Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisn't Thal and I'm Tracy Alloway. So Tracy,
Speaker 1: we continue with our bubble series this week. Bubbles. Bubbles
Speaker 1: are just the best, aren't they? Yeah? They are? And
Speaker 1: what's amazing is there are so many of them. Should
Speaker 1: we just stop doing other non bubble episodes and just
Speaker 1: do bubbles from here on out? Because we probably could,
Speaker 1: couldn't we? I would be into that. Plus, you know
Speaker 1: new bubbles are being made every day. Yeah, exactly. I
Speaker 1: think we should seriously consider just doing until we've really
Speaker 1: run out of bubbles, and that will be never um.
Speaker 1: But today I'm I'm particularly excited because we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about a bubble in which I was an
Speaker 1: active and enthusiastic participant. Okay, wait, I know you dabbled
Speaker 1: in trade tech stocks in the late ninety nineties, and that,
Speaker 1: of course was a huge bubble. Is it? It's not
Speaker 1: tech stocks? So I guess, now that I think about it,
Speaker 1: I guess I have a personality that's sort of drawn
Speaker 1: to riding bubbles up and then all the way down.
Speaker 1: But no, it's not tech stocks. Do you want to
Speaker 1: take it. It's not beanie bubbles. Is it's beanie bubbles
Speaker 1: Beanie babies? That one I was not into. I'll give
Speaker 1: you a hint. I was a twelve year old boy
Speaker 1: when I was into it in the early nineties. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm really I'm trying to figure out whether or not
Speaker 1: you would have been like trading I don't know, emerging
Speaker 1: market debt during the Asian financial crisis or something, but
Speaker 1: at least how trading Mexican bonds before they play out
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Today, we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: the baseball card bubble in the early nineties. Like many
Speaker 1: other twelve thirteen year old boys, I got super into
Speaker 1: baseball cards, both both the ones that were coming out
Speaker 1: out and historical ones. And maybe if you weren't involved
Speaker 1: in it, you didn't remember this, but there was a
Speaker 1: massive surgeon interest for a few years. I think it
Speaker 1: sort of ended in like the mid to late nineties.
Speaker 1: People are paying all kinds of money for them, and
Speaker 1: then it's sort of just disappeared and people stopped doing it. Joe,
Speaker 1: I have to say I was never into baseball cards,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to admit something to you really embarrassing
Speaker 1: right now, which is I used to be into magic
Speaker 1: the Gathering, and there was a lot of card collecting
Speaker 1: in that. I suspect that there's some similarities. And I
Speaker 1: think you'll find in our episode that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of really interesting finance lessons that this bubble has to
Speaker 1: teach about other bubbles. Well, it sounds very cool. Who
Speaker 1: are we talking to today? We're going to be talking
Speaker 1: to Dave Jamison. He is the author of Mint Condition,
Speaker 1: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, and he is
Speaker 1: a labor reporter at the Huffington Post. Let's bring him in. Dave,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: Odd Lots Podcast. Hey guys, thanks a lot for having me.
Speaker 1: First of all, why did you write a book about
Speaker 1: the baseball card bubble? We'll get into what it was,
Speaker 1: but I'm curious what drew you to this story. Were
Speaker 1: you a baseball card collector at the time? Well, Joe,
Speaker 1: like you, I am a man of a certain age.
Speaker 1: We can say, um, I like yourself, I don't know
Speaker 1: what you were. You were born and I was born
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight, and so I was twelve years
Speaker 1: old in nineteen ninety and I was there for the
Speaker 1: same baseball card frenzy that you were, And this was
Speaker 1: a personal obsession of mine, I would say, from age
Speaker 1: seven to about thirteen, and all my friends were crazy
Speaker 1: for it too, and then for whatever reason, around age
Speaker 1: thirteen or fourteen, it it disappeared from my life. And
Speaker 1: my interest was rekindled when I was around getting close
Speaker 1: to thirty years old and my parents were selling the
Speaker 1: house I grew up in and my mom said, You've
Speaker 1: got to come get these baseball cards out of the
Speaker 1: closet because it's full of them, and so that sort
Speaker 1: of sent me down this rabbit hole of oh yeah,
Speaker 1: whatever happened to baseball cards? So your story is very
Speaker 1: similar to mine. I mean I didn't, you know, write
Speaker 1: a book about it or have to get rekindled. But
Speaker 1: I was born in Ni so just two years after you.
Speaker 1: So all the years line up, if they We're gonna
Speaker 1: have to be very careful with this episode, not just
Speaker 1: trading personal stories about collecting cards, because we could probably
Speaker 1: do that for like an hour or two and it
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't be very interesting. Wait, okay, so I'm going
Speaker 1: to come in here now. We're not going to do that,
Speaker 1: Tracy here's my excuse to come in as someone who
Speaker 1: knows very little about baseball cards or baseball for that matter.
Speaker 1: What is the point of the cards? Are they? How
Speaker 1: did they come into existence? How did you end up
Speaker 1: with a shoe box full of them? Well, the the
Speaker 1: long story, which I will keep short, it goes way
Speaker 1: back to the eighteen eighties when when baseball cards were
Speaker 1: created basically to market cigarettes um, and they were a
Speaker 1: collectible like any others. And the whole idea was to
Speaker 1: uh collect a certain team, a certain set. You know,
Speaker 1: if you've got numbers one, three, four, and five, you
Speaker 1: want to find number two in that set. And the
Speaker 1: original idea was you you collect these cards. They look nice.
Speaker 1: You maybe display them at your house, or you pull
Speaker 1: them out when there's company, when company is over. But
Speaker 1: they were always collectibles for years and years, and boys,
Speaker 1: young boys in particular, I love these. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of baseball card heydays. They were
Speaker 1: huge in the nineteen thirties, they were huge again in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties. Eventually, however, around the time Joe and
Speaker 1: I came along, this idea of of baseball cards being
Speaker 1: investments had come along and there's a lot of backstory there.
Speaker 1: But I think, as Joe had had had said earlier,
Speaker 1: there is a lot to this story that that that
Speaker 1: says a lot about bubbles in general and the way
Speaker 1: they work. Tracy, I'm really glad you asked that question,
Speaker 1: like what our baseball cards, because that's probably I would
Speaker 1: have just like skipped over that question. But it is
Speaker 1: actually interesting this idea that they originally you know, they've
Speaker 1: been around for you know, like a hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 1: They're originally marketed, uh, you know, relating to tobacco. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, the most famous card was I
Speaker 1: and I still remember the Honus Wagner T two O
Speaker 1: six card, uh that I think was specifically like you
Speaker 1: bought it and you got it in a pack of tobacco.
Speaker 1: And I remember the early six in the world, and
Speaker 1: I think Wayne Gretzky owned one. Uh. Tell us about
Speaker 1: this card, Dave, because I assume you know all the
Speaker 1: same lare about it. Yeah, the the the T TOO
Speaker 1: six Honess Wagner is is like generally the most valuable
Speaker 1: car it ever and that's because in part because Wagner
Speaker 1: was was a great player for Pittsburgh and a Hall
Speaker 1: of Famer, but also because the card itself had this
Speaker 1: really unique back story, there was only a limited number
Speaker 1: of them of them printed. Um, there's different theories as
Speaker 1: to why there was. You know, people think there was
Speaker 1: this dispute, you know that that Wagner didn't want to
Speaker 1: be on a tobacco card to market tobacco, so he
Speaker 1: pulled the rights anyway, for whatever reason, there's this mystery
Speaker 1: as to why there are not so many of them
Speaker 1: and if became this really hallowed card, and those old
Speaker 1: cards are really important to understanding the bubble that would
Speaker 1: come in the nine eighties and nineties. We fast forward
Speaker 1: to the nineteen seventies. Baseball cards have been around a
Speaker 1: really long time, but it's not really un till then
Speaker 1: that anybody starts thinking of them as something that could
Speaker 1: be worth money. They've always been collectibles up until now.
Speaker 1: But there's a group of kind of forward looking guys
Speaker 1: at that time who start realizing that there's a market
Speaker 1: develop uping around these old neat cards like the Honus
Speaker 1: Wagner card. And these guys, uh, they start traveling the
Speaker 1: country trying to buy up collections of baseball cards from people,
Speaker 1: and they will hit the road, and they'll put an
Speaker 1: ad in the local paper and say, Hey, my name's Joe.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be in in Pittsburgh next Tuesday at the
Speaker 1: Holiday Inn. If you've got baseball cards, come out, I'll
Speaker 1: give you some money for him. And people came out.
Speaker 1: They they pulled out whatever it was in their attic
Speaker 1: and they sold it to these guys for for pretty
Speaker 1: much a song. But that's when a certain group of
Speaker 1: collectors starts thinking about these things as money and a
Speaker 1: market starts forming. And it's not long after that that
Speaker 1: we start we see a price guide, Uh, come out.
Speaker 1: This is a guy named James Beckett, a statistician who
Speaker 1: was also a big collector, decided that there should be
Speaker 1: some sword of price guide to help people guide sales
Speaker 1: and trades, and so all of a sudden we have
Speaker 1: this this price guard guy that serves almost like a
Speaker 1: stock tick or telling people what what their cards are worth.
Speaker 1: And this is these are the sort of things we see,
Speaker 1: kind of priming the pump for the boom that's going
Speaker 1: to come in the nineties. Okay, I have questions about
Speaker 1: the price guide, but before we go there, I mean,
Speaker 1: I know you both have an affinity for these cards.
Speaker 1: But as an objective observer, I'm really curious how a
Speaker 1: single collectible piece of cardboard can be assigned of value because,
Speaker 1: like something like a card, surely you can counterfeit it, right, Like,
Speaker 1: surely you can make infinite numbers of copies of it.
Speaker 1: How did it become a collectible? Well, you know, counterfeiting
Speaker 1: isn't all that easy. And when it comes to these old, uh,
Speaker 1: these old vintage cards, you could assign a market value
Speaker 1: to it because there weren't a whole lot of them. Actually,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole idea of baseball cards was they
Speaker 1: were supposed to be ephemera. They were not supposed to
Speaker 1: be here forever. So people back in the thirties and forties,
Speaker 1: of fifties and sixties, you threw them out, and if
Speaker 1: you didn't, your mom eventually through amount when you outgrew
Speaker 1: these things. And so cards were not really meant to
Speaker 1: stick around for decades and decades, and so people got
Speaker 1: rid of them. And so those old cards, like the
Speaker 1: Honus Wagner card, they were genuinely scarce, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: it was always hard to say how many there were
Speaker 1: out there, of course, and some would always kind of
Speaker 1: appear out of addicts. But you knew that those old
Speaker 1: cards were rare cards and because of their scarcity, they
Speaker 1: could actually be valuable. Now that is very different from
Speaker 1: the cards that we're being produced in modern times. Okay,
Speaker 1: And this was was a big problem and a big
Speaker 1: feeder of the bubble was was sort of the mentality
Speaker 1: that people had going into this hobby. People were we're
Speaker 1: buying and collecting cards in the nineteen eighties that were
Speaker 1: being produced at that time, but they were applying kind
Speaker 1: of this vintage mindset to it. People were collecting, you know,
Speaker 1: a Don Manning Lee Rookie card in four and thinking
Speaker 1: of it kind of in the Honus Wagner terms. And
Speaker 1: so you had these baseball card manufacturers that were essentially
Speaker 1: printing money, you know, they were they were rolling these
Speaker 1: cards out, and nobody really thought about how there was
Speaker 1: no way to know how much was being produced and
Speaker 1: whether this stuff would ever be scarce, And in fact,
Speaker 1: it was like printing money, and the card makers were
Speaker 1: printing obscene numbers of them. So before we started the recording,
Speaker 1: I was tarring to Tracy and I said, the two
Speaker 1: things that I think are going to be very relevant
Speaker 1: from this episode to understanding bubbles are a the role
Speaker 1: that price guides had in priming the pump, and be
Speaker 1: the explosion of supply that happened in the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 1: To magic demand, which is of course something that we
Speaker 1: see in other bubbles. Uh, supply always ends up swamping
Speaker 1: the bubble. So you've already hit on both of them.
Speaker 1: So let's really dive into those. Let's start with the
Speaker 1: role of the Beckett You might even say the Beckett
Speaker 1: magazine was the Bloomberg terminal of prices? What did it
Speaker 1: do it? How did it? So? I remember, I would
Speaker 1: look and I would, you know, say, oh, I have
Speaker 1: this card from like a Ken Griffey Junior rookie card
Speaker 1: or something, or maybe there's eighty nine, I don't remember.
Speaker 1: And then every month I would look and see how
Speaker 1: much the price had moved up and up a nickel
Speaker 1: of a quarter of fifty cents, down a bit. How
Speaker 1: were those prices collected by the magazine on a monthly basis,
Speaker 1: How reliable were they? And then be what did how
Speaker 1: did the existence of that price guide, the fact that
Speaker 1: I could look it up end up changing collector behavior?
Speaker 1: So the methodology, Uh, you may not be surprised to
Speaker 1: learn was actually pretty murky. I'm not hard to know
Speaker 1: exactly how they came up with the figures. Originally it
Speaker 1: was based on surveys with deals and collectors who are
Speaker 1: kind of in the know. And you know, in Backett's defense,
Speaker 1: you know, early on, I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: thought of this as a public service. Right right now,
Speaker 1: and you know, in this day and age, it's very
Speaker 1: easy for me to know what my Donmattingly rookie card
Speaker 1: is actually worse. I can put it on eBay and
Speaker 1: in seven days i'm gonna have a pretty good handle
Speaker 1: on what the actual market value is. Back then, you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't so easy to know. You know, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of collectors felt isolated, and so the price
Speaker 1: guide kind of like gave you a benchmark to go by. Um.
Speaker 1: But where the price Guide was really dangerous was, in
Speaker 1: my opinion, just generally popularizing this idea of baseball cards
Speaker 1: as investments. Right I can say, you know, as a
Speaker 1: nine year old, you know, we we were carrying the
Speaker 1: Beckett price Guide around in school in our back past,
Speaker 1: and you know, that was how we made our trades.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of crazy to think of children as
Speaker 1: doing that. But you know, we we were that the
Speaker 1: price Guy had helped make even children think of these
Speaker 1: cards as commodities um, which of course is always kind
Speaker 1: of you know, in retrospect, was a pretty clear sign
Speaker 1: of dangerous ahead. Okay, so you have the Price Guide,
Speaker 1: you have this narrative that's starting to filter out that
Speaker 1: baseball cards make sense as an investment. Talk to us
Speaker 1: about the I guess the sort of cottage industry that
Speaker 1: sprang up around it, because I'm assuming, as with most bubbles,
Speaker 1: you did get a whole ecosystem kind of building and
Speaker 1: feeding up on this baseball card phenomenon. Yeah. Absolutely so.
Speaker 1: For for many many years, for decades, uh, there was
Speaker 1: only one company making, really making baseball cards, and that
Speaker 1: was Tops, the most famous brand. They essentially had had
Speaker 1: a monopoly on this for decades. They had an agreement
Speaker 1: with the Baseball Players Union in Major League Baseball, and
Speaker 1: they were structured in a way that basically shut out
Speaker 1: any any competitors. It wasn't until around that that they
Speaker 1: finally lost their antitrust case on that, which opened the
Speaker 1: door for other cardmakers to come in, and they certainly
Speaker 1: flooded in at that point. It. It wasn't long before
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of these card man new card manufacturers
Speaker 1: jumped into the fray, and a lot of different groups
Speaker 1: had kind of um their own interests in seeing more
Speaker 1: product kind of flood into the market. You know, one
Speaker 1: was the Baseball Players Union and also Major League Baseball.
Speaker 1: You know, they had these licensing deals with the card companies.
Speaker 1: If you inc more deals, you're gonna get more money.
Speaker 1: The league is gonna get more money, and the player
Speaker 1: is going to get more money. So they had their
Speaker 1: own reason to want to see more cards printed. And
Speaker 1: you know dealers had their own part in it too.
Speaker 1: The more the more stuff they could sell to people,
Speaker 1: the better. And of course, you know, the demand for
Speaker 1: this stuff was surging. So you would think that with
Speaker 1: all these companies piling in and all of many many
Speaker 1: more cards being printed, that you know, people would would
Speaker 1: start to to see that that something was off here.
Speaker 1: But the demand just searched so much you had new
Speaker 1: collectors pouring in, you know, in the nineties, it was
Speaker 1: I would say, highly unusual if if a nine year
Speaker 1: old boy wasn't collecting baseball cards. So, you know, obviously
Speaker 1: we want to talk about how the uh, you know
Speaker 1: the bubble crash, because that's important. But before we get
Speaker 1: to the crash, what, let's just talk about the crazy
Speaker 1: stuff that happened. What to you when you go back
Speaker 1: and look at that period when it was unusual for
Speaker 1: a nine year old boy not to be collecting cards
Speaker 1: and all these new entrants came into the market and
Speaker 1: people started treating cards his money. What are some really
Speaker 1: fun stories of just like pure over the top extravagance
Speaker 1: that in retrospect we can look back on to say, like, jeez,
Speaker 1: this was obviously a bubble waiting to crash. I would
Speaker 1: point to a few things, you know, one would be
Speaker 1: the the infamous Billy Ripken. Yes, uh, error card, Joe,
Speaker 1: are you familiar with that? I? I am indeed familiar
Speaker 1: with that card? Can you can you explain it? Please?
Speaker 1: How much of a family podcast is this? Well it
Speaker 1: is a family podcast. But but basically there was so
Speaker 1: Cal Ripkins younger brother, who never really amounted too much
Speaker 1: there was that they called him error cards. Do you
Speaker 1: want to explain what an error card is? Dave? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So an Eric card is basically when a card was
Speaker 1: printed and there's a mistake on it somewhere and the
Speaker 1: manufacturer didn't catch it in time, so the card gets out.
Speaker 1: You know, usually this is like, you know, the stats
Speaker 1: are wrong, or the guys wearing you know, an old
Speaker 1: uniform or something like that. But in Billy Ripkin's case,
Speaker 1: it was a lot worse. Yeah, they had a he
Speaker 1: had like a lot of typical pose was a picture
Speaker 1: of a baseball player holding a bat on their shoulder,
Speaker 1: like just sort of holding it up, and he had
Speaker 1: a foul phrase that's not safe for saying on the air. Uh,
Speaker 1: certainly not safe for nine year old boys to read,
Speaker 1: written on the bottom of his bat. And you know,
Speaker 1: so as soon as they caught that mistake, they obviously
Speaker 1: pulled that. But of course everybody wanted the uh the
Speaker 1: few that route there. Yeah, so this was a huge
Speaker 1: embarrassment for the company that printed it. Flear and they
Speaker 1: really bungled kind of the response. They didn't know what
Speaker 1: to do. They they tried blotting out the expletive and
Speaker 1: reprinting it, and then they scribbled it out and others
Speaker 1: um and it turned out there ended up being like
Speaker 1: six different versions of this of this error card, and
Speaker 1: it kind of only only served to feed the frenzy more.
Speaker 1: And I mean I remember this was like the buzz
Speaker 1: on the playground back then was was was the Billy
Speaker 1: Ripken card and and it was just you know, you
Speaker 1: really enjoyed it as this illicit thing as a kid.
Speaker 1: But what's crazy is how valuable those gotten a very
Speaker 1: short time they were They were selling for well over
Speaker 1: a hundred hours in many cases. Um, just because this
Speaker 1: was a card that had a bat that had an
Speaker 1: exploitive on it, you know that that was a sign
Speaker 1: of of kind of the weirdness going on that something
Speaker 1: like that could be could be fetching so much money.
Speaker 1: And you know, for me it was it was just
Speaker 1: kind of little thing things that that that you know,
Speaker 1: you should have seen that that could have told you
Speaker 1: what was going on. You know, one being how how
Speaker 1: people were stockpiling cards and not opening them right This
Speaker 1: la kind of goes goes against the very idea of collecting.
Speaker 1: You're supposed to open the packs and like see if
Speaker 1: you got your favorite player and try to assemble your team.
Speaker 1: People mself included, were just buying this stuff and like
Speaker 1: putting it in the closet as if it was like
Speaker 1: you know, going to accrew value forever and ever as
Speaker 1: this like unopened artifact, and you know, dealers were dealers
Speaker 1: told me like we were storing this stuff in our
Speaker 1: our basement like it was cardboard gold. Dave, I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you about this because of course, Okay, so
Speaker 1: people are collecting cards because they think they're going to
Speaker 1: grow in value, but you also have this tinge of
Speaker 1: gambling there, right, because you buy a pack of cards
Speaker 1: and you never know what's going to be inside of it,
Speaker 1: and one of the you know, you could in theory,
Speaker 1: hit the jackpot. It's a bit like buying a lottery ticket.
Speaker 1: So how much did that feed in to the craze? Wait,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell a story here. Sorry, it's a real
Speaker 1: quick story, but it's exactly what this is about. It's
Speaker 1: perfect story. So my friends and I actually did this.
Speaker 1: We bought a box of unopened nineteen eighty nine Don
Speaker 1: Ross cards that's another one of these new um, these
Speaker 1: new ones that came into the market, and we're like,
Speaker 1: we're not going to open them. I don't know what
Speaker 1: we were thinking, but we that were like, well, let's
Speaker 1: just open one pack just to see if we got
Speaker 1: the Ken Griffy Junior Rookie card. Because it's just we're
Speaker 1: just gonna open one pack and then we're gonna leave
Speaker 1: the other one sealed for like future or whatever. And
Speaker 1: so we did that, and not only did we get
Speaker 1: the Ken Griffy Junior Rookie card, we also got the
Speaker 1: Bobby Benia Rookie card in the same one. So it's
Speaker 1: totally exactly what you say, Tracy. It was totally that
Speaker 1: gambling thing, like, let's just do it one. It's like
Speaker 1: opening scratching off a lottery ticket and incidentally we won.
Speaker 1: Incidently lost because we lost. I don't know where that
Speaker 1: card is now, but it's you nailed. The mentality of
Speaker 1: the gambling thing is totally what I was thinking. Isn't
Speaker 1: it great that you have these cards that started as
Speaker 1: tobacco advertisements and then slowly taught children how to gamble
Speaker 1: and make speculative investments. Absolutely, the stories from the eighties
Speaker 1: in the press are kind of amazing about you know,
Speaker 1: little kids hanging out outside smoke shops basically badgering people
Speaker 1: for the cards and their cigarette packs. And I mean
Speaker 1: truly not joking it. It really served to introduce kids
Speaker 1: to tobacco. So, you know, there is this idea that
Speaker 1: that cards were always this kind of wholesome thing. I'm
Speaker 1: like always trying to poke holes in that that kind
Speaker 1: of nostalgia for these these things, because they've they've really
Speaker 1: you know, they've always been about money, whether it was
Speaker 1: the money for the collectors or money for for the
Speaker 1: manufacturers who were rolling them out. I had no idea
Speaker 1: how dark of a turn this episode was going to take.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the crash. So you know, you talked
Speaker 1: about the build up, the price guides, treating them as money,
Speaker 1: the gambling. What was the tipping point? When did it all? When?
Speaker 1: When was the peak, what year was the peak, and
Speaker 1: what sort of was the sign that it was sort
Speaker 1: of coming to an end. I think the peak in
Speaker 1: sales when you actually look at numbers was probably around
Speaker 1: but most people and myself included, like to point to
Speaker 1: four as the year when things started really going down,
Speaker 1: and that was, of course the year that that there
Speaker 1: was a baseball strike. Um, you had a big labor
Speaker 1: dispute between the players and the owners that the season
Speaker 1: got sidelined, and so you had that coinciding with people.
Speaker 1: You had people really disenchanted with the game because of
Speaker 1: because of the dispute that was going on coinciding with
Speaker 1: people also kind of starting to realize that this stuff
Speaker 1: is actually just cardboard and that maybe it was actually
Speaker 1: way overprinted. Um so people people are really star to
Speaker 1: see that because it's it's it's inescapable. Then, I mean
Speaker 1: the volume of cards that they were printing and the
Speaker 1: sheer number of sets that were out there, it was
Speaker 1: it was really dizzy ng And and you know, one
Speaker 1: interesting part of this, you know when you get into
Speaker 1: into monopolies here, was when all these different cardmakers were
Speaker 1: able to come come into the market. Uh and I'm
Speaker 1: I'm look, I'm all for for for the free market here,
Speaker 1: but it created a lot of confusion and you had
Speaker 1: kids like me, all of a sudden, there's like there's
Speaker 1: a half dozen companies and there's thirty different sets. You
Speaker 1: kind of started to lose the common language of collecting,
Speaker 1: right because the whole the whole idea of collecting is
Speaker 1: that and trading is that we're we're kind of working
Speaker 1: with the same cards here, right Like if I'm trying
Speaker 1: to to to to collect the Yankees team that tops
Speaker 1: rolled out, my buddy down the street needs to be
Speaker 1: collecting the same set of cards, and so that that
Speaker 1: element got lost in their hobby just got really confusing
Speaker 1: for kids just because there was there was frankly like
Speaker 1: so much crap out there and so um. You know.
Speaker 1: It was really in the early nineties when that hit
Speaker 1: a peak and it in it unfortunately for the hobby,
Speaker 1: really coincided with UH, with this labor dispute, and that's
Speaker 1: when we see, you know, a very precipitous drop off
Speaker 1: in sales after another interesting dimension here now that you
Speaker 1: bring it up in terms of the changing nature of
Speaker 1: cards from when it went to a monopoly to you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the early nineties. If you go back and
Speaker 1: uh look at you know, those seventies and eighties cards,
Speaker 1: they're all just kind of on like a rough, fairly
Speaker 1: cheap cardboard. By the time like three the level of
Speaker 1: uh sort of like how much was being invested in
Speaker 1: the design of the car. They were all like super glossy.
Speaker 1: Some of them had like golden or like you know,
Speaker 1: leaf on them to sort of make them pretend like
Speaker 1: you couldn't counter counterproof them. Like it was just they
Speaker 1: just became like these sort of like luxury cards in
Speaker 1: and of themselves. This sort of attempt to I guess
Speaker 1: sort of manufacture collectibility from day one, like they really
Speaker 1: just changed. Yeah. Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it.
Speaker 1: And you know that the company upper deck Is is
Speaker 1: kind of the best example of that. This was a
Speaker 1: company that that sprang up in the late eighties out
Speaker 1: of this idea of cards explicitly being being something you
Speaker 1: you you collect as investments. They made these really fancy
Speaker 1: cards on on heavy cardboard stock, They had the holograms
Speaker 1: on them, they sprung for really good photographs, and they
Speaker 1: you know, doubled or quadruple the price of what you
Speaker 1: would normally expect to pay for a baseball card pack,
Speaker 1: and people ended up buying them anyway, and a lot
Speaker 1: of this, you know, and we see signs of it
Speaker 1: here is really, in my opinion, the huge mistake that
Speaker 1: that card makers you know, commit here is they really
Speaker 1: start catering to two adults, right, you know. Tops at
Speaker 1: one point I found in one of their one of
Speaker 1: their ten k's around this time explicitly said like we
Speaker 1: are you know, we are making this stuff for adults
Speaker 1: as well as children. That is really not how you
Speaker 1: want to be approaching this if you're in this for
Speaker 1: the long term, because those adults are not going to
Speaker 1: be around forever um, and so that that was I
Speaker 1: think a big, big mistake on their part was starting
Speaker 1: to cater to people who were older and had disposable
Speaker 1: income to throw on this one. Really the lifeblood over
Speaker 1: the decades was always children, children, children. Wait, I have
Speaker 1: I have a sort of off the wall question if
Speaker 1: if the bubble started to burst or burst around, there
Speaker 1: was something else that was happening then, which was the
Speaker 1: rise of the Internet and the rise I guess of
Speaker 1: you know, transparency, And I think did eBay exist in
Speaker 1: I can't remember, but in theory you had a Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have an online platform where people could, for instance,
Speaker 1: talk about the pricing information of baseball cards. Do you
Speaker 1: think that played into it at all? It may have
Speaker 1: I think a bigger problem, you know for the industry
Speaker 1: when you talk in terms of like evolving technology, it's
Speaker 1: just at a time when they were losing kids. Um,
Speaker 1: you had the Internet rise, you had video games become
Speaker 1: that much more amazing, and so you had all this
Speaker 1: stuff really starting to compete for children's attention on a
Speaker 1: on a much greater level, and it became I think
Speaker 1: harder for you know, cardmakers to say to kids you know,
Speaker 1: in this in this day and age, in modern times,
Speaker 1: say hey, here's a pack of cardboard, you know, go
Speaker 1: go have fun with it, and that, you know, that
Speaker 1: created problem that to this day they're they're still trying
Speaker 1: to dig their way out. Yeah, before we go, David,
Speaker 1: I was actually just gonna ask you exactly that you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of you know, a competing thing, video games,
Speaker 1: Nintendos and stuff really sort of probably helped crush my
Speaker 1: interest in cards because those you know, playing video games
Speaker 1: were way more fun. But I was just gonna ask you, um,
Speaker 1: what is the state of the market today. And there's
Speaker 1: still who's still producing cards. It's still primarily Tops. Um
Speaker 1: they are, They're still around, and to a credit, they're
Speaker 1: they're trying to do some inventive stuff now, you know,
Speaker 1: they they are still printing cards and they have them
Speaker 1: tied to you know, an online app that functions a
Speaker 1: lot like Fantasy Baseball and so kids, you know, have
Speaker 1: this online element to it. You know, their sales on
Speaker 1: the baseball card front are are still you know, I
Speaker 1: would say a fraction of of what they were you know,
Speaker 1: many many years ago, back during the boom. So you know,
Speaker 1: they still have a lot of work to do if
Speaker 1: they ever hope to get back to where they were.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think they are, you know, to
Speaker 1: their credit, trying to reach kids again in a way
Speaker 1: that that for a lot of years of card makers
Speaker 1: had kind of written off and we're increasingly only uh,
Speaker 1: you know, devoted to these these these older guys who
Speaker 1: had who had money to throw around. But of course,
Speaker 1: you know, they're not gonna be around forever. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think one of the problems that's going to linger
Speaker 1: for a long time is that when you lose a
Speaker 1: generation of collectors with something like this, it becomes harder
Speaker 1: to to get people back and to get the children
Speaker 1: of those of those collectors you lost. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was just talking with with our producer here, Zach, who
Speaker 1: was just a few years younger than me, and we
Speaker 1: were talking about what we were going to talk about here,
Speaker 1: and he said, oh, I didn't know that there was
Speaker 1: a baseball card bubble because he was seven seven years
Speaker 1: or so, eight years or so younger than me, and
Speaker 1: so he had completely missed the fat. Of course, you
Speaker 1: knew about like beanie babies and pots and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing, But when you lose a generation of collectors.
Speaker 1: It was it. You know, for a long time, it
Speaker 1: was you know, fathers turned their sons onto baseball cards,
Speaker 1: older brothers turned their younger brothers on the baseball cards.
Speaker 1: So you know, when you have this big generation that
Speaker 1: missed out on it, I think you're you're trying to
Speaker 1: dig out of a bigger hole. Does that mean there's
Speaker 1: no chance that the market could ever recover, because I
Speaker 1: mean we are in the midst of a little bit
Speaker 1: of a nostalgia boom. And what's more nostalgic really than
Speaker 1: kids collecting cards that depict the players of America's national pastime.
Speaker 1: I mean, cards have been so zilient for a hundred
Speaker 1: and forty odd years that I think there's no reason
Speaker 1: they're they're not going to be around for a really
Speaker 1: long time. I also think it's important to kind of
Speaker 1: clarify that there's really two markets here. There's there's the
Speaker 1: market of of new stuff being made that we're talking
Speaker 1: about right now, like companies like Tops are producing still
Speaker 1: each year that has been you know, a struggling business
Speaker 1: for you know, two decades now. But that the separate market,
Speaker 1: the earlier one we were talking about a vintage cards
Speaker 1: of the Honus Wagners and such. That market has been
Speaker 1: a a bowl market for forty fifty years now. It
Speaker 1: is still going strong because that stuff is still very
Speaker 1: rare and because there's a lot of older guys, um
Speaker 1: millionaires who are willing to throw serious money after that stuff.
Speaker 1: So that market has remained exceptionally strong. And if you
Speaker 1: were if you were involved in that early and if
Speaker 1: you made some smart moves, you know that that could
Speaker 1: could very well have made you a rich person now.
Speaker 1: But that is a very different market from this overglutted
Speaker 1: modern market of way overproduced cards that me and Joe
Speaker 1: came up in. Well, Dave, it was absolutely awesome to
Speaker 1: talk to you. I I swear, you know, maybe we
Speaker 1: should beat for Colbee sometime just so we could talk
Speaker 1: old baseball cards stories. But you know, you talked about
Speaker 1: trade stories. But I feel really dumb now because I
Speaker 1: did all the dumb things back then. I was just
Speaker 1: like everybody else thinking that I just feel really stupid
Speaker 1: the problem. But I'm glad to I'm glad to find
Speaker 1: out that I am not alone. And uh, I really
Speaker 1: appreciate you coming on. I learned quite a bit. Look, man,
Speaker 1: I got an email like every three days from some
Speaker 1: guy around our age asking me what is cards are worth?
Speaker 1: And so I'm baking breaking bad news to people all
Speaker 1: the time. So you're you know, we're all on the
Speaker 1: same boat. So so there's that awesome stuff. Thanks Dave,
Speaker 1: Thanks guys. So, Tracy, I kind of wanna go on
Speaker 1: eBay and start buying a bunch of baseball cries. Now,
Speaker 1: what happened to your old baseball cards? Do you remember?
Speaker 1: That's a really good question. Um, I know my dad
Speaker 1: has some storage, some boxes in storage somewhere from when
Speaker 1: I was a kid. So now I kind of got
Speaker 1: to figure out where those are and go get them.
Speaker 1: They might some of them might be somewhere, they might
Speaker 1: be recoverable. Yeah, I mean, I think the amazing thing
Speaker 1: is we all kind of have stories from our childhood
Speaker 1: of similar things, whether it's baseball cards or um in
Speaker 1: my case, magic the gathering cards, or POGs or beanie babies. Again,
Speaker 1: it's just amazing how often this pattern of behavior is
Speaker 1: repeated throughout history. There's so many relevant lessons here for
Speaker 1: other things. So obviously we talked about the role of
Speaker 1: price guides, and that's kind of clear. But although although
Speaker 1: it's interesting too, the idea we should do an episode
Speaker 1: just on pricing, because it's interesting that and how prices
Speaker 1: are derived, because you know, we got these magazines as
Speaker 1: kids and it would say, oh, your card is worth
Speaker 1: five dollars, but we never questioned how that price was
Speaker 1: arrived at, how how whether we could get that price
Speaker 1: if we actually wanted to sell our cards. Like, there's
Speaker 1: all sorts of interesting stuff just with the collection of pricing.
Speaker 1: Also interesting this idea of like they're really being two
Speaker 1: baseball card markets. The current market that just sort of
Speaker 1: got overturned and overproduced and that collapsed, and then the
Speaker 1: true vintage market from when there was actual scarcity, and
Speaker 1: how that has been, as he said in a two
Speaker 1: decade bowl markets sort of unfazed by the crash. And
Speaker 1: the other part, Yeah, it almost speaks to a truism
Speaker 1: of bubbles, I guess, which is that as people cotton
Speaker 1: on to the fact that this is going on, and
Speaker 1: as they start to participate in it, you get that
Speaker 1: boom and apply and then inevitably the bubble will eventually
Speaker 1: come crashing down, right, Yeah, I remember before our Bubble series,
Speaker 1: it might have even been like a year ago. Remember
Speaker 1: we talked to that professor at Harvard about his paper
Speaker 1: on the five or six characteristics of all stock market
Speaker 1: bubbles and the premium, and that was one of the
Speaker 1: things that I really took away from that, the premium
Speaker 1: that stock investors pay for new issues, new I p
Speaker 1: o S versus legacy ones. And then of course, because
Speaker 1: investors pay that premium, then the I p O Market
Speaker 1: booms and the supply or you know, swamps demand and
Speaker 1: that helps to kill it. But that's really sort of definitional.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, if we look at even
Speaker 1: the bubbles that we've talked about in this series, Florida
Speaker 1: real estate being example, you know, suddenly people just buying
Speaker 1: the swamp land in the middle of nowhere. The market
Speaker 1: always finds a way to create the supply when there's
Speaker 1: adequate demand for it. Yeah. Hey, hey, Joe, what's the
Speaker 1: secret to uh, writing a bubble success fully? Is this
Speaker 1: gonna be right? Oh? Yeah, that's a good lot. Actually,
Speaker 1: thank you, I've been saving that one. Speaking of timing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, let's do it. This has been another episode
Speaker 1: of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: I'm on Twitter at Tracy Alloway, and you can follow
Speaker 1: Dave Jamison on Twitter at Jamison. And you can follow
Speaker 1: our producer Sarah Patterson on Twitter at Sarah patt With
Speaker 1: two teas. Thanks for listening.