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.

Average Real Pricing (ARP): The Future of the Price Guide

There's an oft-repeated, widely held misconception amongst vintage card collectors, one that reeks of that “old money vs. new money” elitism. That misconception is that new cards—cards made in the last 10 years—are worthless.

It’s not true, of course. After all, anything can have value if someone is willing to purchase it. The problem is, unlike cards manufactured prior to 1970, new cards are probably not worth as much as collectors are led to believe. Whereas the market and value for older cards is more stable, the value of a new card is dictated not so much by what the market will actually pay, but by an artificial, out-of-touch price: its “book” value.

Since the rise of the nationally consulted price guide in the early 1980s, “book” value has been determined by an aggregate tally of prices reported by a network of sources within the hobby, mostly card shop owners and touring show dealers. The reported prices were accurate and reliable because that’s where collectors bought cards: at hobby shops and at card shows.

But over the last 10 to 15 years, with the rise of online shopping and big-box, one-stop-shopping stores like Walmart and Target—combined with the dwindling number of card shows and hobby shops—the tried-and-true price guide model stopped working.

So why base pricing on reports from people with only half the story? One theory is that it preserves the card-collecting industry. Without a somewhat-inflated baseline, whatever shops and touring dealers remain would flag and fail. Another theory is that this model is still used because it’s convenient. Changing how book prices are determined would undermine more than 30 years of labor of transforming a hobby into a gigantic industry. And while changing the nature of how and from where prices are collected would erode the “wink-wink” dealer advantage and definitely shake things up, nobody wants to see the hobby fail. We just don’t want to be lied to anymore about the true “value” of our cards.

Enter the average real pricing guide, or ARP guide. With monthly prices based on realized prices of new, raw card sales from various Internet auction sites, any card’s ARP will be much more accurate than a traditional price guide’s pie-in-the-sky value.

Let’s look at an example. Topps 2013 Series Two came out in mid-June. And while most collectors don’t expect base cards of a flagship set like Topps—with a total print run probably into the millions of cards—to hold their value long-term, how should we value short-printed cards like the on-checklist variations? Realized prices from September and October were used to find the ARP values of 17 variations (see table below).

Card # & Player	ARP Value	Unregulated ARP Value*	Trad. Price Guide Value Range (Dec.)
1C Bryce Harper Sunglasses SP	$14.78	$14.66	$12.50–$30.00
10B Adam Jones Sunglasses SP	$4.95	$4.85	$5.00–$12.00
11C Yu Darvish Sunglasses SP	$5.93	$6.02	$5.00–$12.00
27C Mike Trout Sunglasses SP	$10.30	$10.19	$8.00–$25.00
28B Prince Fielder Sunglasses SP	$4.26	$4.07	$5.00–$12.00
34B Felix Hernandez Sunglasses SP	$3.13	$3.60	$5.00–$12.00
55B Tim Lincecum Sunglasses SP	$4.25	$4.25	$5.00–$12.00
110B Justin Upton Sunglasses SP	$2.38	$2.49	$5.00–$12.00
122C Andrew McCutchen Sunglasses SP	$5.64	$5.72	$6.00–$15.00
127B Giancarlo Stanton Sunglasses SP	$4.31	$4.10	$5.00–$12.00
242C Matt Kemp Sunglasses SP	$2.91	$2.91	$5.00–$12.00
316B Josh Reddick Sunglasses SP	$3.01	$3.23	$5.00–$12.00
362B Yoenis Cespedes Sunglasses SP	$4.20	$4.02	$5.00–$12.00
456B Pablo Sandoval Sunglasses SP	$3.47	$3.39	$5.00–$12.00
595B David Ortiz Speech SP	$17.06	$17.77	$10.00–$25.00
660B Miguel Cabrera Sunglasses SP	$7.43	$7.60	$6.00–$15.00
661B Hyun-Jin Ryu Sunglasses SP	$4.40	$4.42	$5.00–$12.00

*Unregulated ARP contains high and low in range.

The ARP values here aren’t arbitrary, like the traditional book values feel—the ARPs are made up of actual realized prices for raw cards on major Internet auction sites. (It’s important to stress that ARP values are for raw cards only. Graded cards are a different beast, and are not part of these calculations.) To determine each price, an aggregate of realized prices for each card was taken from a given a date range. Next, the highest and lowest prices were removed to avoid skewing the result (See note on Unregulated ARP above*). Whatever was left was factored into the ARP. In those few cases where five or fewer prices went into the price calculations, all prices were factored in. (In the example above, only the Kemp had five or fewer sales.)

One interesting quirk about an ARP value is that the number of individual prices that go into each average is not uniform. For instance, if a Yasiel Puig card is sold 20 times but a Dustin Pedroia is only sold 6 times, shouldn’t all 20 Puig prices be used to find its ARP? It’s a more popular card, after all. I used date cutoffs rather than number of individual prices. These values reflect whatever happened between September 1, 2013, and October 31, 2013.

And about that middle column... While the ARP is the more accurate of the two price values, the Unregulated ARP (UnARP) contains the single highest and single lowest values left out of each ARP range. With these values factored in, the ARP and UnARP form an accurate range of high and low for a given card (it doesn’t matter which is higher or lower). For example, your Felix Hernandez “Sunglasses” short-print variation in 2013 Topps Series 2 is valued between $3.13 ARP and $3.60 UnARP. This is how much you should expect to pay for it, and how much you should expect to get for it should you decide to sell it. Notice how the expected buy and sell price ranges are the same?

“Book” value has long been the starting point for negotiations, or baseline for dealers offering to buy cards. If a card books for $20, a dealer will usually pay 20% to 40% of book to buy, then turn around and charge 60% to 90% of book when selling the card. The dealer has to protect his profit margin in order to stay in business. That’s one of the inherent functions of the book value and a wrinkle in how the hobby currently works.

An ARP value doesn’t have to protect a profit margin. Internet auction sites don’t care who’s buying or who’s selling. You want to buy that Ortiz “Speech” SP? Expect to pay between $17.06 and $17.77 for it. You want to sell the same Ortiz SP? Guess how much you should expect to get. That's right: between $17.06 and $17.77. 

A level field is a new concept, one that won't be embraced by dealers. I expect the traditional price guides will fight ARP at every turn. But here's why you should use it if you buy and sell new, raw sports cards: it's accurate. And as you can see from the table above, "accurate pricing" and "book" value are rarely synonymous.

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?