One of the things that the pandemic of 2020 has done, was teach me something new. Well, not completely new. When I was just 10 years old and in elementary school, I had a group of friends that were big baseball fans. In a way, it kind of reminds you of what you see in the movie, "The Sandlot". It was around 1987, and I wanted to fit in, so I became a sports fan and a fan of baseball cards.
1987 Topps Baseball was the baseball card of choice and they were cheap. They may have only been 35 cents a pack, but I think they were actually 50 cents a pack. So, for a buck you could get two packs. The baseball cards at that time were completely cardboard and they came packaged with an unwrapped piece of bubble gum. For the many packs of 1987 Topps baseball cards that I purchased, I don't think there was ever a time when the piece of bubble gum was actually soft. Hard as a rock every time.
So back then, especially being a young kid, the idea of collecting baseball cards was to hang on to them forever. The reason that you do that is because, "Some day they will be worth a lot of money." So, collect and collect I did. I collected cards all the way through the early 1990s. Before you knew it, I had somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 cards.
So going along with the theory that, "Someday they will be worth a lot of money", I moved those things with me every time I moved. I still have them now. However, with COVID-19 raising havoc on 2020 and having more time at home, I decided to start opening those boxes again and see what I actually can do with them. My first thought was to inventory them and see what my collection is worth. I am still doing that and have almost 7,000 cards inventoried so far. Meanwhile, I bought a new Beckett Baseball Price Guide to use a reference in case anything notable comes along and I can see if it has value now. So, I did find something right away. I noticed in my Beckett Baseball Price Guide that Ichiro Suzuki Rookie Cards are doing okay. I noticed that they were valued at about $20.00 a piece. So, I threw a 2001 Topps Ichiro Suzuki Rookie Card on Feebay, I mean Ebay, and it sold for $13.99. Then I found a different 2001 Topps Traded Ichiro Suzuki and Albert Pujols 2001 Topps Rookies Of The Year Card, and I sold that for $26.00. This grabbed my attention. Two cards sold for $40.00, I can do something with this.
So after many years of being idle in the card collecting world, I decided to dig deeper and I was now interested in buying some new 2020 cards. Why buy new cards when I have so many already to sell? It is because the whole mindset of card collecting has changed. Instead of that old theory of hang on to the cards forever and they will be worth more money, now the theory has changed to buy and sell now when a player is relevant and the demand is high. It is kind of like flipping cards instead of flipping houses. The card companies have changed dramatically as well. Fleer, who released cards for years, dropped out of the sports card game quite a while ago. Topps, Donruss, and Score are still around. When I started collecting when I was 10, the idea of the baseball card was to have a card of each player in the league. There may have been a few special cards in the set like Record Breakers, Turn Back The Clock, and All-Stars, but the bulk of the cards were regular player cards and all of them were mass produced. I think the 1987 Topps Baseball set had 792 cards. As time went on, the cards no longer were strictly cardboard, the gum was no longer included (my teeth thanks them for that), and the idea of special insert cards was born. You see there were different subsets that were not a part of the regular set that were randomly inserted in packs, and those were the more desirable cards and the ones that would usually fetch the most money. As inserts became popular and card companies continued to grow and become more creative, they introduced the idea of randomly inserted cards with game used jerseys, game used patches, and game used memorabilia. These game used cards usually a much lower production run and that, of course, made them more desirable. In the late 1990's I pulled two types of these cards out of packs. I pulled a 1998 Brett Favre Game Used Football From Super Bowl 31 card and 200 were only produced. I also pulled a 1999 Upper Deck Harmon Killebrew Game Used Bat Card and only 500 of those were produced. I still have both of those cards today and in the office of our home.
When I was a kid, it was always a dream to get a card autographed. As collecting autographs became a bigger thing, everyone wanted to know if it had a certificate of authentication to prove it was an actual autograph instead of thinking it was my Grandpa Thomey scribbling on a card to make me feel good. The card companies have also latched on to randomly inserting autograph cards into their packs and the authentication is listed right on the back of the card.
Getting back to the present time, 2020 and the pandemic, I was a rookie all over again when it came to card collecting. I learned that card companies continue to do jersey, patches, and memorabilia cards. They continue to insert autograph cards. They add all these types of cards more frequently to make buying cards more desirable. The new lesson for me was when I learned that now card companies add different color variations, called parallels, into their packs. There is a limited production run of each parallel and oftentimes it has a serial number on the card to show which numbered card it is. They make some parallel cards where there is only one card produced period. That is a home run, in baseball terms, if you can pull one of those. This past weekend I pulled two of those parallels where only one was produced out of the same box of cards that I purchased. Right on the front of the card it says 1/1. It was a rush and it was exciting. As a collector now that is committed to self-funding this form of card collecting today, I knew I had something really good.
My goal is to sell all of my cards. As you get older, the thought of forever seems to fade away. I want someone to have them that enjoys collecting them, and I want make some money on the side to put away for the future. Well, maybe some of it will buy new cards to continue flipping. To me its the best of both worlds with the hobby. I get the excitement of buying the cards and opening them, but I also get the excitement of seeing what people are paying for them and how desirable they are. It's a win-win I think. It is a good hobby that relaxes me after some tough days at work. Unless I pull an extremely rare card and then the blood pressure goes back up. Anyways, that is one of my new things learned in the pandemic of 2020.
Be Kind To Everyone.
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