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Monday, August 24, 2009
The Last Iconic Baseball Card
Luke Winn at SI has the story:
But this is what mattered: Upper Deck had the undisputed Griffey rookie card. Topps and Score didn’t have the foresight even to include the Mariners’ 19-year-old phenom in their first-edition sets, while Donruss and Fleer were virtual afterthoughts in the hobby’s frenzy over Upper Deck’s premiere. By the time, say, Derek Jeter came along in the 1990s, the market had become oversaturated with Upper Deck copycats; the Yankees shortstop had eight different rookie cards. When Albert Pujols arrived in 2001, he had 43.
We had a recent thread on baseball cards, which was a real eye opener when reader JD told us:
To stick with Jeter, in 2008 he had 2,645 cards listed in Beckett.
Main set - 331
Parallel set - 907
Insert set - 662
Parallel insert set - 745And of those 2,645, 271 were memorabilia cards (the ones with a piece of something in the card). 198 had autographs.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think I should be able to buy a complete set of all cards published by a company in 2010 for 50$. And the only players who can have cards are those with at least 25 IP, 100 PA, or 200 innings played the previous or current season.
The sports trading card industry is dealing with an uncomfortable present and an uncertain future. The sales of cards peaked in 1991 at $1.2 billion, according to estimates by Sports Collector’s Digest, but slid to $400 million by the turn of the century and to $200 million last year.
That’s all sports cards, if I read it right. Let’s say baseball is half of that. $100MM divided by 50$ sets means 2 million sets sold. If you read the article, rather than getting back to the pure basics, they are going to put non-athlete cards with the baseball cards. This is way worse than the Spiderman base.
Will pop-culture ephemera be enough of a draw? When someone’s pack yields a poly-cotton swatch that once hugged the backside of a Charlie’s Angel, what will be the reaction? Arousal? Shock? Or, worse, indifference?
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