slate.com — If I had to guess, I'd say that I spent a couple thousand bucks and a couple thousand hours compiling my baseball card collection. Now, it appears to have a street value of approximately zero dollars. What happened?
Aug 2, 2006 View in Crawl 4
jonviscAug 2, 2006
I am sure, give it some time and the price of these cards will go back up. It may be awhile (read: 20+ years) but if you have them already, just keep them or pass them down. Everything seems to recycle these days (e.g., fashions, trends, colors) soon cards, amazingly enough will bounce back.
Closed AccountAug 2, 2006
As another child of the 80s/early 90s, yep, sad but true. And great article. Also probably related to the comic books boom of the early 1990s, where somehow people thought that the 5 different holographic covered issues of X-Men, with a print run of about 2 million, would become as valuable as Action Comics #1 in a few years. The mass-marketing of collecting kills it for the people who actually like collecting, funny, huh?
lurker82Aug 2, 2006
So MLB is launching a marketing campaign to revive the popularity of baseball cards? Good luck. The increased sophistication of video games and other entertainment mediums have certainly put a dent in the card-collecting industry. If you were a pre-pubescent child these days, what would you rather do? Build up your franchise on MLB 2K6 or invest the minimal allowance that you get from your parents in crappy pieces of cardboard that have no value.Player's stats that were found on the rear of cards can also now be located on line with the click of a mouse.Collecting baseball cards back in the day was fun, but it'll take some serious effort to resuscitate the hobby.