Updated Food for Thought: Hot Stove Edition

A few baseball-card-related thoughts as we approach winter...

If Jon Lester signs with a team other than the Athletics—which is how it seems things will shake out—does that mean we'll never see a card of Lester in an A's uniform? This probably happens a lot, but the two players who come to mind are Reggie Jackson (Orioles) and Don Baylor (Athletics), both in 1976. Another guy who could fit this bill is Yoenis Cespedes, the slugging outfielder the Red Sox obtained in exchange for Lester. The Sox have a logjam in the outfield and the feeling is that Cespedes walks after next year.

This also brings up an interesting take on the purpose of end-of-year series like Topps Update and Topps Heritage High Numbers. Topps Update is a showcase for All-Star cards, rookies, and guys who fell through the cracks in the regular set. Heritage High Numbers is chock full of rookies and other end-of-the-bench guys who didn't get cards in the regular series. Gone are the days when traded players get cards of them in their new uniforms. Were it up to me, High Numbers and Update would be a more traditional mix of rookies and traded players. This would solve the problem of guys like Lester, Cespedes, and Nelson Cruz (whose year on the Orioles probably won't be recognized in 2015 Topps Heritage)...

...An insert set that didn't seem to hold its value is the mini set in 2014 Topps Heritage. Despite being the case hit and each card being numbered to just 100, eBay prices have fallen in the last few weeks. All of this is good news for me, as I now have 47 of the 100 subjects...

...Is Topps's design for 2015 a subtle homage to 1990's design? It'll be the 25th anniversary of that set, which could mean a possible "no-name" error, right?...

...I promise this is the last Heritage item I'll bring up for now: I've decided that the ultimate card from the Heritage set is the Maury Wills Real One autograph card. For one thing, Wills is shown as a member of the Dodgers. Secondly, he wasn't included in the 1965 Topps set, so—barring custom cards—this is as close as you're going to get to a 1965 Topps Maury Wills card. 

...Are there great card blogs still out there? From what I've read recently, collectors are more interested in posting images of their "hitz" on Twitter than talking about the bigger picture in the hobby. Is that how others see it?

Finally, I almost forgot. Remember my post in November 2013 about the future of price guides? (Read Average Real Pricing: The Future of The Price Guide.) Well, if you subscribe to Beckett's online price guide, it looks like they incorporated something like average real pricing into their tiered offerings. They're calling it the Beckett Online Price Guide Plus (very original). If it's anything like my idea for average real pricing, this is a step in the right direction. Hey Beckett, you're welcome.

What Ben's Thinking About

It's no secret: my interest in collecting sports cards waxes and wanes like the cycles of the moon. But there are certain things about the hobby that pique my interest. Here they are for the week of June 15, 2013.

1. I'm still marveling at the profile page our own Travis Peterson got in June's Beckett Sports Cards Monthly. Hey Topps, how long before you wake up and give this guy some sketch cards in a new product? 

2. My excitement for Topps Heritage 2014 is palpable. Not too long ago I finally put the finishing touches on my 1965 set, and since its one of the more popular Topps years, I wonder if the company is also counting down the days till its release. I'm convinced that it will be a surefire hit, especially if they include a full 72-card Embossed all-stars insert set. The Heritage line has seemed like it's been phoning it in the past few years...

3. I bought some Topps Tiffany cards a few weeks ago. No wonder I lusted after these cards as unattainable in my youth—they still look great; glossy and bright as the day they were born. Too bad the last owner was definitely a smoker. I never it would matter much if a previous owner smoked, but you can tell just from one sniff. It's kind of gross.

4. One of the biggest steals of the last few years has to be sealed Topps buybacks on eBay. Head over to our Facebook page and watch my pack break if you don't believe me. I paid $2 for that sealed pack on eBay.

5. I'm debating which vintage set to collect next. The choices are 1953, 1954, or 1955 Topps, or 1988 or 1989 Topps. I know what you're thinking: Why would anyone willingly spend money on junk wax? Well, I must've put together at least three full sets from both years back in 1988 and 1989, but I didn't save any of them. And it turns out that as I put together the mega master sets for 1986 and 1987, I'm reminded how much I like the designs from 1988 and 1989. And it would be super-cheap to accomplish, even without plunking down the $7 for a factory set.

6. I'm not sure how others feel about 2013 Topps Archives, but I don't really like the idea of mixing sports designs. Topps Basketball had some great designs in the 1970s, but that doesn't mean I'll take a shine to seeing Ted Williams on a 1972–73 card. Is it that they feel they've tapped the well of baseball designs too many times?

7. I just re-read Ken Kaiser's autobiography Planet of the Umps. Definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a quick, lively read. Makes me sad that umpires never got into a major baseball card set after 1955 Bowman. Maybe that will be our next great custom set...

8. Can I consider my 1976–79 mega master Topps sets complete without custom cards from Bob Lemke?

9. Since Topps has included mini cards as an insert set the past few years now, what will be the throwback design for 2014? My money's either on 1965, as a tie-in to the Heritage set, or a set from the 1990s, like 1992 Bowman. Or they'll pull an Upper Deck and steal a classic design from a one-time competitor. Who wouldn't love mini 1984 Donruss?

Jason Giambi, Mustache Quotients & Beckett on the Block

Watching the last Red Sox/Yankees series got me thinking: Jason Giambi's mustache makes him look a lot like Steve Balboni. That revelation brings up something I'm going to call The Mustache Quotient.

It seems like the facial hair that's most acceptable today is the goatee. Just look around; tons of players sport one. That's why it's so weird when a player (especially a Yankee) bucks the trend and goes for some upper lip action. But if we go back to Balboni's era, it seemed like everybody and their mother had a mustache. The MQ is the percentage of cards in a given baseball card set featuring players sporting mustaches. Here are the MQs for 1980 -1984:

1980: 360/726 = 49.59%
1981: 354/726 = 48.76%
1982: 432/792 = 54.54%
1983: 439/792 = 55.43%
1984: 420/792 = 53.03%

I would've thought the percentages much higher (like 75%), but I guess that's just the haze of nostalgia.


Beckett For Sale?
This is really old news, but I thought I'd mention it anyway, seeing as how it's also mentioned in the July issue of Card Trade: Back in May, The Dallas Business Journal reported that Apprise Media LLC was entertaining offers for Beckett Media. The article quotes Webster University economist Patrick Rishe as saying the company could fetch between $25 and $45 million. It also cites Beckett's recent change from many monthlies to its current, consolidated format as a possible misstep.

The situation brings up a few questions (aside from the very slim possibility that the price guides are waning in influence):

1. Is this the writing on the wall that the hobby isn't good for business? Or is it just a sign of restless, unfulfilled corporate greed?

2. Would Beckett Media flourish in a setting similar to F+W Publications? In addition to the Sports Collectors Digest family of publications, F+W publishes scores of other magazines and books across a vast spectrum of topics, from Log Homes Illustrated and Writer's Digest to Print and I.D. International Design.

Apprise Media's website doesn't really give a good idea of what they do or handle, but I guess the gist is that they're investors, with fingers in a number of pies, including a trade show behemoth (Canon Communications) and other publishing ventures. So are there other similar F+W's out there?

I'm not a financial reporter, or journalist of any kind, so what I suggest is based simply on something that on the surface feels like a good fit. That's why I think Apprise should look at Wizard, the comic book price guide/trade show empire.

Dallas Business Journal story (5/12/08)

You Have to See This...

I got an email today from a collector, wanting to tell me about his latest eBay purchase. Nothing out of the ordinary about that. Here's where it gets weird:



I'll let him explain it in his own words:

I don't know how I found this auction but it was an auction for a 1991 Topps Chipper Jones graded by Beckett grading... the interesting thing about this card is that on the back of the card is a 1990 Topps football player! It is authentic and was not tampered with but I have never seen anything like this... Take a look at the photos that I have provided and I would be interested in any input you could provide....

I have collected cards for over 20 years and I have never seen this. They must have accidentally put a 1990 Topps Football Sheet with the 1991 Topps Back Sheets... Most likely since football cards were produced later in a given production year and baseball cards were produced sometimes before the year even started there may have been an overlap. So the question is was an entire sheet produced of 136 1991 Topps Cards with 1990 Topps Football Backs?

Here's what I want to know: What did the guys and gals at Beckett Grading Services think when they saw this card? Also, does a wrong back or blank front/back hurt the grade of a given card? Any answers for us, BGS?

For the Love of Sitting Around and Flipping Through a Price Guide, Part 2

Let me be the first to say it: I didn’t realize that so many people feel the same way I do about the meaningless-ness of prices listed in Beckett and Tuff Stuff. Very interesting stuff.

Let me also be the first to say that I didn’t realize just how big an issue this assessment really is. There are lots of thoughts out there about how the apparent demise of the price guide affects collectors, ranging from very much (count me among this lot) to not at all.

In the last post on this topic, I brought up the idea of price guides as hobby infrastructure and claimed that without their consultation the hobby would be thrown into chaos. Tonight I would like to take this a step further. Tonight I want to examine…

A World Without Baseball Card Shops

Here’s the situation. The list prices in price guides have been deemed useless on such a massive scale that Beckett and FW have ceased their publication. With no widely available prices, the majority of collectors now consult eBay for accurate card prices.

Dealers do the same. And after they view the umpteenth autographed patch 1/1 card go for less than $20–pulled from a box that dealers paid a premium on to sell–they stop ordering high-end products from the manufacturers. The dealers understand that if they’re seeing these auctions on eBay, their potential customers are winning them.

So many dealers stop ordering these cards that the manufacturers have a difficult decision to make: finally listen to dealers and put more value in each box of product, or dismiss dealers altogether and work exclusively with big box stores like Target, Kmart and Wal-Mart. It comes as no surprise when the manufacturers go with the latter choice.

Because the majority of shops deal primarily in new cards, they start to close. Collectors don’t notice right away, as most of them are tuned to eBay. And besides, the hobby’s gone through this before and survived, so what’s the big deal? Also, everybody’s got a Wal-Mart near them, so who cares if one more shop goes out of business? Shops sell off their inventory and shutter.

Dealers at baseball card shows don’t feel the same pressure right away, though many of them do feel their brethren’s plight. Instead, without book prices to consult on every transaction, desperate, frenetic dealers result to using their best judgment. Collectors, fully aware of the situation dealers are in, refuse to be charged “judgment call prices.” Many dealers, citing lack of meaningful sales at shows, stop booking booths. What few shows remain shrink in attendance until they cease to exist. The National is the lone exception, chugging away, though it’s a magnet for news media to lament the hobby crisis. “Ain’t in the Card$,” is the New York Post headline.

Without dealers, the manufacturers are no longer in the dominant bargaining position. They’re at the whim of the big box stores. Product’s gonna be late? OK, we’re diminishing your shelf space. The manufacturers are not used to their role as ‘just another product.’ What happened to all those dealers they used to push around?


If I haven’t given my critics enough fodder already, here’s some more:

• The future of the hobby most certainly will not play out the way I’ve got it, though certain aspects of it are very close to happening now.

• No matter how much we distrust the prices within price guides, they’re essential to the well being of the hobby. If you’ve got a plan for injecting realistic card values into the hobby without killing hobby shops and show dealers off, please, I’m all ears.

• One last thing: I wanted to work graded cards into this somehow, but never found a good spot. If raw singles aren’t really worth their book value, what about graded cards? I know that entire price guides cater to graded specimen, but will/should these prices be combined with prices for unslabbed cards? Or would that negate the values assigned to those that have been slabbed? Also, why does it feel to me that dealing in graded cards is going to be what saves shop owners and show dealers?

For The Love of Sitting Around and Flipping Through a Price Guide

Today I walked down to the supermarket and for the hell of it bought the new Tuff Stuff– excuse me, the new Tuff Stuff's Sports Collectors Monthly. And while it was fun to flip through it, scan the ads and learn about cards from the Dark Ages of the hobby (1996 - 2005), I got to the point where I felt like I was deluding myself if I actually believed what was printed in the magazine's price guides. I found myself agreeing with the anonymous commenter on the "Toppstown" post: a conventional price guide has become the string quartet on the Titanic.

I'll admit, that's a dire read on today's hobby, but let's examine the situation. The hobby doesn't need price guides to exist, and yet would be chaotic without them. Beckett and FW Publications (publisher of Tuff Stuff) provide infrastructure for the secondary market. Dealers consult them when setting prices. You want to see a world without the consultation of book prices? Look no further than eBay.

With its low prices and open-source approach to assigning realistic value to cards and memorabilia, it's the new face of the hobby. It's slowly killing independent in-shop dealers. It's taken the bottom out of the value of game-used, relic, auto and other seemingly hard-to-find cards. That Poley Walnuts insert of the squirrel at Yankee Stadium from last year's Topps? Tuff Stuff has it at $40. Here are two eBay auctions: one's at $1.25, the other at $0.99.

I know I'm not the first person to bring this up, but have you really thought about what the hobby will look like in the next five years? I think it's fair to say that both Beckett Publications and FW have enough money to continue publishing their respective fleets, but what will be in those magazines? Or, more appropriately, what will be on their websites? Will there still be price guides? And if yes, will the prices they hold mean anything?

Ebay's not going anywhere. Beckett.com has a large community forum on the site, as does TuffStuff.com. Beckett's got guest columnists, Tuff Stuff's got bloggers...

With realistic pricing coming from a relatively unexpected third party, is original content the infrastructure of the future? Or can the Becketts and the Tuff Stuffs reclaim their relevancy in a traditional role in the hobby? And what about all the dealers who got into the industry only to watch their roles in it disintegrate?

Lessons from the Other Beckett

Yesterday Beckett announced they're shifting the format and timing of their publications.
So let's cut to the chase. Is Beckett making the right move here? Or is this simply a re-hash of Waiting for Godot, as the biographer of that other Beckett paraphrases, "to keep the terrible silence at bay"? Since I'm a little late to this party, here are four things I've been thinking about today:


Competition is real, not matter where it's coming from (i.e. the Internet)
Although I'm probably taking myself and my writing way too seriously, bloggers like yours truly, Chris Harris, David Campbell and others are cutting into the Beckett audience. We're producing fresh content that's opinionated, truthful, and free to read. Heck, even TS O'Connell and the SCD crowd got on the blogging bandwagon earlier last year to keep up the pace.

By moving the printed edition to once every two months, Beckett cuts down on printer, distribution, shipping and production fees and moves their fresher content to the web (at least that's what I would do). So then what becomes of the Beckett Blog?


Where is all this new editorial content going to come from?
Back in the day, Beckett had a ton of new content every month, plus detailed price listings for the majority of sets. Besides Beckett, I distinctly remember Tuff Stuff clocking in at over 200 pages on more than a few occasions. But most of those 200-plus pages were advertisements, and the last time I checked, there aren't too many dealers out there today who can support a national advertising budget. Also, where's all this new content going to come from? Is there a room full of monkeys at typewriters that's going to help churn this stuff out? Or have blogs like Stale Gum, Cardboard Junkie, Cardboard Gods, and The Baseball Card Blog awoke a widespread kindred spirit of old baseball card collectors just itching to write?


What is the breakdown going to be?
With the Sports Card Monthly, are we looking at 10 pages of content for the four major sports and 5 pages for racing, golf, the WNBA and the WWE? Because it's starting to look a lot like Tuff Stuff.

Also, how will new card pricing be introduced? Through the monthly? Or as a way to boost sales of the single-sport magazine? If it's the former, then presumably there won't be an outcry from the hobby. But if it's the latter, and new cards are only introduced every two months, you can almost guarantee that there will be an outcry from the collectors and dealers who rely on Beckett almost every day. Newspapers publish stock prices five days a week for a reason.


The Ramifications of Upping the Cover Price
This is probably the most important thing to come out of this whole story, for two reasons. First, by charging more, Beckett is moving their magazines away from the casual collectors or lapsed collectors who maybe want to check out what's going on or find out how much their Canseco rookie is worth. It may not seem like much, but consider that right now Beckett Baseball is $4.99 per issue. If you buy it at the newsstand, $4.99 is almost the average cover price for any magazine not named US Weekly or OK!. But by suddenly adding between $3 and $5 to that cover price, you're pricing a lot of people out. Not that I would know, but $7.99 and $9.99 cover prices simultaneously scream out 'niche' and 'pornography,' which may seem appropriate, considering the way some collectors covet their cards.

The proposed change in cover price is also important because it will make Beckett more expensive than Tuff Stuff, truly it's only competitor. For those who don't see a difference between the two, it's like if Pepsi raised their suggested cost to $2 a can while Coke stayed at 99¢. Which one are you going to drink?


You could make the case that Beckett had to do something to combat stale months with no new pricing, the immediacy of content on the web, and so on, but then again, to quote the playwright: "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple, I can't make out."