Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Baseball Wild Cards
Good article in Slate about baseball card collections from the 1980s, and why they are worth nothing. The collecting mania was marvelously documented by Charles Mackay over 130 years ago, but the lesson has to keep being re-learned. I knew someone who took a hefty buy-out offer from his employer and opend a baseball card shop. Within two years he was out of business. My favorite quote in the Slate article: Requiem for a rookie card. By Dave Jamieson: "This year there are 40 different sets of baseball cards on the market, down from about 90 in 2004. That's about 38 too many. "
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2 comments:
A very interesting article thanks for the link. While I never got into baseball cards I worked for a guy who was into them big time.
His interest was both as a lover of the sport and for the value. This was during the time of 1987-1990. He would bore me to tears during lunch when he would start talking stats. And not just the usual stats of who had the most homeruns, but the type of stuff you only hear on ESPN, like most runs hit during a game played in Denver in the rain. Then once he had covered some obscure item of baseball history would start talking about his collection and how much it was worth and how he was helping his son build up his own collection.
I hope he got out of the market before the glut hit.
I once made the mistake at work of mentioning that in my opinion the most boring nerds of all were the ones who did rotissierie league baseball. Needless to say I ruffled the feather of at least one nerd.
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