Card Schadenfreude
Schadenfreude (noun): pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.
As certain segments of the card market are cooling or falling after that crazy COVID run-up, it seems to be a good time to discuss our love-hate relationship with card prices.
It is a weird zeitgeist when card prices boom. On the one hand, we (purportedly) celebrate unfettered capitalism and individual wealth building, and we love to see the value of our stuff go up, but there is also a ton of vitriol unleashed on rich collectors who use their money to buy the most expensive toys, like the T206 Wagners that we mere working stiffs cannot afford. For those who follow Network54’s baseball chat board we had a classic example this last week of a collector who apparently had enough and decided to flame the hobby with a brilliantly entertaining tirade:
“I'm sick and tired of graded cards, and all the BS surrounding them. I could not give a flying f$&k. I'm sick and tired of cards that have been rubbed on every corner on concrete, folded and creased, and held by clothespins in bicycle spokes being worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars, no matter who the card is. Ridiculous. And even more ridiculous is that someone would actually pay. I'm sick and tired of "listening to offers". I've got an offer for you! In short, when it comes to this so-called hobby, which is in reality nothing more than an investment brokerage and good old boy club of like-minded investors, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Enjoy. You can have it.”
Fabulous. Bravo. That’s a guy who knows how to leave a room with a flourish.
I get that feeling; I really do. I wanted to extend a double-barreled middle finger to the hobby in the early 2000s when it became apparent that I could never hope to finish certain prewar baseball sets I was into, especially the T206 HOFer portrait run. Before that, I could theoretically add a Plank or even a Wagner to my collection, but the meteoric price increases on those and so many other vintage cards pre-2008 just buried me.
Seems to me you have two choices when you feel like that: get out or find something else to pivot to in the hobby and enjoy what you can. I started collecting oddball cards and ephemera and Exhibit cards. As prices on those rose in turn (who’d ever have thought a Jackie Robinson anti-prejudice blotter would be a four-figure item?), I pivoted to other stuff, like inserts, premiums, Wheaties and matchbook covers, cards from other sports and even some non-sports cards.
But back to schadenfreude. The corollary to hating on wealthy collectors is hating on collectors who get lucky with a big find, a high grade, or a pack break. In the supercharged market of the 2020s, any of those can shave years off a retirement plan. As Sam Spade would have said, it’s the stuff that dreams are made of. I know it is what I fantasize about every time I go to a flea market, estate sale, or paper fair. I imagine that bang, that rush, that sheer moment of realization that I have my ‘fuck off world’ money in hand. Oh, the things I would do: go to work Monday, toss the keys to the boss, and tell her to keep my stuff because I am outta there (ideally accompanied by a clap-out like a blackjack dealer leaving a table in Las Vegas). Yeah, that’s the ticket! It has almost happened to me dozens of times. At one antique show, I found a giant box of matchbox labels (collecting those is a real thing, especially in Europe). There were thousands in there. The dealer wanted very little for the box. I looked at it, saw a small stack of 1950 Topps Felt Back football cards, and bought the box, knowing I would make a profit on the cards, sight unseen. When I unloaded the box at home, I saw a single T206 at the bottom of the box, face down. There it was at last, my Wagner. I knew it, I felt it in my bones. The universe, karma, fate, whatever, was shining on me at last and I was going to have my moment. I turned over the card, hands shaking. Nope. Just a beater common.
Ah, well, there’s always next weekend.
The guy who pisses me off is not the guy who has a flash of jealousy. After all, when someone else scores freakish, spontaneous wealth, maybe even life-changing money, you wouldn’t be human if there wasn’t some envy or jealousy rearing its ugly head. Never mind that you may have amassed a valuable collection on the cheap years ago; that was then, and this is now. I want that dopamine hit and if someone else gets it instead, I get cranky. For a minute. Then I congratulate my friend on his good fortune and move on. We’re (nearly) all human, after all, so I am good with a little green envy goblin skittering across the mind’s eye for a moment. The guy I can’t stand is that unique specimen of collector who is genuinely pleased, even joyous, to see a fellow collector lose. You know the guy. We all do. When someone’s card comes back from a grading service as trimmed, he can barely restrain the smiles. A card gets lost in the mail and he giggles. It causes this guy pain, actual physical pain, to see another collector luck into a find. If there’s something really great in there, he gets a migraine and has to lay down. That’s not for me, or I’d have stopped collecting decades ago, consumed by card schadenfreude. I don’t hate on people who have the resources to amass a great collection, unless they are dicks about it, in which case it is hate-on, but because they are dicks, not because they have the resources to collect large.
I often ask those who are consumed by card schadenfreude to explain just what they think is the solution? Do we tax the wealthy and redistribute their money so that no one can buy a $100,000 baseball card? Seems to me you can't say no to that and yet complain when wealthy collectors flex their financial muscles, or the cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. After all, the tenets of capitalism dictate that the guys who run the table financially are deservedly enjoying the fruits of their labor when they drop $100K on a card. If you accept that system, you have to accept its outcomes. I'm always curious to hear the answers. Usually, the critics have none and are just exercising the most precious of American rights, the right to complain. It isn’t in the Bill of Rights but bitching a red-white-and-blue streak about everything and anything is our one uniquely American and universally accepted right. Certainly, the reason why I do stand-up and probably why I write these screeds…
My ideal world would be an absolute dictatorship with me as the dic, but I don’t have a magic wand to remake the world, so I play the hand I am dealt. That means working the system as best as I can for my own benefit rather than wasting my time being pissed at those who make more money than I do, or my fellow collectors who luck into a find or a PSA 10.
Hate the game, not the players. I think I heard that somewhere...