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If you’re a sports fan, probabilities are finelooking good you assembled retail cards as a kid. You might recall spending your allowance on a pack of baseball cards with stale, pink gum at the corner store. You’d tear open the packs in search of your favored star, then trade with your friends or conservatively slide a few cards among the spokes of your bicycle wheel and listen to them click as you pedaled. If you were a card collector, you in all likelihood had binders full of the conservatively sorted cardboard gems lying around your room — until you encountered girls. Once the fairer sex was on the scene, the cards went to the garage sale, attic or trash. In the years since you got rid of your cards without a second thought, the industry has boomed. Though prices have skyrocketed, syndication cards have never been more popular. Here are 5 things you didn’t know with regards to sports cards. However, be warned: After hearing how far the sparetime activity has come, you might want to stop on the way home and pick up a pack or two. 1- The value of rookie cards is artificially inflated There’s little argument that Wayne Gretzky is the best hockey player to lace up skates, and his 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee rookie card sells amidst $600 and $900. Sidney Crosby may be billed as the best thing since The Great One, but he’s got a lot to prove. Still, Sidney Crosby’s 2005-06 Upper Deck The Cup rookie card sells at more than $10,000. We’ve got not one thing versus Crosby, but the fact that a for the most part unproven star’s rookie card may trade at more than 10 times the value of Wayne Gretzky’s is mind-boggling. It all comes down to supply and demand. In the late 1990s, card companies introduced serial numbering, the antidote to mass-produced cards such as Gretzky’s rookie. Cards were printed in fixed quantities and stamped with a distinguishable number. Only 99 copies subsist of Crosby’s The Cup card, meaning if you want The Next One’s top rookie, be prepared to remunerate for it. 2- Babe Ruth is still signing cards If you pulled an autographed card from a pack in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you’d tell everyone you knew. Now, autographed cards are so popular, ofttimes with one or more per box (and in a lot of sets, one per pack) that they hardly seem stimulating anymore. What may have you calling your friends, however, is finding an autographed card of a deceased athlete. To develop these “cut” autograph cards, card companies buy authentic autographs of sports stars, ofttimes off of paperwork or void checks from the deceased athlete’s estate, then cut out the player’s signature and glue it into a new card. So even though Babe Ruth has been dead since 1948, it’s possible to get his autograph in a 2008 product — and that goes for more of the game’s greats, such as Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, to name a few. 3- Barack Obama has a baseball card No, the probable future U.S. President didn’t have a short stint in the Big Leagues. Card companies have reacted to the popularity of politics in American society, and political figures have begun to appear on special insert cards. This year’s Upper Deck baseball includes a Presidential Predictor insert set, featuring cards of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and others. Taking the popularity of game-used memorabilia cards a step further, a lot of relic cards in recent years have included swatches cut straight out of American history. It’s possible to get a card that includes a little square of cloth from one of John F. Kennedy’s suits or a card containing a piece of George W. Bush’s necktie. Other American legends (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, etc.) are represented with memorabilia cards in today’s products. It may seem odd to get a Marilyn Monroe card in a pack of baseball cards, but these rare inserts are hot marketers among history buffs. 4- Celebrity body parts are now for sale Topps produced industry waves in 2007 when it developed three cards, each containing a strand of hair from former President George Washington. The card company got the hair from John Reznikoff, the owner of the biggest collection of hair from historical figures. Despite the shock of a lot of gatherers and intermediate citizens similar (and the disturbing wishes of a lot of persons to track down the cards so they could try to clone Washington through DNA strands), Topps’ merchandise formulated a stir and gatherers responded by showing there is in truth a market for these bizarre, yet intriguing, collectibles. Topps acknowledges that DNA cards are hard to make because of the difficultness of tracking down strands of hair from deceased public figures, but the idea has already caught on. The hot insert in this year’s Upper Deck SP Legendary Cuts baseball cards is a Hair Cuts series — cards that incorporate cut autographs and a strand of hair from figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Andrew Jackson, and Geronimo. A Topps 2008 baseball product holds cards with hair from not only Abe Lincoln, but likewise JFK and Beethoven. 5- Your son’s allowance won’t get him far in the hobby If you accumulated a couple decades ago, you’ll do not forget when Upper Deck productions hit store shelves in 1990 at the seemingly exorbitant price of $1 per pack. Almost overnight, gone were the days of 25 and 50 cent packs of cards that contained a piece of pink gum for good measure. The price of buyer goods has risen over the last couple decades with inflation, but card prices have risen because of the increased demand as the sideline boomed. With very few exceptions, packs of cards are at least $4 and galore high-end productions cost more than $500 per pack — not box but per pack. And those packs might comprise as few as five cards. What, did you think you’d find that $10,000 Sidney Crosby card in a pack that cost $1? Each sport only features a couple 99 cents per pack brands each season, which means youths with allowance cash to spend don’t have much of a chance of delving into the hobby. Adults with more disposable income, however, have a wide assortment of choices. |
July 31, 2011
1979 Topps John Stearns Baseball
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