Archive for baseball cards

The youth are a continual problem in society. They listen to music created by autonomous computers and Canadians, eat cereal comprised entirely of marshmallow, and are occasionally sulky about the incomprehensibly massive national debt they will inherit without representation. They giggle uncontrollably upon hearing the word “fart” and play card games with rules based on statistics far more complicated than anything found on this fair site. Surely, any attempt to understand such creatures is tantamount to madness.

Woe betide, then, the baseball card company whose profits are linked directly to these whimsical beasts. At least, they were until the early 1990s, when the price of a pack of baseball cards tripled in three years and children were crowded out of the market by “investors” and post-philatelists. Sensing a demographic issue, the marketing gurus at Topps and other baseball card companies found a solution: “Kids Cards”, which would appeal to the young soul of the consumer and bring them back into the collectible fold.

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This will not be the first time that I’ve bemoaned the slow death of eBay, which has essentially devolved into a different, more poorly organized version of Amazon.com. As the proliferation of “online stores” with one-price sales has continued, the online auction site no longer gives us a conception of the free market at work. For example, a search for “Chone Figgins Mariners Jersey” reveals no item costing less than forty dollars, which may be forty times the actual price point according to supply and demand.

Even so, a good economic market has occasional irregularities and inefficiencies that speak the interest of the purchaser, and give him or her the hope that offsets the effort of shopping. Essentially, we want to capitalize on someone else’s inability to detect the value of their own merchandise. We want free stuff. Thus today I present a collection of baseball paraphernalia that has, in recent times, been free on the internet, selling for six cents or less, including free shipping (and handling). Even the envelope used to mail these items are more expensive than the purchases themselves. All of these could have been yours – and perhaps, with luck, they still might be someday.

MEMORABILIA CATEGORY

Photocopy of Joe DiMaggio’s Death Certificate ($0.01): I have to admit, this is both strangely compelling and morose. There’s an undeniable urge to treat anything baseball or baseball player-related as collectible, not so much out of callousness or greed but in our interest in compiling the history of the game we love. But what do you do with a death certificate? You can’t frame it. You can’t really celebrate it. And yet, for a penny, I could see myself buying it. Should I feel bad about this?

For those with moral qualms, there’s also an equally useless but less squicky copy of Roberto Clemente’s original contract with the Pirates.

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The baseball card industry, to me, is fascinating. People are willing to pay real money for little bits of cardboard coated in plastic and foil, with tiny and usually grainy pictures of baseball players. The entirety of a baseball card, the images and statistics, can be found on Google in six seconds. The cards have differing values based on the player depicted on the card, and that value has no relation whatsoever to the aesthetic merit of the player in question.

Despite the crumbling of the baseball card industry some ten years back, these cards are still worth some money, despite the fact that they have no intrinsic value to speak of. The baseball card economy is driven solely by the irrational demand of its customers, driven by tales of Mantles and Wagners found in attics, or driven by the horror of the investments their own mothers had tossed away. In short, baseball card collecting is as useless as it is ridiculous, a waste of time and energy.

This is not, in actuality, a bad thing.

Happiness, after all, is often found in the ridiculous. We cannot be caught up in the spiral of productivity and efficiency; these ideas may make us better, and stronger, but they also make us slaves. They’re emblematic of the childlike sense of play that is crushed out of us by societal conformity and increased obligations. Noted (forgotten) philosopher, playwright, and dashing rogue Friedrich von Schiller spoke out as a proponent of frivolity against a backdrop of developing industrialism. It’s only during play, says he (in German), that we develop our aesthetic sense and allow our curiosity to develop. Leisure, it turns out, is good for us. A hundred and thirty years later, legendary face-maker Bertrand Russell piled on, noting that hobbies are “fun”.

So rather than continuing to impugn the dumb activity that is baseball card collecting, I’d like to celebrate it. Unlike most “important” things, no person has ever been killed over a baseball card, or at least there is no evidence of it when I google “killed over a baseball card”.

Our first entry in the history of dumb baseball cards: the 1981 Fleer Graig Nettles Error Card.

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The year is 1987.  The nation is reeling from a combination of Iran-Contra hearings and Cold War-induced deficit crisis.  Toni Morrison publishes Beloved, depressing the hell out of everyone. Vince Coleman becomes baseball’s new darling, and Full House appears on television screens for the first time.  Patrick Swayze has not yet recorded “She’s Like the Wind”, but he is about to do so.  Clearly, American morale is foundering, and the baseball card manufacturing companies are needed to revive the spirit of America.  No longer was one set per brand enough; we need more.

They fill this demand by selling small, forty-four card individually boxed sets.  These cards were sold, through exclusive retailers, on the premise that if people liked to collect pictures of baseball players printed on small pieces of cardboard, they might want to collect pictures of baseball players printed on different pieces of cardboard.  To increase jubilance, these cards were given red, white and/or blue borders and exciting names. They loaded these cards with as much Gershwin-esque bombast as they could scrounge.

Essentially, they lied to us.  They lied to America. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been said that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I am a set collector, complete with price guides, plastic sheets and graded cards. Without even consulting a Beckett I can tell you that the book of a first series 1966 common card in Near Mint condition is $1.50; at the same time I can tell you that this card is in a considerably lesser grade.

How would you grade this card? The soft corners, poor centering and multiple creases plunge it towards the Good range and then the stain on the card sends it directly to the Poor category. Forget about $1.50 – if you tried to sell this card on ebay you would be lucky to get two cents for it.

Yet if asked to name the favorite card in my collection, this would be one of the first ones I would mention. This hand-me-down card from one of my older brothers of Johnny Stephenson, a worthless backup catcher who put up an almost impossible to duplicate .225 wOBA in 153 PA for a team that lost 95 games.

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