Putting A Price On Childhood

The year is 1989.  Milli Vanilli has invaded the airwaves. People are excited about the new Batman movie. Michael Dukakis is off crying, cold and alone somewhere, probably hiding from bears. Prospective athletes everywhere are buying Chris Sabo goggles in droves. Baseball cards have surpassed precious metals as the most convenient and failsafe investment in America.

Baseball cards are now, of course, worthless; the ink used to produce them is universally recognized as poisonous, and many foil-stamped parallel sets are faintly radioactive. Certain states have outlawed the sale of baseball cards and many hobby owners, who once made millions profiteering from hapless collectors during the junk wax era, have been driven into hiding in the Mojave Desert, only surfacing to socialize with each other at card shows housed in middle school gymnasiums.

But O, in that innocent time, with its afternoons stitched into endless tapestry! Huddled together in playgrounds, sipping their juice boxes after soccer practices, they spread their anonymous, clandestine rumors. The Billy Ripken, it was told, could be found in the pack second from the bottom on the top left corner of the box. Andy’s brother’s friend Chris found one there, so it was undeniable fact. They bragged to each other about the number of Gregg Jefferies rookies they owned, and which brands.

And their bible, the gospel that validated their very form of self-expression, was the Beckett Baseball Card Magazine. With each monthly release the kids would bring them onto the bus and pore over them like they were the Wall Street Journal, while the less fortunate fought for a place over their shoulder to scan the numbers, like the youngest member of the knothole gang. The numbers were never really grounded in reality; few boys read the newspaper or scanned a box score, and their exposure to the game itself rarely surpassed the radio in their father’s garage.  At most, they were aware of the health of their local team; otherwise, all was dictated by the unseen hand.

As it turns out, that’s just as well, because no one had any clue which rookies were any good. The following graph (with its implicit apology about the use of a graph in the heart of NotGraphs) demonstrates:

The correlation between these two values comes out to be 0.097, a surprisingly low number. Of the six probable Hall of Famers from this class, only two were highly prized as rookies. Granted, Smoltz, Schilling and Johnson were each somewhat slow in their ascent. But Biggio acquitted himself well, even by traditional statistics, in his quick journey through the minors. Perhaps his photograph, with its Gaedelian perspective, hampered his value.

The set, as a whole, was worth 26 dollars, or $45 in 2010 as adjusted for inflation.  Today, it fails to be worth the price of ground shipping.

As the youth of the late eighties bloomed and then withered along with their baseball heroes, the luster of the baseball card lottery has gone.  The young boys on the playground grew up, fell in love, got married and divorced, became happy and miserable.  The path to greatness, after all, is paved with so many Meulenses. But just as baseball cards are meant to encapsulate a season, so it does for the industry and the era themselves. It bears a history that began with Ricky Jordan’s pinch-hit home run and ended with Ken Griffey Jr.’s weak grounder to second twenty years later.  It would witness a time of hope and dingers, of steroids and malaise.

The vibrant rainbow stripes of the Donruss card seem dated, almost tacky now, but they were the boisterous proclamation of a generation, and a hobby, that was stumbling through adolescence.  It may not have ended well, but at least we still have our photographs.