The Cardboard Investment

Too Good To Be True

  From 1956 until 1981 Topps had a monopoly on the sports card market. There was a few years where other companies made a small run at competition, but Topps remained  supreme. The product and implementation was simple, including a base set that would usually be released in two different printing productions. A few different insert sets would be made to add some variety and lower odds to chase in the packs and boxes. After production, Topps would sometimes have a different company contracted to collate the printed cards in a desired ratio of odds. These card's would be put into packs, and then sealed in boxes. Every one containing similar odds as the last. Some people have told stories about knowing which place in a box the packs with certain players were. The boxes were then sealed in larger boxes called cases. These cases could have a dozen or more sealed unopened boxes in them. When people with money began to get into the sports card collecting world, they brought with it simple economics; supply and demand. These buyers would have no issue buying cases of cards to try and resell, store or break open to sell the hot players.

  Even with the large print productions coming in the 1960s and 70s, there were no other major card manufacturers to choose from. This allowed the market to avoid over saturation, and the average collector was fine with getting a single card of that years Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron. In 1981 Fleer and Donruss attempted to break up the hold they had on the consumers. With the popularity of sports cards with young kids, and the gaining traction of adults now being interested in the hobby, it allowed the market to bloom and accept more competition. Collectors were now transformed from building a set and moving on, to collecting as many Rickey Henderson, Ozzie Smith, or Cal Ripken cards as they could find. Production continued to increase to meet this new found demand.

  Topps had dabbled in sports other than Baseball over the years, but the popularity of collecting these cards just never caught on like Baseball did. Some of these other companies saw this as an opportunity as Fleer decided to make a comeback with Basketball cards in 1986. This set would turn into the holy grail for basketball collectors with the introduction of the Michael Jordan rookie.

  Very soon other companies began to pop up and build a small following like Score in 1988. It seemed like for a few years there was enough room in the hobby world for everyone. 1989 further solidified this evidence with the iconic release of Upper Deck baseball, featuring Ken Griffey Jr's now most desirable rookie card. Fueled by the same illusion that had fallen upon my 8 year old self, almost every kid around the U.S. was buying these cards in hopes they turned into the small fortunes their parents cards had become. One small catch to this scenario was that these kids parents knew not to throw away these cards from the 80's and 90's. Many of these parents now realized there mistakes of letting these collections become lost, just like the false hope I had that there was a hidden box of cards stashed away from my father's collection.

  Like many markets before, including the dotcom boom and the 2000s housing markets, a bubble was forming. Card manufacturers were getting greedy, and who could blame them. People were buying anything and everything that was put out. Slowly the hobby was beginning its transition from being collected by kids to a hobby more geared towards adults. With monthly releases of pricing guides such as Beckett, this was the beginning of having monetary values associated with cards that could be agreed upon by everyone across the country. People began to see cards of players at the beginning of their careers worth hundreds of dollars, just like the Rickey Henderson rookie card that was mentioned earlier. Consumers began to see this hobby as an investment and started to hoard cards in hopes of them continuing to increase in value. As people bought more cards, the card companies just printed more. The unseen issue here was that people did not have the internet. Card shows were frequent, but the average person didn't travel from state to state. There were some magazines, but you had to wait a month for the latest updates. No one had any idea how flooded the market had become until it was too late.

  The instant stardom of Ken Griffey Jr. led to infatuation with his 1989 Upper Deck rookie. Customers would buy cases of these cards and open them all searching for the Griffey rookie. Their is speculation that this product and card were so popular that Upper Deck continued printing this product into the 1990 season. People didn't care though, as this was the hottest card in the entire world at the time..

  The community was growing astronomically, but there was still a lack of unity in terms of what these pieces of cardboard were worth. Without a way for average collectors to communicate outside their immediate circle, people remained clueless for far too long about what was happening to there rare and valuable card's. The more connected the world wide sports card hobby became, people began to open their eyes to how over produced this Era of cards had become. Some saw the writing on the wall, while others held onto their delusions of grandeur.