Topps becomes the official trading card maker for Major League Baseball:
By dropping Upper Deck, M.L.B. hopes that Topps, under Michael D. Eisner, the former chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, can invigorate card collecting, especially with young fans. The league also believes that one cardmaker can end the confusion of competitors selling multiple card series in hobby shops and big-box stores.
“This is redirecting the entire category toward kids,” said Eisner, who acquired the company in 2007. “Topps has been making cards for 60 years, the last 30 in a nonexclusive world that has caused confusion to the kid who walks into a Wal-Mart or a hobby store. It’s also been difficult to promote cards as unique and original.”
Baloney. Kids are more than capable of keeping track of the various card companies. I suspect this is more about limiting supply so the company of a former major league team owner can make more money. Competition kept Topps on their toes:
Since Eisner’s privately held Tornante Company and Madison Dearborn, a private equity company, acquired Topps, it has introduced 3-D cards, the ToppsTown trading and collecting Web site, and the Topps Attax game to appeal to young card enthusiasts and to develop new ones.
I doubt that will continue without other companies pushing new products as well. I hope Upper Deck comes up with a way to keep competing, since they still have an agreement with the MLBPA.
Never had a problem in the early 80s figuring out the difference between the Donruss, Fleer, Topps cards, or even at the end of my collecting the Score and Upper Deck cards…
I figure the problems started first in the mid to late 80s with the oversupply (how many Pascual Perez cards does one exactly need?), but the major confusion was when each brand started coming out with the “special” editions, the “limited” editions, the “elite” editions, the “online” editions, and the “so expensive only a “35 yr old wall street executive could afford it” edition. Shame.
What would really invigorate kids to buy baseball cards, is if the price of the packs were under $1, say… 50¢ – 75¢ at most. When I first started collecting in ’82, a pack of Topps cards was about 32¢ …by the end of the 80’s, the price was too high for a 15 year old without a job to bother buying them. They became a collectors investment only, when the price rose like that. Ok, maybe rich kids could talk their parents into buying them. They just need to simplify their card expenses so they don’t have to sell them for so much.
Oh, and selling them in packs of teams… not so good either. We used to have fun trading cards to get the players were needed. There was a whole little community in the neighborhood of baseball card collecting kids. There’s no community to it anymore… you don’t need that. And that takes some of the excitement and fun away for the kids.