If you’re a sports fan, there’s a good chance you collected trading cards as a kid. Maybe you remember spending your allowance on a pack of baseball cards with pink gum 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 dumped your cards without a second thought, the industry has thrived. 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 the rookie cards is artificially inflated
There’s little argument that Wayne Gretzky is the best hockey player to lace up his skates with, and his 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee rookie card sells for between $600 and $900. The Great One, but he has a lot to prove. Still, Sidney Crosby’s 2005-06 Upper Deck The Cup rookie card sells for over $10,000. We have nothing against Crosby, but the fact that the rookie card of a largely unproven star 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 fledgling. The cards were printed in limited numbers and stamped with a unique number. Only 99 copies of Crosby’s The Cup card are in existence, which means if you want the best rookie to The Next One, be prepared to pay for it.
2- Babe Ruth continues to sign letters
If you pulled an autographed card out of a package in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you would tell everyone you knew. 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 may cause you to call your friends, however, is finding an autographed card from a deceased athlete.
To create these “cut” autograph cards, card companies purchase authentic sports star autographs, often from paperwork or voided checks from the deceased athlete’s estate, then cut out the player’s signature and affix it to a new card. So while 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 probable 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 includes a set of Presidential Predictor inserts, featuring cards from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and others.
Taking the popularity of in-game memory cards a step further, some heirloom cards in recent years have included samples cut straight from American history. It is possible to get a card that includes a small square of fabric 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 today’s products. It may seem strange to get a Marilyn Monroe card in a baseball card pack, but these rare inserts are a big seller among history buffs.
4- Celebrity body parts are already on sale
Topps created waves in the industry in 2007 when he produced three cards, each featuring a lock of former President George Washington’s hair. 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 disturbing desires of some people to trace the cards so they could try to clone Washington through DNA strands), Topps products created a stir, and collectors responded. showing that there is indeed a market for these bizarre, yet intriguing collectibles.
Topps acknowledges that DNA cards are difficult to make due to the difficulty of tracing locks of hair from deceased public figures, but the idea has already caught on. The hot insert in this year’s Upper Deck SP Legendary Cuts baseball cards is a Hair Cuts series: cards containing cut 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 not only from Abe Lincoln, but also from JFK and Beethoven.
5- Your son’s allowance will not take him very far in the hobby
If you’ve 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 25-cent and 50-cent card packs that contained a piece of pink gum for good measure. The price of consumer goods has risen over the past two decades with inflation, but card prices have risen due to increased demand as the hobby has thrived.
With very few exceptions, card packs 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 $1 package?
Each sport only features a couple of 99-cent-a-pack marks 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.