If you’re a sports fan, chances are you collected trading cards as a child. You might remember blowing your allowance on a pack of pink bubblegum baseball cards at the corner store. He would open the packages in search of his favorite star, then trade with his friends or carefully slide some cards between the spokes of his bicycle wheel and listen to them click as he pedaled.
If you were a card collector, you probably had folders full of the carefully sorted cardboard gems lying around your room, until you discovered the girls. Once the fairer sex was on the scene, the cards went to the garage sale, the attic, or the trash.
In the years since you ditched your cards without a second thought, the industry has prospered. Although prices have skyrocketed, trading cards have never been more popular.
Here are 5 things you didn’t know about sports cards. Be warned, though: After hearing how far the hobby has come, you might want to stop on the way home and pick up a pack or two.
1- The value of rookie cards is artificially inflated
There is little argument that Wayne Gretzky is the best hockey player to lace up his skates, and his 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee rookie card sells for between $600 and $900. Sidney Crosby may be listed as the best thing since The Great One, but he has a lot to prove. Still, Sidney Crosby’s 2005-06 Upper Deck The Cup rookie card sells for more than $10,000. We have nothing against Crosby, but the fact that a largely unproven star’s rookie card can sell for more than 10 times the value of Wayne Gretzky’s is mind-boggling.
It all comes down to supply and demand. In the late 1990s, card companies introduced serial numbering, the antidote to mass-produced cards like Gretzky’s rookie. The cards were printed in limited quantities and stamped with a unique number. There are only 99 copies of Crosby’s The Cup card in existence, which means if you want the best rookie in The Next One, be prepared to pay for it.
2- Babe Ruth continues to sign letters
If you were to pull an autographed card out of a package in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you would tell everyone you know. Now autographed cards are so popular, often with one or more per box (and in some games, one per pack) that they hardly seem exciting anymore. What might get you calling your friends, though, is finding an autographed card from a deceased athlete.
To create these “cut” autograph cards, card companies buy authentic autographs of sports stars, often from paperwork or void checks from the deceased athlete’s estate, then cut out the player’s signature and affix it to a new card. . So even though Babe Ruth has been dead since 1948, it’s possible to get his autograph on a 2008 product, and that goes for more of the game’s greats, like Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams, to name a few.
3- Barack Obama has a baseball card
No, the likely future president of the US did not have a brief stint in the Major Leagues. Card companies have reacted to the popularity of politics in American society and political figures have begun to appear on special cards. This year’s Upper Deck baseball includes a set of Presidential Predictor inserts, featuring cards from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and more.
Taking the popularity of memorabilia cards used in games one step further, some heirloom cards in recent years have included tokens cut straight from American history. It is possible to get a card that includes a small square of cloth from one of John F. Kennedy’s suits or a card that contains a piece of George W. Bush’s tie.
Other American legends (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, etc.) are represented with souvenir cards on current products. It may seem strange to get a Marilyn Monroe card in a pack of baseball cards, but these rare inserts are a big seller among history buffs.
4- The body parts of celebrities are already for sale
Topps made waves in the industry in 2007 when it produced three cards, each featuring a lock of hair from former President George Washington. The card company obtained the hair from John Reznikoff, the owner of the largest collection of hair from historical figures. Despite the shock of many collectors and ordinary citizens alike (and the unsettling desires of some people to trace the cards so they could try to clone Washington via DNA strands), Topps products created quite a stir, and collectors responded. showing that there is indeed a market for these strange, yet intriguing collectibles.
Topps acknowledges that DNA cards are difficult to make due to the difficulty of tracing strands of hair from deceased public figures, but the idea has already caught on. The hot insert on this year’s Upper Deck SP Legendary Cuts baseball cards is a Hair Cuts series: cards containing severed autographs and a lock of hair from figures like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Andrew Jackson and Geronimo.
A 2008 Topps baseball product contains cards with hair of not only Abe Lincoln, but also JFK and Beethoven.
5- Your child’s allowance will not take him very far in the hobby
If you collected a couple of decades ago, you’ll remember when Upper Deck products hit store shelves in 1990 at the seemingly exorbitant price of $1 a pack. Almost overnight, gone are the days of packs of 25 and 50 cent cards that contained a piece of pink gum for good measure. The price of consumer goods has increased over the past two decades with inflation, but card prices have risen due to increased demand as the hobby has prospered.
With very few exceptions, packs of cards are at least $4 and some high-end products are over $500 per pack, not per box, but per pack. And those packs can contain as few as five cards. What, you thought you’d find that $10,000 Sidney Crosby card in a package that cost $1?
Each sport only features a couple of 99-cent-a-pack brands each season, meaning youngsters with money to burn don’t have much of a chance to delve into the hobby. However, adults with more disposable income have a wide variety of options.