Midwest Mountain Sports Report 4/21/21
It’s been about a week or two since my last post, and I’m happy to be back writing gibberish online. Nothing in particular prompted my pause, but I do think that I had been feeling a bit burned out, and the general state of affairs of the world were weighing heavy. So in order to step back and regain some composure, I dutifully tuned in to the news, albeit with a strict time limit. I followed up my news diet strategy by diving into a new old hobby of mine: collecting baseball cards. That’s right, we are in the middle of a new sports card bubble, and the hobby is just as popular as it ever was, with new collectors jumping into primary and secondary sports card trading markets.
As most new fanatic hobbies go, this one started innocently enough. A friend of mine sent a message into a group chat that his father-in-law had sold a Bob Cousy card in Minneapolis for around $800, which reminded me of all of those old Topps boxes and binders stored in the childhood bedroom of my brother and I. Our collective card stash is circa 1990’s memorabilia, and while I doubt that there may be any single card in that bunch worth $800, I started to speculate upon the current value of some of our old cards. This train of thought led me to the trading cards section of our local Target, where I was surprised to find a barren landscape of empty shelves.
I’ve eyeballed this section of the store throughout the years, checking to see which brands are still relevant, and if people are still shopping for sports and trading cards. And until this year, I can say that those shelves were always stocked with a decent number of packs and boxes, waiting for the collector who was still carrying the flame of the hobby from their youth. It wasn’t until this year that it became clear to me that we are in a bubble, and I’m only slowly realizing how big that bubble is. There was a “Limit three per item, per sport” sign posted in the trading cards section, reminding me of sanitizing wipes and paper towel displays from a year ago. It would seem that we are still in a pandemic state of mind, but our interests have shifted from necessities to trivialities.
However, I think that trivialities still have their place in the world. I’m psychologically aware that perhaps the reason I dove back in to the world of collecting cards is that as the world has continued to make less sense throughout the pandemic, many of us have sought after places and items of familiarity, comfort and nostalgia. Collecting baseball cards reminds me of a time when all I had to worry about was whether or not I had saved up enough allowance for two packs of cards from Bill’s Collectibles. The simple joy of ripping open a pack of new cards in search of a rookie or foil card is a safe sense of apprehension, antithetical to the apprehension of accepting an invitation to a gathering in the middle of a pandemic, or the social fallout should you choose to decline instead. And at the risk of justifying trivialities, I say that there’s still a place for unabashed joy in a post-pandemic world. If anything, our Covid experience has made me understand that nothing is guaranteed, and small moments of joy are to be encouraged and enjoyed.
However, I was also surprised to discover that the hobby has evolved. Pop quiz: what happens when card collecting millenials grow up, and have more disposable income to throw at an innocent hobby? Answer: Sports card trading becomes a “market”. As seems to be the trend with anything today, you can trade it, gamble it, or search for any way within it to make a buck. This isn’t new, card enthusiasts have been selling their collections for a profit ever since Honus Wagner’s likeness was stamped onto the T206 card set of the American Tobacco Company. One of those sold for over $3 million big ones, and Honus Wagner has been dead for 66 years. It’s part and parcel of the hobby. But there’s no question that the level of trading and money involved has grown, and people are collecting and re-selling on the secondary market at a remarkable clip. The only place I can find a second Topps Heritage Box sold exclusively at Target is on Ebay, and you had better believe that I’m buying at least one more.
In addition to the secondary market, the trading card hobby has broken in to the digital realm. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are selling like gangbusters (just Google it, I can barely explain it myself), and Topps has begun to stake their claim within the virtual trading card space. Already ahead of the game with their Topps Bunt app, they’ve been selling digital versions of their cards for a least a year or two. And I’ll admit, while I think it’s a waste of money to throw down cold hard cash for a digital sports card, I did try to buy a virtual pack during their 2021 Line 1 release on 4/20. I signed onto the website maybe thirty minutes after the release was live, and they were already sold out. That’s completely selling out of an entirely digital product, which gives me hope that those digital items will have some value, and buyers within that space haven’t (completely) thrown away their money.
But I’ll admit that I’m old school, I like having a hard copy of the things I pay for. I’ve had iTunes and Apple update their software too many times, deleting movies and albums that I had paid for, and were technically “mine”, until they suddenly weren’t under the latest licensing agreement. That’s the risk of investing in digital media, the block chain be damned. And I find something relaxing about turning over Kevin Pillar’s 2021 card in my hand, eyeballing his previous seasons’ stats and laughing to myself that although he’s wearing a Rockies jersey in his baseball card photo, the only team he will suit up for in 2021 will be the New York Mets. I like the permanence of print, and the inevitable inaccuracies therein. Life is messy and uncertain, and I find physical media to be a moment-in-time representation of the complications of certainty and permanence. It’s too easy to alter a digital card, and no chance at a secondary market for “digital errors.”
This may lead to just a simple case of dabbling back into sports cards for the energy it has in the moment. I’m under no motivation (yet) to buy and resell cards in order to make a profit, because I don’t feel comfortable just yet throwing down big $ for the big movers, so I’ll continue to gather packs here and there, as I’m able. There’s no wrong way to collect cards, and I think I’ll start by focusing on the teams and sports most familiar to me. But can the Rockies do anything this season to justify purchasing a 2021 team set? I’m not holding my breath…
Midwest Mountain Sports Report 