The Baseball Card Effect

April 20, 2007

Recently my parents dropped off a few boxes of my old stuff.. and I found plenty of evidence for my youthful baseball fever. This fever manifested itself in baseball card collecting. The years from about the 4th grade to the 7th grade were my prime years. I have the necessary memories of trading the cards and opening the wax packs.. sometimes even chewing the gum. I collected for years.. used the money I earned from a paper route to buy old cards.. and acquired a few complete sets. Then in high school as I worked on another collection that grew to seem even more pressing.. namely, my music collection.. I took my most valuable rookie cards and two complete sets (1983 & 1984 Topps) and took them to the card and coin shop in Redlands. I got some cash and God knows what music tapes I bought.

For the longest time I felt mildly guilty about that transaction. It looked and felt like a trade-in of something that would be valuable in the long term for tapes that would be valuable only in the short term. Then this past summer I ran into an article on Slate which put my mind at ease.. It turned out that the baseball card market had gone belly up:

Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They've taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn't get out of the game took a beating.

This was naturally a comforting message for me.. after all, it would have been about 1991 that I sold those rookie cards and my two sets. So I actually managed to cash in at the best possible time. Suddenly I feel smart..

Since I learned this information about the fate of baseball cards, I often wonder what other bubbles there might be out there. The key point to consider is that many things appear valuable because of social pressures. Lots of silly things suddenly become "hot". The game, though, is to recognize what will have lasting importance and interest. We might ask: In 200 years, what among the myriad things that surround us will be seen as a genuine cultural artifact? That is not an easy question.. and for the true speculator it is a useless question, since between now and then random useless things will go through surges in price and popularity. My bet is that we can get rid of Barbies and Beanie Babies.. Anything that is collected for its own sake and does not have a genuine place in the economy of everyday life is worthless.. or will be before too many years.