Dreams Sublime and Quotidian: Putting a Pricetag on Youth and Baseball by Philip Martin

FOUR OR FIVE years ago I drove down to my mother's house in Louisiana and crawled around in her humid attic. I don't remember exactly what I was looking for or even whether I found it or not, but I did fetch something from her rafters that I hadn't allowed myself to think about for years; a cache of Topps baseball cards from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s.

The cards were stored in a couple of orange shoeboxes, strapped shut with black electrical tape. I had lashed them together and put them away back at the beginning of high school, with only a vague idea that I might want to look at them again someday. I put them on a high shelf in the back of my closet.

I had sealed the boxes tight, so no light and only the most persistent mouse could ever intrude. I never once thought to reach back over the yearbooks and high-school clutter to touch the lids and reassure myself they still existed; they were buried then without mourning or regret. By the time I could drive, those cards were a legend only occasionally remembered. At some point, probably after I had left for college and it became clear "my room" was actually somewhere else, the boxes were moved, along with a collection of 45 rpm records and other childish things, into the attic.

When I found them again, a jolt of recognition as palpable as an electric shock coursed through me. I immediately cradled them down the stairs, wiped away the dust and split them open with a razor knife.

I folded back the lids from the center, so they opened like wings. And there were the cards, carelessly jumbled together, a mosaic of slightly off-register colors infused with the faint yet unmistakable flavor of stiff gum. Names like Koosman and Etchebarren and Kessinger and Roseboro and Aparicio. There was Ron Swoboda in mid-swing, in a batting helmet, shot from a low angle, backed by a pale 1968 sky.

If anything, they seemed brighter, the photographs sharper than I had remembered. Quite a few of my cards were from 1971, a series I didn't much care for because instead of printing the player's entire major league statistical history on the back, Topps opted to print only the line from 1970 and career totals. The 1971 series had black borders which has since become infamous among collectors. It is difficult to find cards with "mint" borders.

I had a Nolan Ryan card from 1969 and a Mickey Mantle from the same year. There were a couple of Hank Aaron cards, a Johnny Bench, a Tom Seaver. In all there were probably more than 600 cards in the two boxes. Most of them were cards of ordinary players—cards the collectors call "commons"—like Curt Blefary and Don Wert.

I knew what I had recovered. I knew the cards were worth something. Sometime in between the day I had put away my baseball cards and the day I had retrieved them, they had become a minor industry. Suddenly there were cards shops open in every strip mall, and nine-year-old kids were buying whole sets and putting them away unopened. They knew what Ken Griffey Jr.'s rookie card was worth, and they knew to slip cards into plastic sleeves to protect them from fingerprints and oil.

Kids were savvy, and there were plenty of older collectors too. Baseball cards were booming, four or five years ago, they were investments. I went down to one of the card shops and bought a Beckett's guide and started thumbing through it, estimating what my cards were worth.

It almost broke my heart.

I was not so savvy when I was a kid. I ruined a good many of my cards, by adding, in ballpoint pen, another line or two of statistics. Had I not defaced my Nolan Ryan card that way, it might have had a book value of $600. (Of course, I soon learned that no card dealer will ever pay you book value for a card—that's the price they charge you for a card. For any particular card, you might get 60 percent of what it says in the price guide.) If the word "Yankees" on my Mickey Mantle card had been printed in white rather than yellow, it would have been worth $700 rather than $175. I had, in my reckless youth, denatured a Tom Seaver rookie card by cutting it in half (the bottom portion of the card featured a pitcher named Bill Deheny) and stapling the Seaver photo to an index card on which I carefully printed his statistics each year.

Yet, even though a good many of my "best" cards had been defaced and rendered near worthless, I had a good collection. After I had taken my own inventory, I took the boxes down to one of the card shops to have a professional look at them. He appraised the collection, and made me an offer. It was more than I thought the cards were worth.

I turned him down and took my cards home.

THAT WAS FOUR or five years ago. That’s when the baseball card industry was booming. In 1990, demand for baseball cards—old and new—was at an all-time high. There were seemingly as many speculators buying cards as kids and collectors.

That baseball cards could become an industry might seem fantastic to those of us who flipped and traded them as kids. Their roots go back nearly as deep as the game itself, to the late 19th century, when tobacco companies began inserting them in packs of cigarettes. By the 1930s, they were sold with gum under license. From the late 1950s through the late 1970s, the Brooklyn-based Topps bubble gum company enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the major leagues; a stranglehold that was broken when a rival gum company, Fleer, won an anti-trust lawsuit.

In recent years, the gum has disappeared from the packs. It risks discoloring the cards, and upsetting collectors.

Opening the market was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to Topps. Through the 1980s, more and more companies joined the fray, until there were six companies printing more than 27 different lines of cards featuring the likenesses of major league players.

Card manufacturers begin to produce and sell more cards. (Topps sells many more cards today than it did in the years when it enjoyed a monopoly.) They introduced premium and so-called "super premium" lines. Kids could reel off the trading prices of a Don Mattingly card as quickly as they could relate his batting average. Baseball cards were collectibles, and if the public wanted them, the card companies were willing to oblige.

Books with mercenary titles like Collecting Baseball Cards: How to Buy Them, Store Them, and Keep Track of Their Value as Investments began to appear.

Then, quite naturally, the market began to settle and grow soft. Faced with myriad choices, collectors began to concentrate on buying the sets they liked best. Some kids, grew bored with the hobby. A lot of dealers found it hard to hang on and by 1992, most of the card shops had closed. A few hung on, servicing the hard-core collectors and kids newly introduced to the hobby.

Even after the boom subsided, baseball cards are still big business; Greg Ambrosius, the editor of Sports Card magazine estimates they made up $946 million of the $1.7 billion generated by the sports trading card industry in 1994.

Then, last August, major league baseball players went on strike. There was no World Series. There were no real major leaguers in spring training. Suddenly, baseball cards seem a precarious business; even though 1995 sets have been issued, and you can buy packs of new cards, production has been cut way back. And interest is disturbingly low.
Marty Appel, the director of public relations for Topps, the oldest and best-known of the card companies, downplays the affect of the baseball strike on the hobby. He says that while there’s a "large segment of consumers" angry with baseball and with sports in general, card collecting "has a life of its own."

"It can continue to flourish even without the games on the field," he says. "America maintains a passion for sports collectibles. If you look beyond the labor unrest, sports is a very healthy industry, and trading cards are a significant part of it."

Vince Nauss, the director of marketing for Donruss, echoes Appel's optimism one can hardly imagine a director of marketing doing anything else. He claims Donruss has yet to see any "major turnoff" from collectors, though he says he assumes that card collector interest will fall off if the strike affects the 1995 regular season. Accordingly, he says, Donruss has cut production on 1995 cards.

For that matter, so have Topps and most of the rest of the card companies. Apparently the demand just isn't there.

"You'll definitely see less Topps products on the market," Appel says, though he insists that as fans get over their anger the 1995 cards will eventually become highly prized by collectors.

"No matter how angry people are at the moment," he says, "last year may be one of the most historically significant and interesting seasons this century, in the sense it was an incomplete season. There will be considerable historical interest in the 1995 cards."

Cameron Broussard, the director of communications for Upper Deck, admits that the strike has significantly affected his company's sales.

"Fans have just stopped buying trading cards, period," he says. "It not because they feel badly about the cards, it's a measure of how they feel about the sports themselves."

Still, Garrison says cards like the vintage ones I stuck away in my shoe boxes more than 20 years ago have generally held their value. They were insulated from the boom. Few kids bought them, so they were scarcer and hence more expensive than newer cards—and why should a 12-year-old be interested in owning a 1966 Matty Alou card anyway?

ALL THE FLASH and glory attends the new millionaires, the cocky young men of the '90s who patrol the base lines draped in gold, wearing space-mask sunglasses. Barry Bonds, Kenny Lofton, Deion Sanders—the kids want the footwear heroes. That's who brings $5 a pack.

That's OK, I guess. Kids can’t help the time they're born in. If Roberto Clemente played today, he would be different too. Joe DiMaggio couldn't retain that hermetic cool; Mickey Mantle might be a candidate for intervention and substance-abuse treatment.
Big-league baseball wasn't better in those days—just different.

Baseball cannot, as some suggest, be boiled down to a line of statistics. The reams of quantifiable data produced by baseball don't equal the game, any more than a couple of shoe boxes full of trading cards equals a childhood. Baseball cards are sublime and quotidian, at best; they might be the receipt stubs of abandoned dreams.

Baseball, with its quiet stretches and languid rhythms, tempts writers into silliness all the time. They try to make a second baseman into a shaman. They try to make baseball cards into symbols of unrecoverable youth.

That’s not what they are. My cards had nothing to do with the game, just like the game has nothing to do with the strike or even with the rude young millionaires who play it. It is, as Stephen Jay Gould has written, profound all by itself.

I think sometimes I should have taken the cash for my cards. I don't really have any excuse for not taking the money, had the dealer offered a bit more money I'm sure I would have taken it. And I'm sure that money, whatever the sum, would be gone by now.

I’m glad I didn't sell my cards. I’m glad that I gave them to my niece, who was then too young to understand that the scraps of paper represented men who once played a boy's game. She could delight in their flat colors and the cartoon drawings on the back. I didn't care if she put them in her mouth and crimped their corners.

Her parents, being practical people, put them up for her.

— Philip Martin

Originally published in July 1995
Vol. 2/Number 2