Kids used to put baseball cards in the spokes of their bicycles to make for a flashier trip around the neighborhood block. For what Leonard Kim was paid for one baseball card on eBay last weekend — $16,403 — he could have bought bikes for his entire neighborhood in Burke, Va. Baseball cards, it seems, are back.
With the consolidation of the card-making industry to just one licensed vendor — Topps Inc. — startling sums are again being paid for single cards, such as the one-of-a-kind Bowman 2010 “Chrome Superfractor” card of Washington Nationals pitching prospect Stephen Strasburg that Kim sold Saturday.
That’s not all.
A card enthusiast paid $743.98 for a 2005 SPx Ubaldo Jimenez autographed 8/10 (eighth out of 10) rookie card on eBay on Sunday. A 2010 Topps Pro Debut Jason Heyward Futures Game 1/1 card was up to $455 Tuesday with a little under four days left in the auction. A check of card sales on eBay showed thousands of recent cards selling for upward of $100.
Does that mean baby boomers and Generation X’ers can expect big paydays for their boxes of baseball cards stacked in the closet, the ones that Mom didn’t toss out? Probably not.
“When people come in with their sets of cards from the ’80s and ’90s and think they’re going to cash in, it’s always tough to see. There was just too much product out there then,” said Bill Vizas, owner of Denver’s Bill’s Sports Collectibles, one of the few area sporting-goods memorabilia stores to survive a decade of tumult in the business. “Sales of packs of cards have been better this year because there’s less product now. It’s more sane. People can actually decide what they want to collect now and collect it.”
That’s because only Topps is now licensed by Major League Baseball to make cards of its players. That scarcity of cards is driving up the value of the class of 2010 sets. In years past, multiple other licensed card companies would have produced their own versions of the Strasburg rookie, diluting the value. According to Dave Jamieson’s recent book “Mint Condition,” as many as 81 billion baseball cards were produced in some years during the baseball-card boom of the late 1980s and ’90s. That glut ultimately made the cards not worth the paper they were printed on.
The overproduction added up to a vast army of disillusioned collectors and card-shop owners — and card companies that went bust.
In recent years, competitors of Topps’ such as Donruss, Score, Fleer and Upper Deck dropped out of the baseball- card business as the industry consolidated, leaving Topps alone again in the position it occupied for most of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Adding to the value of select cards is that Topps has gotten into production of cards of hot prospects. Rather than print, say, a million of the same rookie card of a Strasburg, it’ll make a limited, individually numbered set of the player in a derivative set. Collectors will pay a lot more for one of only 10 cards compared with one of a million. They’ll also buy more packs, as Kim did, in the hope of getting that rare card, creating a lottery scratch ticket effect.
Once people like Kim get a rare Strasburg card, they can instantly find a buyer. The Internet has opened up a new world for card collectors and sellers alike. No longer does it take months to find a buyer or a seller. Now, you can do so in a few seconds online.
Rockies pitcher Jeff Francis occasionally goes online to check the prices of the cards featuring him. “Not very impressive right now,” said Francis, an avid collector as a kid growing up in Canada. “(Ken) Griffey’s rookie card was a big one then for me. It was pretty surreal for me to see myself on my own card. It was a huge thrill.”
Topps vice president Warren Friss expects card collecting to build in interest now that fewer cards are being made.
“Our cards will maintain or increase their value. The fewer numbers of different product of the same players out there, the value is higher,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise us that the Strasburg Superfractor card had that kind of a demand. We have a lot more special stuff planned for him.”
That likely includes special cards with, say, some showing the uniform he wears from his first start with the Nationals, which is scheduled for Tuesday at home against the Pirates.
But, like any speculative investment market, the bubble can burst — quickly.
“One torn ligament in his elbow in his first start,” Vizas said, “and that card is worth five bucks.”
Adrian Dater: 303-954-1360, adater@denverpost.com or twitter.com/adater
