Sports card fever was well advanced early in 1991 when hockey star Wayne Gretzky and his boss, millionaire Bruce McNall, sank $451,000 into a yellowed scrap of cardboard bearing a crude depiction of a long-dead baseball player.
But overnight their much publicized purchase of a 1910 Honus Wagner had the effect of validating the burgeoning market for trading cards that feature modern-day players - cards that collectors hoped would also be worth a great deal of money some day soon.Since then that market has collapsed, with many serious speculators learning the hard way that the venerable Honus is valuable for a reason: there are fewer than 40 known copies of him in existence.
On the other hand, cards with sports heroes of the past 15 years are far more common than even the people gathering them ever suspected. As a result, many are now barely worth the paper they're printed on.
"Twenty years from now, there will be just as many of the modern ones in mint condition as there are today," said Gordon Shires, a salesperson at Legends of the Game, a Toronto card store.
Consider some facts:
- Baseball cards alone amount to a $1.3-billion-a-year industry, with 25 or 30 competing brands producing a wide variety of overlapping lines.
"It's getting ridiculous," said Richard Stadnicki, a manager at Legends of the Game. "You can end up with five or six cards of the same player - all from the same company."
- Alan Rosen, the leading U.S. card dealer, has abandoned the modern product altogether: "I don't deal in anything after 1975. You buy the new ones and they go down every month."
- A recent U.S. survey found that card sales tumbled 20 percent last year to 16.8 billion, while the ranks of collectors fell 7 percent to 16.7 million.
- Retailers are among the casualties of the collapse. Typically small operations, stores were obliged to carry everything to cater to customers' different tastes, and found their cash flow crippled when the decline struck in earnest.
"We're down to about three good stores in a city that had 40 or 50," said Jonathan Levy of Toronto's Sports Connection. "There used to be five card shows a week. Now, we're down to two."
- Also, several smaller manufacturers have gone under, with one of the top five now operating under bankruptcy protection while another has laid off 75 percent of its staff. The value of stock in Topps Co., the granddaddy of the business, recently fell by half.
Of course, sports cards are not the only collectibles to suffer in recent years. Demand and prices for upscale art are hurting, while the cost of classic automobiles has been halved. But cards differ because, unlike hatpins or vinyl records, they are not collected by happenstance - it's the sole reason they are created.
This wasn't always so. Sports cards first appeared around the turn of the century, as a modest bonus for buying a brand of tobacco or a stick of gum. They were collected mainly by youngsters to be traded or used in schoolyard games, their charm lying in their ability to transport their owners to a fantasy world. Anybody could own a little piece of Lou Gehrig or assemble a cardboard dream team.
Later on, most cards would meet an untimely demise at the hands of mothers who tossed them out when their children left the nest. It was precisely this winnowing process that established cards as a limited, and thus valuable, commodity.
In the early '80s, a half-dozen imitators invaded what had been the sole preserve of one manufacturer - Topps. They threw out the gum and started marketing cards as commodities in their own right, steadily outdoing one another in the quality - and price - of their product.
Fuzzy mug shots of players were replaced the artsy work of professional photographers. The shoddy, wax-laden packages of old were phased out in favor of handsome, tamper-proof foil packages. Included in the packs were such novelties as nifty holograms or specialty cards; one depicted hockey star Eric Lindros in a Toronto Blue Jays uniform and another commemorated the first female goalie to turn professional, even though she may well never play a game in the National Hockey League.
Nowadays, a pack of about a dozen new cards tends to cost between $1.50 and $3, with more glamorous "premier" sets worth $4. Especially sought after are "rookie" cards, since a shrewd purchase of a future star can pay off later. (Manufacturers will pay minor-leaguers princely sums for exclusive use of their pictures.) Indeed, many collectors bone up on teen-age players in the minor leagues and Europeans who just may cross the Atlantic. In some cases, the speculation becomes so fevered that it's self-defeating.
"You try to tell them to collect cards to have fun, but people are like lemmings," Shires said. "You still see people buy a hundred Lindros cards, expecting them to go up. You can tell them something isn't going to be worthwhile, but they don't want to hear it. They just stampede."
So, it doesn't pay to ignore the law of supply and demand. While the value of a 1933 Babe Ruth has risen to $15,000, the Brett Hull rookie card, worth $120 at its peak, has dropped to about $40, and Jose Canseco's, which commanded $100 in 1991, is down to a mere $30.
In the face of such dramatic price fluctuations, many collectors stay glued to their bibles - price guides published monthly that list the value of each card. However, Shires criticizes the guides for imparting an illusion, by basing their estimates on anecdotal evidence from relatively few collectors and failing to account for regional variations.
And collectors persist in believing that they can sell their treasure troves anytime they choose. In reality, many cards are of little interest to dealers (Shires said he routinely rejects Brett Hull and Wayne Gretzky rookie cards), and when they do buy, they pay only 50 to 70 percent of the price listed in the guides.
As the plunge continues, collectors are beginning to learn the value of scarcity. For example, McDonald's recently issued a hockey set available only at Canadian franchises that instantly became a hot commodity.
Mere rumored rarity is enough to start a run. The French-language edition of 1990-91 Upper Deck hockey cards soared to almost $500 a box on the basis of a tip that the print run was very small. That turned out to be wrong: a box now costs about $200. Such rumors are nothing new to the trade.
"A lot of dealers have been burnt by the companies before," Stadnicki noted. "They say there will be limited production, and six months later you are seeing them in K-Mart and Woolco, and the price drops . . . Basically, it's a lot of hype."
Given the modern card-world's high costs and overwhelming complexity, it is hardly surprisingly that many children are being shut out of something created for their fun rather than for adults' profit. Stadnicki estimates that about one-third of youngsters now collect cards, compared with 60 percent five years ago. He says the most-depressing sight in his business is to have a parent arrive with a child in one hand and a price guide in the other.
"Parents should teach their kids to enjoy the hobby. Nobody really picks teams or players and sticks to them any more. They know Robbie Alomar as a card. They are growing up with the cards, not the players."
In fact, on a personal level, many dealers try not to mix business with pleasure. Shires, for example, has a mania for hand-painted Japanese baseball cards of the Second World War era. And Levy stubbornly specializes in whimsy - such as cards of players with Afro haircuts.
"I'm not going to spend $500 for a piece of cardboard that says Mickey Mantle on it," he asserted. "I just think it has gotten out of hand."