The Honus Wagner baseball card sold again, nearly doubling in price since the last transaction, going for $2.35 million:
The seller Brian Seigel in 2000 paid a then-record $1,265,000 for the prize card, which is in better condition than the rest.
“This particular one was preserved in spectacular condition,” said Joe Orlando, president of Professional Sports Authenticator of Newport Beach – the company that certified the authenticity of the card. “It’s the Holy Grail of baseball cards.”
Still, the Wagner cards are so rare that even those in much worse condition will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Seigel said.
I remember the market for baseball cards was hot in the early 1990s. I didn’t trade, but I know at some point the market collapsed. Did that happen because collecting was a fad or did card companies produce too many cards trying to make a buck off the craze?
It was a combination of too many card companies, and too many “super special” cards. I was a Mattingly fan, so I tried to collect all of his cards. For 1984, this was easy, as there was Topps, Fleer, and Donruss. By 1992 or so, there were a bunch more companies, and even worse was that there were these premium cards that were quite rare as well – the all-star gold foil cards, super-premium-platinum-stamp cards, etc. They were so rare that it got too expensive for a 12 year old like me to afford to even collect one of each card of my favorite player. That’s about when I quit collecting, and my father quit being a card dealer.
Also the internet helped to destroy and redefine the collectibles market. Once when things were hard to find suddenly you could find whatever you wanted on ebay.
I was one of the many kids in the 80s who understood the concept of investments (it was the 80s, after all), but had no grasp of supply and demand. Apparently, neither did anyone else in the hobby. The fact is that the cards that I collected then will never be worth something, barring some type of nuclear holocaust, because not only were too many cards produced, but the ones that were produced are still in M- condish hiding in plastic sheets all around the country.
Mike’s story is exactly the same as mine, right down to Mattingly being the guy I collected and quitting at age 12.
I think it goes beyond “too many cards produced” though. As RT pointed out, the Internet killed the collectibles industry. That “rare” card you have sitting around isn’t rare anymore if you can find it on eBay or other specialized Websites that bring together people who would never have met or even known about each other. Comic books have suffered the same fate.
Mike hit on the major thing which is the companies killed the goose that laid golden eggs. Look at a recent Beckets and you’ll see that for 2006 there were hundreds of different sets of cards. People could handle Topps, Fleer and Donruss having an annual set and then an update set to account for rookies and traded players. In the late 80’s it started getting bad and by 93 they had chased folks like me completely out of buying any cards. I won’t even start complaining about the ridiculous prices.
Perhaps not having the Internet in the 80s hid the fact that the Canseco RC displayed behind the dealer’s case wasn’t all that uncommon, but the fact remains that plenty of them were produced, and all were cared for. Dangerous combination, when you’re counting on something becoming a “collectible.”
I always thought it be interesting to quietly buy the other Wagners or have agents do it. Then when I had them all – burn all of them save for the one in the best condition. Then you’d really have something.
Perhaps a fraud conviction too. My uncle put that thought in my head years ago.
I spent most of the 80’s buying my complete set and working on older sets from the 60’s and 70’s. I’d get a laugh out of the ads discussing cards as ‘investments’ and offering 100 card lots of the latest hot rookie. I always wondered what somebody was going to do with 100 cards of the same guy unless it was to sell to someone who only had 99. Since everyone who was collecting at the time more than likely already has the card, you’d be counting on a new generation of collectors to be interested in players before their time at the expense of collecting cards of today’s players they know well and can follow. It was literally a house of cards waiting to collapse.
The bust in card values has nothing to do with the internet. A lot of collectibles have retained their value despite ebay, as long as demand exceeds supply.
The bust in sports cards occurred because the card companies responded to the boom in the late 80’s early 90’s by just printing millions more cards. It’s the same thing that would happen if the US Mint just started printing dollars in endless supply. One day, you’re suprised to find out that your dollar isn’t worth squat because everyone is holding packs of hundreds.
I was collecting up until my early teen years in the early to mid 90s and I attribute some of the rapid decline in my interest in collecting baseball cards to the “professional grading” industry. Suddenly, no card was worth anything unless you could pay to have it graded and it by stroke of sheer luck it came back a mint 10. I guess this was the expected result of the production of millions of extra cards, and the scarcity of a card had to be arbitrarily heightened by the professional grading system. Also, I spent a lot of time collecting Alex Fernandez and Phil Plantier rookie cards and now look what happened to them.