Worthless (Sadly, Not Bush-Related)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I pit what has happened to the sports card industry in the past 15 years, which I happened to have completely missed because I wasn’t paying attention.

When I was younger, sports card collecting was something my Dad and I had some passion for, and we spent hours upon hours looking for deals to complete sets, going through cardboard boxes, carefully logging specimens and placing them in plastic protective thingies. In those days, condition didn’t matter all that much, as long as corners were sharp and someone hadn’t taken a hole puncher to a card.

This weekend, I subscribed to Beckett online and found out that just about every card I own is absolutely worthless. Based on what I can piece together, here’s what happened:

  1. At some point, the bottom fell out because no one wanted to pay $10,000 for a piece of cardboard with Mickey Mantle’s picture on it.

  2. Some people decided to get into the business of grading the condition of cards. Now the collectors that remain are obsessed with condition above all other things, and everyone’s priorities are out of whack, while they pursue cards in a condition called “Gem Mint”

  3. Based on what I’ve been able to gather, a card satisfies the conditions required for “Gem Mint” if and only if the collector stands at the end of the row of machines at the Topps plant and captures the card in lucite before it has been touched by human hands. Oh, and the card has to be perfectly centered and otherwise free of any defects the very printing press it’s made on could introduce.

  4. None of my cards are “Gem Mint” and therefore are worthless.

  5. There are only a handful of companies that get to determine what “Gem Mint” is. Not surprisingly, they seem to be the only ones making money in card collecting anymore.
    So that 1980 Topps Ricky Henderson rookie card that used to fetch $100 in the late 1980s? Pretty much worthless. Unless it’s Gem Mint, in which case it’s worth more than the GDP of Argentina.

Speaking of 1980, no one seems to want any baseball cards made after 1980. Too much supply. So no one wants anything from my prime collecting years.

Even if you do have some cards that somebody might want, selling them would require sending them off to the Validation Gods to have them graded (see #5, above) so that the obsession with condition can self-perpetuate. It’s this kind of crapola that makes a 1960 Topps Mickey Mantle in reasonable shape (considering it’s a piece of fucking CARDBOARD that’s been lying around for 45 years) worth less than a common card from that era that happens to have been sealed in an airtight container, placed in a vault with lead-lined concrete walls 7 feet thick, and never permitted to be touched by light, heat, or particulate matter of any kind.
This revelation that every baseball card I own is apparently worthless has taken a toll on me, considering I’ve paid for an offsite storage space to contain all the cards my Dad gave me. Had I known they were that worthless, I would have given them away years ago.

Instead, I’m…

  1. Giving notice to the landlord on the storage space this week.
  2. Selling my entire collection on eBay.
  3. Throwing anything that doesn’t sell into a pile and burning it along with the leaves this fall.
  4. Pulling my hair out over having thought these damned things would actually hold their value, and paying rent for a space where I could keep them.
2

Try to hold on to this thought, and perhaps you’ll do less of this:

It sucks that they’re not worth the money you paid for them anymore. But was the time with your Dad worth the money you paid for them?

3

Look at the bright side. Had you chosen to collect Beenie Babies your storage requirements would have been much more costly.

4

I’m moving this thread to MPSIMS, lest it become dog-eared and tattered here in the Pit. Hopefully the mods there will take good care of it, holding it only with tweezers.

5

I could have had the same rant a couple of few years ago. Just insert Comic for Card.

The companies getting greedy and issuing 4 copies of the same thing with different covers just to make everybody get their panties in a twist and BUY THEM ALL didn’t help.

sigh at least I read all mine.

6

Well, you are collecting something that has only a very small intrinsic value. So there was a certain risk there. That said, you don’t know that the pendulum won’t swing back. There are other people like you with collections that are going to be using them for heating purposes this winter. So eventually, the scarcity will build back up.

I think you need to get out of the mode of “I’ll cash in on this some day” and more into the mode of “one of my kids might cash in on this some day.”

7

Well, I did appreciate the time spent with my Dad collecting, but this was something we both expected to appreciate in value.

I’m converting my home’s heating system to run on cardboard.

8

I am of the personal opinion that people who collect basicaly worthless items, (cards, toys, “limited” edition plates, or anything from the Franklin Mint,) with hopes of future profit are fools. The CEO of the clinic I uset to work for had a special room in our warehouse to store his “card collection” (please note that our warehouse was the basement of an old church.) He had several hundred CASES of various sports cards. Stacks upon stacks of boxes of cards, all squirreled away in hopes that they would somehow increase in value. (I suspect that there was some kind of moneylaundering going on, but as the Dr.s and the other administrators seemed to be in on the deal, who do you tell?)
The only way yer toys, cards etc. will increase in value is if someone is willing to buy them at increased value. Demand like that is too fickle to put any trust or investment in.

I love those published price guides that list “suggested value” of these things. I hate to break it to you all, but the thing is only worth what someone is willing to pay.