Rinker on Collectibles

RINKER ON COLLECTIBLES — Column #1784

Déjà Vu All Over Again

“Oh, when will they ever learn? / Oh, when will they ever learn?” Pete Seeger, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (1955)

“Tank McNamara” is a daily syndicated comic strip written and illustrated by Bill Hinds. It appears in the Sunday edition of the “Grand Rapids Free Press.” McNamara is a local sports television reporter and former defensive lineman in the National Football League.

In a recent six panel strip, a father is talking to his son who is sitting on a couch playing video games. “Son, your culture and mine are finally starting to interact. We are going to have a common interest,” the father explains in the first panel. “You and I are going to spend time together because we want to,” the father continues. His son replies, “You’re going to become a gamer?” In the third panel, the father firmly states: “I’ll never be able to play those games,” to which the son responds: “You’re going to skateboard?” Leaning over the couch and up close and personal with his son, the father exclaims: “We are going to get into sports cards?” The son, who appears much more sophisticated than his father philosophizes: “I don’t know the meaning of Repudiate but the word comes to mind.” In the fifth panel, the father holds several baseball cards encased in plastic. “Your Generation is really getting into it, just as mine did a-oh-generation ago. Look what I picked up at the card show.” The strip concludes with the son holding the card packages and asking: “So, we pull these cards out and play with them with other kids and dads? “No!,” the father shouts: “We don’t take them out of the plastic cases! Touching them devalues them!” The son’s response is classic: “Fun.”

During the 1990s Beanie Baby craze, I made an offer to testify on behalf of any child who shot a parent because the parent lost money set aside for the child’s college education by investing it in Beanie Babies. Such action fits my criteria for justifiable homicide. I make the same offer for those children who suffer a similar fate because their college funds were squandered as part of the revival of speculation in sports trading cards.

“Oh, when will they ever learn?’ – Pete Seeger (1955).

Déjà Vu All Over Again? Over 30 years have passed since the rampant 1980s and early 1990s speculative craze in boxed sporting card sets. Although boxed baseball card sets were the most prominent, boxed card sets of NASCAR drivers and other sport categories also were included in the speculative hoarding.

The craze lasted almost ten years. Sporting card manufacturers sweetened the speculative pot by adding chase cards, embossed and gilded cards, mid-season correction sets, and even personally autographed cards. Prices rose and fell faster than a balloon that was punctured in mid-air.

In the 2020s, most of the boxed sets sell for less than they cost initially. Most are dissembled in favor of a few rookie cards, Hall of Famers cards, or a viable future prospect. Do not take bets on a Barry Bonds or Roger Clemente card.

Time is a great contributor to forgetfulness. A new generation of get-rich-quick speculators has once again been lured into the word of sports trading cards by savvy marketing and market manipulators. “When something is too good to be true, it probably is” is the applicable phrase. The lessons learned from the Beanie Baby craze and Bernie Madoff investment scam appear to have been forgotten. They have been forgotten, and they most certainly will be repeated.

When I first read the Tank McNamara cartoon, I printed it and placed it in my “future ‘Rinker on Collectibles’ Idea” file. I never expected to use it as quickly as I did. The catalyst was Robert Channick’s article “Baseball cards are booming during the pandemic with long lines, short supplies, and million-dollar sales” that appeared in the “Chicago Tribune” on February 12, 2021.

“Same old, same old” is one my son Harry, Jr.’s favorite expressions. It is the way I felt reading Channick’s article. Although the article mention’s some top dollar prices for older sport trading cards, the article’s principal focus is on current sporting card issues. Channick begins by citing Jim & Steve’s Sportscards in Waukegan, Illinois, selling the Topps 2021 Series 1 baseball cards for $149.00 a box before they appeared on the store shelves.

Channick notes: “Baseball trading cards are booming during the pandemic, with record sales of vintage cards, skyrocketing prices for new cards and an influx of collectors—old and new. Some industry analysts see pandemic stay-at-home boredom as fueling a resurgence of interest, as parents rediscover the hobby and share it with their children.”

[Author’s Aside #1: Hobby and speculative investment are not synonymous. Hobby is about the joy of collecting without any consideration of value. Hoarding and attempting to control a collecting market is about greedy individuals willing to take advantage of the naivete of unknowledgeable individuals.]

Channick quotes Jason Koonce, an Ann Arbor sports memorabilia broker, arguing that “new cards are immediately worth 3 to 10 times the retail price in the secondary market, if they are sold unopened, which preserves the value and holds the promise of a future Hall of Famer or a limited edition autographed card.” Channick reports that the 2020 Bowman Draft collection, a Topps product released in December 2020 and which included three autograph cards, had a suggested retail price of $150.00. The set sold out almost immediately. One dealer has a “healthy supply” of boxes available at $500.00.

Two valuable lessons that the antiques and collectibles trade learned in the late 1980s’ mild recession appear to have been completely forgotten. First, there is a price at which eventually every object will not sell. That price occasionally may reach the millions, but it always is reached. Second, the winners are those individuals who sold while the speculative market was hot and the losers were those individuals who paid the top dollar and will only recover a small fraction of what they paid when it comes time to sell.

My advice to those who have purchased new boxed sets of trading cards is to sell now. Take any offer that is more than you paid. In ten or twenty years, you most likely will be able to buy back the boxes (not that you would want to do it) for less than you paid initially.

[Author’s Aside #2: The career for most modern sports participants is fairly short. One- and two-year wonders are often nothing more than flash-in-the-pan individuals. Mickey Mantle, LeBron James, Wayne Gretzky, and Tom Brady are exceptions to the rule and not the rule.]

Hidden within Channick’s article are a number of warnings. The most obvious is: “Buying a new box of trading cards and opening them, at the current prices, is like playing the lottery, with far more busts than winners, [Jason] Koonce said. Selling a sealed box on the secondary market, is by far the safest investment….It’s fun but generally, it’s a bad investment to open them.” It is a bad investment because no one likes shattered dreams and finding out that they were hoodwinked by manufacturers and sellers.

Few remember what I call the “Jose Conseco” investment debacle. When Jose Conseco Capas, Jr., a Cuban-American, began his major league baseball career in 1986, he was voted the American League Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player. Speculators immediately drove up the price of his Rookie baseball card. He was touted as the next Mickey Mantle. Although he had an above average baseball career, including two World Series rings, he is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame. A recent WorthPoint.com listings check showed his rookie card usually sells for less than $10.00.

Time is a great equalizer in terms of assigning value to antiques and collectibles. There are no fixed prices and no guarantees of what an object will be worth in five, ten, or fifty years. There is one guarantee I will make. There is less risk investing in an established stock market fund than in unopened boxes of new sport trading cards.

Harry L. Rinker welcomes questions from readers about collectibles, those mass-produced items from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Selected letters will be answered in this column. Harry cannot provide personal answers. Photos and other material submitted cannot be returned. Send your questions to: Rinker on Collectibles, 5955 Mill Point Court SE, Kentwood, MI 49512. You also can e-mail your questions to harrylrinker@aol.com. Only e-mails containing a full name and mailing address will be considered.

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