TThis year marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession(Grove/Atlantic Inc, 272 pages, $15.95), the definitive history of baseball cards. Dave Jamieson, a contributor to Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, has written a book that is as much fun as opening a pack of baseball cards and discovering a Mickey Mantle and as compelling as a 7th game of the World Series. Make no mistake. Mint Condition isn’t a terrific baseball card or baseball book; it’s a terrific book period. My 88-year-old mother, who, needless to say, doesn’t know a Clyde Klutz from a Bryce Harper, couldn’t put it down.
Mint Condition, which still remains in print, was favorably reviewed in all the right places when it first appeared, from The New York Times to The Washington Post. In his 2010 review, a Forbes.com colleague of mine, Steven Schaefer, distilled the essence of its appeal: “it explores the history of card collecting through an entertaining cast of characters— the visionaries and villains who turned a gimmick designed to boost tobaccos sales into a billion dollar industry.”
Though Jamieson shows a delightful appreciation for the artistry of “artifacts of expired popular culture that [can] be summoned at any time from a breast pocket,” he brackets his book at its beginning and end with pessimism about the industry’s future. His own collection from the 1980s and 1990s, like all the others from that period, is absolutely worthless because it came from overproduced sets that mothers didn’t throw away. “The industry then was driven by unsustainable speculation, and though for a while it yielded a bonanza for manufactures and dealers, the frenzy probably did more harm than good in the long run,” the author writes.
But five years later, the vintage baseball card industry is booming more than ever, setting all-time records every few months. So what’s going on? The answer lies in the history Jamieson traces and in the five years since his book came out.
My mother’s favorite visionary in his book is Jefferson Burdick, the father of vintage baseball card collecting. “Many people credit him with establishing an organized hobby that now includes thousands of collectors,” Jamieson writes. “The pioneering research he did in the 1930s has provided the foundation for today’s thriving secondary [i.e. vintage] market.” After contracting a degenerative form rheumatoid arthritis, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to accept his collection of hundreds of thousands of cards on the condition that he curate it. In the early 1960s Burdick, a recluse with no known relatives or friends other than a few fellow collectors with whom he corresponded, brought a small oak desk to the corner of the print department. Living on borrowed time, he “toiled frantically” pasting cards into albums. Number 306,353 was his last and he died of an exhausted heart two months later.
The primary villain comes straight from central casting, a hobby kingpin I spent a long day with, helping liquidate a Brooklyn buddy’s baseball card and memorabilia collection about a decade ago. Bill Mastro, brash and obnoxious, was one of the first auctioneers to make big money from baseball cards. He says things like “I understand why these guys [his competitors] don’t like me. It’s not just jealously. I’ve extracted my pound of flesh out of them. I handle myself like a businessman most of the time, and my job was to take their legs out. I did that in a very surgical manner.” At the time of his reporting and research, Jamieson notes that allegations were swirling around Mastro that his company was shill bidding, artificially inflating the prices of objects, and that he had trimmed the most valuable Honus Wagner card to improve its condition and value. (It last sold in 2007 for $2.8 million.) At the National Convention in Cleveland in 2007 Mastro dismissed the charge “with a wave of his hand” to the author. Since then he has pled guilty in federal court to the shill bidding and to doctoring the Wagner card, and is awaiting sentencing.
Having reported extensively on the baseball card and memorabilia auction business for many years, my impression is that the Mastro scandal has sent a chill through the industry. At last year’s National Sports Collectors Convention in Cleveland, a dealer joked to me that there should be a betting pool based on which auctioneers would be escorted off the floor in handcuffs. While there are still unscrupulous dealers playing small con games, my impression based on the multitude of shows and auctions I’ve covered, is that the systemic fraud is less prevalent because the FBI is watching.
Jamieson rightly condemns the mass-market bubble of new cards in the 1980s and 1990s when speculators bought jillions of cases. Back then I remember one dealer boasting that he cashed out his retirement funds to buy new cards on his road to financial freedom; I’m sure he wasn’t alone. “The card industry had been headed for an epic crash since the speculative era of collecting had begun,” Jamieson says. He estimates that more than a million of the Ken Griffey 1989 rookie cards were produced. In hindsight the market was clearly rigged. A lot of collectors returned defective Griffey cards so the manufacturer went back to printing hundreds at a time.
Rather than the primary market fueling the secondary market as it did 25 years ago, the two are now entirely separate. There’s still a sizeable following for shiny new cards with swatches of uniforms and slivers of bats of popular players, but almost all the big-time dealers and auction houses specialize in vintage cards and memorabilia— i.e. bats, jerseys, and autographs— produced before the early 1970s. (Jamieson wisely skips memorabilia, a whole other realm unto itself.) The third-party, independent grading companies are not perfect by any stretch— the trimmed Wagner card eluded detection— but they they’ve devised a fair and accurate way of updating the quantity of graded cards and their values.
Meanwhile collecting borders on a national obsession, fed by eBay and TV programs like Antiques Roadshow, PBS’s most popular and longest running show; Pawn Stars; and American Pickers. There are even smaller shows devoted to sports cards and memorabilia. “Fully one third of North Americans define themselves as ‘collectors,’ wrote Maureen Stanton in Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market Americain 2011. “In one study, over 60 percent of American households reported having at least one collection.” One antiques authority says that before eBay there were 1,500 categories of collectibles. Since then, there are now more than 30,000, and that number is still is increasing.
As for the baseball card collecting craze, Jamieson quotes a Burdick contemporary: “I would like to have an example of every card ever issued. It’s a form of megalomania, of course. But not, I think, a bad form.” What says megalomania more than appearing on a reality TV show with a rare 1870s baseball card or registering your valuable baseball card set on website for the whole world to see?
Besides their competitive streaks, many of the top baseball card and memorabilia collectors talk about the strong pull of their childhoods. Michael Eisner compares his rationale for buying Topps, the number one baseball card company, to the “Proustian kind of uplift” associated with Disney, the company he ran successfully for many years. For many young grown men baseball cards are a more tangible and valuable asset to conjure up their childhoods than video games. Or as Woody Gellman, a visionary card designer for Topps, told Jamieson, “Part of it is a recapturing. You discovered how to play. You go back with a vengeance.”
With today’s popular culture so transitory, baseball cards offer permanence, even intimations of immortality. “I still say the trick is to retire early enough,” Burdick wrote. “As time goes on, I see ever so many waiting until they literally have one foot in the grave before they quit. Then the retirement period is too short, as it will probably be for me. Nobody can figure accurately how many years are left for them.” Many of today’s collectors see their profiting from the past as a way of preserving it.
I’m not sure this age of disruptive technology we inhabit is any more stressful than earlier eras, but baseball card collecting still offers a fun escape. As an early collector of vintage baseball cards in my early teens, I remember a wonderful quote of Burdick’s that doesn’t appear in Mint Condition, but is echoed by Jamieson’s other sources. “A card collection is a magic carpet that takes you away from work-a-day cards to havens of relaxing quietude where you can relive the pleasures and adventures of a past day— brought to life in vivid pictures and prose.” This fantastic notion of collecting as a magic carpet has stuck with me ever since.
Granted, baseball cards are big business like the game itself and have been sold to both adults and grown-ups with cigarettes that cause lung cancer, chewing tobacco that causes mouth cancer, or gum that rots teeth. Furthermore companies have been guilty of scams like not printing an individual card in a 1933 set to induce children to go on shopping sprees in futile efforts to complete sets.
A reader of my Forbes posts commented that the high-end of the industry reminded him of Robin Williams’ line that “cocaine is God’s way of reminding the rich they have too much money.” A key figure at a top auction house told me that he doubted the prices for baseball cards and memorabilia, such as the record $4.4 million for a Babe Ruth jersey, would have ever have been so high, relatively speaking, in the 1950s or 1960s. He was alluding to the income tax rate that now favors the top one percent. If polls are any indication, I regret to concede that our tax rate won’t be more progressive again anytime soon. In a story about the recent auction of a $179.4 million Picasso painting, a record price for art, The New York Times Neil Irwin writes “The astronomical rise in prices for the most-sought-after works of art over the last generation is in large part the story of rising global inequality. The number of people with the will and the resources to buy top-end art is rising, thanks to the distribution of extreme wealth.” The billionaires he has in mind are the beyond the one percenters; they are the the 0.1 percent or even the 0.01 percent.
At the same time my thinking about the dealers and collectors I’ve befriended since starting my Forbes blog almost two years ago has evolved. At show after show, I see middle class and working class types of the kind that attend such events spending thousands and even tens of thousands of their hard-earned dollars on baseball cards. They may not be in the league of the one-percenters, but they can be the masters of their own universes for an afternoon. What worries me about their conspicuous and sometimes contagious consumption is stories they tell me about putting their investment-grade cards in bank safety deposit boxes as though they are U.S. Savings Bonds. “Buying baseball cards is a lot like gambling,” a well-heeled collector tells Jamieson. “If one isn’t willing to lose money altogether, then they shouldn’t buy the cards.” In other posts I’ve preached the wisdom of spending only your discretionary income, not your grocery money, on sports collectibles and buying what you like in case it drops in value.
I do have other worries. Affluent collectors could cause a crash by pulling out of the top end. And I agree with Jamieson that the lack of children or even teenagers at shows doesn’t bode well for the industry’s future. My efforts taking the 16 and 18-year-old sons of my friends to the big shows in White Plains, New York failed to transform them into my collecting soul-mates. “Mostly notably missing from the National [Convention] were children,” Jamieson writes. “At nearly 30 years old I felt like a spry pup alongside the vast majority of collectors there, most of them appearing to have settled nicely into middle age.” By the same token I’ve gotten to be friends with a few card dealers in their mid-20s like Jonathan Celona and Greg Campbell. I also see a lot of families lining up to meet their heroes like Mariano Rivera at autograph shows where baseball card dealers set up. The problem is that after shelling out $300 for Mo’s signature and $100 for each inscription they have a lot less to spend on cards.
Even though people primarily collect their memories, very few of today’s buyers of Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige bubblegum cards are old enough to have ever seen them play, much like Burdick only knew Cap Anson and Buck Ewing from their 1880s tobacco cards. Since 1930 vintage baseball card collecting has survived the Great Depression and least a half dozen recessions. “Burdick knew the story behind the Wagner and had apparently struggled to obtain one himself,” Jamieson writes “Even as he tried to keep prices down, he acknowledged the Wagner’s scarcity and value, pricing it in his 1960 catalog at a whopping $50— the highest of any card— compared to T206s.” That’s $400, adjusted for inflation. When I was a child in the early 1970s the price was $1500, or $8500 in today’s money. A few weeks ago, Robert Edward Auctions, a top auction house Jamieson covers in Mint Condition, sold a Wagner card in very good condition for more than $1.3 million. Long live baseball cards.
