Baseball Cards

Anyone still collect?

I'm moving mine from my parents' attic to my house. There's nothing groundbreaking in there, just years of mediocrity and over 100 autographs of minor league baseball players who might have had a cup of coffee or washed out.

I'm thinking about diving back in. I want to buy one or two boxes per season of baseball and football cards and store them away. It's not a money making adventure; just something so when I get older I can pop a few packs and have some memories.

Didn't know if there was a brand anyone could recommend. I used to buy Upper Deck, but they don't have the licenses. I'm not into the high-end brands. Looks like Topps might be the only player, but if anyone still buys I'd love an opinion on this.

 

My daughters buy blind packs of little collectibles much like how we used to buy baseball cards. They also watch folks on kids YouTube open these packs on camera. I can imagine me doing the same if kids YouTube was around for baseball cards back in the day.

I pick up a pack or two every now and then, but spend my money on whiskey, blow and hookers now.

 

I still have mine from when I as a kid. They're sitting in a box down in my basement. I don't have any plans on getting more, but I want to be able to show them to my kid when he gets older.

This is probably the coolest one I have:
action packed brett favre rookie card - Google Search

 

This is pretty close to my experience. I'd go so far as to troll the roads between my house and the nearest convenience store for recyclable bottles so I could collect the deposit money, which I'd then use to buy cards.

I built a collection of 5k-6k cards, most of which was accumulated a pack or two at a time. Had a few football cards and basketball cards in there, but baseball was my thing. Amassed complete Topps sets for 1977, 78 and 79. I vividly remember finishing off the 1977 set - I basically begged a kid down the street to trade me Dave Lemanczyk to complete it. I had doubles of dozens of players he didn't have, but he wouldn't budge. Either I wore him down or he took pity on me. I had every Mike Schmidt (favorite player) Topps card except his rookie card by the time I stopped. When I left for college I gave them to a kid in the neighborhood. It's one of my few regrets, though it's tempered by the knowledge I did something nice.

When my son reached eight or nine years of age I picked it up again, but it wasn't near as fun knowing I could buy them in bulk or even order complete sets. My son never really caught the baseball card bug, but he kind of did the same thing with gaming cards (Pokemon, Dragon-Ball Z and a couple of others), so I guess I passed it on in a way.

 

I want too. I still have mine but my hardcore years were the 80s. So my stuff - all 45,000 cards - are nearly worthless.
So what's the point?

Oh ...
Ty Cobbs Found Safe at Home

 

Like everyone else, the thousands and thousands of cards and complete sets I accumulated between 1979 and around 1990 are pretty much worthless now.

I'll buy some on occasion for my son now - Topps is the only game in town, but they are really, really nice. Way better than even the Upper Deck cards that you remember changing the industry. All of the photos are action shots now, and they go to the edge of the cars. No obtrusive borders. When my son opens a pack, his hopes are pure - to get good players and, in particular, White Sox and Cubs players. We also have the current Topps sticker book, which they still make. He seems to like that even better.

I went on a little run a few months ago where I bought some graded cards off of eBay. A Steve Carlton rookie card, I think. A Joe Morgan rookie card. A couple others like that. I'll probably pop for another from the '60s and '70s from time to time.

I hide them from my wife. She doesn't know I spent money on them.

 

My brother threw out all mine from when I was a kid. I started collecting again as a young adult.

I have a first year unopened Upper Deck complete boxed set (Griffey rookie) if anybody wants to take it off my hands for a fair price.

 

I was director of product development (baseball and football) for Score and Pinnacle Brands back in the trading card heyday, starting in 1990 through about 1995. I have a ton of that stuff in a loft above my garage, much of it unopened boxes. But I have absolutely no desire to even begin sorting through it, so I'm thinking about finding a kid and giving him or her a hefty commission to get rid of it for me.

 

Were you the one who came up with the moving image cards? SportsFlix, I think?

 

No, the Sporflix lenticular cards were before I got there and were being phased out by then, although they may have brought them back in the mid-'90s. They originally had Sportflix and Score, a base brand (99 cents/pack) and I was originally hired to oversee the introduction of a new high-end brand -- Pinnacle -- intended to better compete with Upper Deck. By the time I left there were about 15 brands.

The cards were produced and distributed out of Grand Prairie, Texas, by a company called Score while the creative, sales and marketing were handled by Major League Marketing in Westport, Conn., which is where I worked. Eventually there was a big battle over control of the company and Texas gained control over my boss in Connecticut and they moved all operations to Grand Prairie. We parted ways amicably when they couldn't pay me enough to move to Texas.

We were the first company to put advanced metrics on card backs and we had, by far, the best copy. Upper Deck produced the nicest looking cards in terms of photography, card stock and design, I always thought. I was primarily in charge of player selection and card back content (stats and copy).

 

There's a pretty good book that was written a couple of years ago on the history of the industry, titled "Mint Condition." It covers, of course, those strange boom years from about 1988 through about '90 or '91, I'd guess, when otherwise rational individuals became convinced, en masse, that they were going to finance their retirements with Jose Canseco baseball cards.

I think that Baseball America came out with its first Top 100 prospects list right around the peak of the boom, which just fueled it. It would be interesting to go through an old set of Beckett guides and see who the hot rookie cards were each spring. I remember Gregg Jefferies, Ben McDonald, Ken Griffey, Jr., Eric Anthony, etc.