Ennui, anyone?

For the last two weeks the news drove my remarks. PWCC’s acquisition by Fanatics dovetailed nicely with an article I was already working on about a trend of wealth-based stratification in the hobby.  The demise of Collectable was a nice case study in the difficulty of moving a hobby to a pure investment securities model.  Well, this week we tackle the hobby’s evolution from a slightly different perspective: how the hobby’s evolution makes collectors feel.  My main take on this is that quite a few of us who have been at this thing of ours for a long time are feeling more than a little tension over the financial aspects of collecting, a little directionless about our collections, a little unmoored from what got us into collecting, perhaps even thinking of selling out. 

I’ve kicked this around with quite a few fellow veteran collectors who are going through the same feeling, and from what I have gleaned from these discussions, the very success of the hobby is at the root of the malaise.  Three years of price fatigue from the pandemic boom have taken their toll on veteran collectors’ mindsets.  I don't know for sure, but if you told me five years ago that I could swap a card I own for a new car and get change back, I'd have said you were crazy, yet that exact issue has come up repeatedly within my circle of long-time hobby friends.  Guys who have been collecting for 20-30-40 or even 50 years are selling things that I had long thought of as untouchable, and none need the money to live on per se.  It is just that the iconic cards in their collections have morphed into assets worth life-altering money.  When a card you bought for $2,000 is suddenly selling for $250,000, it makes you think.  Even with handing 28% to Uncle Sam (capital gains tax rate on cards) and more to the state taxing authorities, that still leaves a lot of money.  Some are paying off mortgages, others are using their collections as a final boost to their retirement savings.  

I know that I never expected the money that is sloshing around the card market today or the way it warps our thinking on the hobby.  When I contemplated writing on hobby issues, I thought I would be mostly gossiping about hobby news and insiders, telling big fish stories, and reminiscing about collectors and collecting life over the fifty years I’ve spent chasing cardboard.  And I will be writing those columns too.  I just never thought I would be writing a blog about cards that would veer so often into financial strategy, taxes, investment analysis, and so on, but that is where collecting has gone and where it may go to an even greater extent in the future, so that is where the discussion goes. 

What I do know is that with this much money at issue I am forced treat my collection like an investment even if I prefer not to, and that takes its toll on my enjoyment of the hobby.  Besides the increasing number of cards that I simply cannot afford, it is just so bloody expensive to get even a lower grade mainstream career contemporary card of a Ruth, Cobb, etc.  I mean, going well into four figures for a card that looks like it has been up someone’s butt for a week, I just can’t believe it.  I saw a 1952 Mantle that looked like it went through the washing machine sell for five figures.  For all my pontificating about deals and the finances of the hobby, I am still on the collector spectrum. If I get to the point when worrying about what my cards are worth exceeds the enjoyment I derive from them, I am gone, immediately. Thus far, it has not, but as the Boomers (not me; early Gen X) drop out or die off, it gets a bit harder to find people who remember the pure joy in a hobby devoted to collecting crap that was so worthless that American mothers usually threw it out while their sons were in college or in the military.  

The younger collectors (and by that, I mean anyone who cut his collecting teeth after the Beckett monthly price guides started up) simply do not have the experience of collecting as a lark.  The Gen Z and Millennial newbies have experienced collecting as a financial proposition from the start.  I was recently at a gathering of collectors.  One of these young card bros showed up and hung out until it was just a few of us older collectors and him, so I got a good taste of how the young’uns think about the hobby.  He wasn't a bad guy at all, but his manners and hobby focus were just money, money, money.  The energy was jarring and quite off-putting to me.  Just because cards are worth money does not mean every conversation has to be financial in nature.  Perhaps I am looking at prior generations of collectors through rose-colored lenses, but in the young card bros, I don’t see much in the way of discernable pride of collection as much as pride of making a deal.  

Not to say that this is a new thing.  I recall many years ago, when card prices started booming in the wake of the Beckett publications, reading some description of kids of the era as miniature stock investors, buying and selling with copies of a price guide in hand.  But it has morphed into a version of that on steroids.  The little stock investor would be laughably quaint today: the kids now are gamblers, primarily, then day traders with the winnings on phone-based apps.  I am not sure that doing a break and flipping the good cards for a quick profit is "collecting" as much as it is having a side hustle.  With the decline in the prices of modern cards over the last year, these newbs are experiencing their first market downturn.  How many of them will bail and move on to another hobby is unclear.  Many of us long-term collectors have lived through multiple boom and bust cycles in the hobby, and we are still here precisely because to us it is still first and foremost an enjoyable hobby, a pastime.  Things turned down, we added to our collections when and if we could because we enjoyed it.  I’m not saying there are not passionate collectors among the newer breeds of collectors, just that they are much more concerned with money from the start than we were. 

Fear not, older collectors with ennui about the hobby, there is hope, even if you are feeling the fatigue.  If you are a collector, it is part of your personality and you will find something to collect.  The saving grace of the hobby is that you can always pivot to another aspect of it.  When I got priced out of so many cards about 20 years ago, I pivoted to premiums, team issues and photos.  Now that they are becoming pricey too, I've actually spent way more time lately looking at nonsports items like postcards, and at pins.  They are beautiful and so cheap that there is no financial pressure on having them.  You can also get into trading.  Maybe you don’t really care to sell your T206 green Cobb portrait, but you wouldn’t mind trading it for a 1949 Bowman Jackie Robinson?  After all, if we got into this because we are still kids at heart, why not trade like it?