling problem.

Back before the 1990s, collecting baseball cards was something almost every kid did.  For some, like me, it went hand-in-hand with a love for the American pastime.  For others, it was the excitement of collecting.  For others still, it was a chance to say they had this many cards or that particular card you were dying to get.  Whatever the reason for collecting, you were really hard pressed to find a kid in your neighborhood who had no interest in the hobby.

For so many, baseball represented the ultimate father-son activity.  Most kids from Generation X had parents who grew up with Sandy Koufax, or Bob Gibson, or the early days of Pete Rose.  To them, these guys were heroes and completely indestructible.  Their fathers grew up with their heroes and so on.  This line of fathers passing the love of a sport to their children is on a level that no other major sport can boast.  Spending the day at the ballpark, or going out to the backyard with your pops and tossing the baseball around is pure Americana.  Sure, you could toss the football around or shoot some hoops, but it wasn’t as simple or satisfying as grabbing your glove and throwing a baseball.

Baseball is a simple sport.  It’s the activity that is easiest to teach a kid.  You can show them how to throw a ball, coach them to keep their eyes on the ball while they are batting, and the proper mechanics to field a ground ball.  It’s also the safest sport to play with your son.  Football is rough and tumble and usually reserved for brothers who are already likely to be wrestling one another.  Basketball is something you play with your pals at school.  Bowling is more for fun little dates with your sweetheart.

Even though I’ve always been a bigger football fan, mostly because of the strategy involved, baseball allowed for me to have some kind of athletic dream.  I always wanted to be the good old fashioned hard working ball player like my all time favorite players, Mike Schmidt and George Brett.  I played little league and was mostly praised on my defense.  What mattered most was that I could play the sport without my parents being nervous about me getting hurt or having to spend large amounts of money for me to just have a good time playing a fun sport.

So, with baseball being a big deal for a lot of kids my age, it was only natural that I would follow in my brothers’ footsteps in collecting baseball cards.  Just about everywhere you went, you’d see a box on the counter with unopened packs of cards for you to buy.  Back then, you’d get about fifteen cards for 50¢.  If you bought a pack of Topps cards, the most popular brand of all time, you’d get that nasty cardboardy bubble gum stick included with the cards.  If you bought a pack of Fleer cards, the second most popular brand during that era, you’d get a special sticker that would either be pennant shaped, jersey shaped, or the team logo.  If you bought a pack of Donruss, you’d get a puzzle piece that, when put together, was a larger version of certain cards.

Each brand had their own little added bonus that came with the cards.  They each had their own distinct look too.  Fleer cards were colorful on both sides.  The front of the cards were usually colored based on the players’ teams while on the back, they were not the normal drab colored cardboard backing the Topps cards had.  The Fleer cards usually looked real nice in your collection.

Donruss cards were generally uniform in color, but also had a glossy backing.  However, Topps was tops.  They had been in the business much longer and even had a disputed monopoly that eventually granted Fleer and Donruss to get heavy into the game by the 1980s.  They may have been much more bland in design, but they were always distinguishable by their overall quality.  Topps may not have included as many stats for years past as their competitors, but several cards contained some sort of trivia fact.

Like any other collectible item, there were definitely legendary baseball cards.  The first is the most famous card ever printed.  In 1907 a tobacco company began packaging portraits of baseball players in their cigarette packs.  Known as T206 cards, the tobacco company had to get permission from the players to print their likenesses.  The player who had the most reservation about his face helping sell cigarettes was also one of the best players of the all time, Honus Wagner.

Wagner, a Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop, played during an time known as the dead-ball era.  Baseball back then was more about low scores and few home runs.  It wouldn’t be until Babe Ruth came onto the scene that we see the numbers and style we are more accustomed to.  Wagner was an 8-time batting champion and rivaled one of the best hitters of all time, Ty Cobb, for the title of the very best baseball had to offer.

These days, Honus Wagner isn’t known for his prowess in the batter’s box or fielding capabilities.  His status as one of the best is really lost to the ages to everyone except the baseball historians.  Now, he’s known for being the face of the baseball card collectors’ holy grail.

It doesn’t matter if you briefly collected baseball cards, collected your whole life, or know a lot about collecting through a friend, you know about this card.  This card has sold for thousands of dollars for several decades.  In the past few years, price tags of over $2.5 Million have been paid by collectors in auctions.  Estimated at around 55-60 still being in existence, it isn’t even the hardest to find card.

Let’s think about this for a minute.  This card for sports cards collectors is the equivalent to Action Comics #1 or Detective Comics #27 for comic collectors.  Those two comics probably have fewer number of copies combined with worthy enough conditions for sale than the Wagner T206.  However, the sheer age of this card, now over 100 years old, has made this card so important to the industry’s hobbyists.  An inevitable change in how collecting baseball cards came in the 1990s would slant the importance of having something that is truly one of a kind.  I will get to that in just a moment.

Another legendary card, this one from the 1980s, would revolve around a somewhat obscure player who was a part of a very famous baseball family.  This is the story of Billy Ripkin’s 1989 Fleer card.  Billy was the son of legendary Baltimore Orioles Manager Cal Ripken, Sr. and the brother to baseball’s ironman himself, Cal Ripkin, Jr.  Billy posed for his picture to be placed on the baseball card with his trusty bat.  He either forgot or knew damn well that “FUCK FACE” was written in permanent marker on the bottom of the bat’s knob.  So, when he posed with the bat resting on his shoulder, the writing was in plain view.  The card was released with the original writing, then reprinted NINE additional times with different knobs on the bat.  Some were different words written at the bottom, while some are just obviously corrected before it went to print.  Either way, this card has been widely sought after.  Many people try to collect all ten of the cards.  None of the cards come with a price tag anywhere near the Honus Wagner card, but nevertheless, it’s a fun card to find.  The “Fuck Face” card has gained the reputation as one of the most notorious cards along with the rumored “C3PO with a giant golden penis” card from Topps’ original Star Wars trading card set.

As the 1990s dawned, a new force in baseball trading cards would emerge – Upper Deck.  Upper Deck preyed upon the notion that glitz and glamor would pull people to their product.  Hologram this, foil that, higher quality card stock…  Upper Deck seemed primed to target the collectors more than anything else.  If you think about it, holograms, foil covers, and higher quality paper stock proved to all be gimmicks duplicated by the comics industry by the early to mid-90s.

Upper Deck hit the ground running.  It’s inaugural set, 1989, sold for 99¢ a pack and produced one of the era’s most sought after and valuable cards – Ken Griffey Jr.’s rookie card.  Ken Griffey Sr. was one of the most productive hitters on the Cincinnati Reds’ 70s dynasty, better known as “The Big Red Machine”.  Griffey Jr., however, was a new hero for a new generation of baseball fans.  He was this skinny little kid, but damn could he hit.  It wasn’t so much that he could just make things happen when he got on base, but he could hit the crap out of the ball.  In his first 11 seasons, he averaged over 35 home runs a year – AND he didn’t even play every game of every year.  On top of that, his career was full of defensive accolades as well.  In a career that just ended partway through the 2010 campaign, Griffey won ten Gold Gloves and is hailed as one of the finest all around players in the last 40 years.

Griffey Jr. gave all us skinny little kids hope that we could be great baseball players.  We didn’t have to be massive in size like Babe Ruth, or some tubby guy who could throw all your weight into a swing like Kirby Puckett.  We literally felt that Ken Griffey Jr. would show that freakish talents were obtainable if we just worked hard at it.  Most of his best seasons came when others were looking toward performance enhancers to get the big numbers and big paydays.

As the 90s continued, competition between the trading card companies were at a fever pitch (pun partially intended).  Like comics with the direct market, Baseball card prices were going up.  Shops devoted to baseball card collecting were springing up in strip malls.  Then, out of the blue, a new gimmick in the industry would drive prices of packs skyrocketing to $5 a pack and higher.

Now, instead of fifteen cards per pack for 50¢, you’d be lucky to get half that number for ten times that amount.  What you got instead was the opportunity to get a card that was short packed.  This unique card might have been a real autograph of an up and coming star, or a golden embossed foil whateverthehell type of card.  As more gimmicks were done, and more and more people looking to sell their cards for a quick and, hopefully, large sum of cash, the best place for collectors to go wasn’t the drug store, comic shop, or newsstand – it was the ball card shop.  With the gimmicks wooing more collectors with the promise of one of these über-cards being packed into every box of cards, it was harder for any store other than a baseball card shop to make money off these new types of cards.   Besides, if you want to buy the best cards on the shelves, where better to buy than a store that caters to your needs?

By this time, I was not only long out of collecting baseball cards, but I had heavily returned to comics after an extended hiatus.  I discovered this truly disturbing trend in collecting baseball cards one Wednesday afternoon when a friend of mine and I went to the comic shop to pick up our weekly haul.  He was still interested in ball cards, but mostly because he had bought into that lottery-esque idea of buying that one magical pack that contained that one magically unique card that could be sold for hundreds of dollars.

I watched my friend pick out four packs of cards.  Each pack was around $5 and contained only five cards.  So, he plops down his twenty dollar bill, spends the next 60 seconds opening the packs, barely looking at who the card featured, only to toss them to the side, and throw down another twenty and asking for four more packs.  The next 60 seconds went the same as the first round of cards.  At this point he spent $40 on cards that would likely not resell for that amount all for the hopes he’d find one of those chase cards that would multiply the resell value many times over.

What exactly was he looking for?  The one gimmick that has certainly remained throughout the last decade or so of baseball cards was the special “game used” items packaged inside the card itself.  Usually this was a piece of a player’s jersey or baseball bat.  This trend wasn’t entirely new to sports memorabilia.  Game worn jerseys, caps, and football helmets were huge in the sports auction circuit.  Now, you can get a real piece of the game in a pack of baseball cards.  In a way, it was kinda cool, but in another, it really shook me to my core and gave me a different, and jaded, outlook on what baseball cards meant to people.

I was long aware of what happened to the comic book industry of the 1990s.  The more gimmicks you can throw at people in the hopes that you can draw in a larger number of customers, the more money you can make.  Except that can also come back and bite you right in the butt.

What happens when you flood a market of a bunch of books or cards that aren’t really worth anything?  Even if there are books or cards out there that are worth a lot, it turns people away once they realize that buying all five X-Men #1 covers eventually meant squat and you spent a too much money for something that you could only get pennies back on.  Just before the gimmick boom in baseball cards, the same thing nearly happened to that market.

In 1987, Topps hit it big with their regular set of baseball cards.  Just about everyone I knew had the set.  It might have been the retro cool of the wood paneled cards that looked like the pictures were inside a baseball bat – a designed they once used in the 60s.  It might have been the sport itself that made the trading card industry that popular.  Either way, that set is worth diddly now because everyone had it.

So, moving into the new decade, the industry switched gears.  The packs cost more and the chance of you pulling something that not everyone had out of those packs increased.  There still is a “regular” type of card set out there, but those have moved to the background.  If you had a dollar to spend on the lottery, why spend it on 25¢ pull tabs that might pay out a couple bucks when you could spend the whole dollar for a chance at $10,000?

All of a sudden, the all-American pastime of collecting baseball cards was reserved only for the people who could spend the money on the gamble.  Then, if the gamble paid off, they would could sell the card to another person who had the ability to drop the money on one particular card.

Just this past Summer, a card of Washington Nationals’ phenom Stephen Strasburg was sold for a staggering amount.  The final, winning bid on eBay was over $16,000.  Why?  It was a one of a kind card.  Bowman, a Topps imprint, creates a crazy looking chrome card called a “Superfractor” every year.  It is randomly placed into a pack within a randomly selected box.  To get it, you have to buy untold number of packs.  Rumor has it that the 2006 Evan Longoria Superfractor has never been found, making that, not Honus Wagner, the hardest to find card in baseball card history.

I’m not down on the guy who found the card at all.  When reading about the card and seeing what the guy wrote on some message boards about how he found it, I was really happy for him.  It’s a great find and probably the greatest moment in his collecting life.  What I’m not so big on anymore is how the market has changed so much for the sports card industry.

When the same friend I saw throw $40 in the garbage on baseball cards that were worthless got a job at a ball card shop, I saw the changing face of card collectors.  It was rare to see a father bring his little boy into the shop so he could by his son a pack of baseball cards.  It was more likely he was there looking for cards for himself and either the son was there because the dad drug him there or he was there in the hopes that the shop had Pokemon cards.  Most people who came into the shop were guys who were middle aged driving ridiculously nice cars.  All of a sudden, it struck me…

Baseball cards had become the pastime of the elite, not the kid who dreamed of being the next Cal Ripkin Jr. or Ken Griffey Jr.

When it comes to the ideal of the American Dream, what’s more patriotic than wanting to be that guy who worked hard, practiced every day, and eventually grew up to hit the winning home run in a World Series?  I guess the only thing that is more American than that is an apple pie maker who turns his recipe into a million dollar business.  Still, the idea of the American Dream is that anyone with a little elbow grease and/or a good idea can become the next John D. Rockefeller.  Let’s face it…  That isn’t the truth anymore.

Usually those who make the most out of the American Dream is not the poor boy raised on the streets or the kid who stays up past his bedtime every night to learn as much as he can so he can get good grades and go to college.  Hell, even boxers aren’t like Rocky Balboa anymore.  It’s not so much about what they can do in a ring or how much they have to literally fight for it, but who can promote them the best.

No, the American Dream is reserved for the rich and elite.  Something as purely American as baseball is also becoming more and more of a privilege.  It used to be the cheapest way for families to spend their time together out of the house.  Going to the ballpark meant fathers and sons could see their favorite team play for the home crowd and where you can get the best damn peanuts on Earth.  You used to be able to see those players you collected on those little pieces of card stock in action before your very eyes.  Hell, you could even bring your cards to the park and get autographs from the players just hanging out around the dugout before a game.

Now it seems as though the ball park is more about impressing your clients than connecting with your son.  As players’ egos and paychecks rise, so must the ticket prices.  There are many parks that you can still get in without paying an arm and a leg, but if you want to see a team that has one of the higher payrolls and, you know, like a winning team, you can’t afford to bring your kids unless you are one of the elite.

With the National Football League’s impressive use of marketing and delivering on hype and excitement, interest in baseball has dwindled.  In fact, ask most of the people you know or work with and you’ll probably find out that their feelings toward baseball is downright apathetic.  It’s generally looked at as a boring game whereas football is an athletic and impact sport.  Every play one football player is smashing into another.  As much as a perfect game is a big deal in baseball, people who think baseball is boring would be tortured watching nine innings of no hits.

This apathy has driven people further away from baseball cards.  Not to mention the debate over whether or not performance enhancing drugs should be the concern of our government.  For many, there’s much ado about nothing.  For me, I found my most profound apathy after the 1994 strike that found a half season completely wiped out.  It took me until start of this century to really come back.  Sure, it was fun watching Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chasing down Roger Maris’ single-season home run record, but my Phillies stunk and I hate the Yankees and Braves, the two most successful teams of that time.  Why should I collect cards that were probably worthless when I found it so hard to be interested in the sport to begin with, not to mention others who had little to no interest?

Now as I plan to have a family of my own, and the Phillies are awesome, I find myself gravitating back toward baseball as a sport that I love.  Football may forever be my #1 sport, but baseball is a solid #2.  Everyday, I check the box scores to see what’s going on in Major League Baseball.  Whenever I can make it to the local AAA team’s games, I go.  I know I will want to throw the baseball around when I have a son.

And then, there were the last two World Series.  Suddenly, after years of rooting for a team in the Series, but not necessarily feeling overwhelming joy or crushing heartbreak, the Phillies were there and every moment of every day during the span of the Series, I was on the edge of my seat.  When they defeated the Tampa Rays, I shed tears of joy that my team was on top of the world.  Then, when they lost to the Yankees, I didn’t want anyone talking to me.  I was that crushed.  It had been so long since I felt that in Baseball, it reconnected me with that idea that if only I had stuck with it, I could live that fantasy of playing baseball and being part of that American Dream.  I didn’t have to be rich to enjoy it or feel personally invested.

In fact, I felt more patriotic than I had since I was a little boy.

So that’s it for this edition of Geek Life.  Come back in two weeks when I remember the greatest Spaceknight of them all…  ROM!

To find out more about what this series of articles are all about check out What is Geek Life? To see what other topics I’ve written about, check out the Geek Life tag!

Tags: Baseball Cards Geek Life