Great Expectations

So the big card news since my last column was the sale of a 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth card. One had not come up for sale publicly in quite some time, and the hype was impressive. The card even ended up on The Today Show (November 14th) and an estimate of at least $10 million was on the card, with some voices touting it as likely to break the record of the PSA 10 1952 Topps Mantle that sold for over $12 million.

The card closed for $7.2 million.

Now, do I really give a crap about the price of that card? Nope. It has about as much bearing on my collecting life as the price of a beachfront mansion in Malibu does to my modest house inland, i.e., none. That being the reality, why does it feel like a disappointment?

Given the hype over this card: "at least $10 million", "maybe the most expensive card ever sold", etc., most peoples' expectations were not met, and it has nothing to do with whether or not many of us could afford it. The card sold for substantially less than the auctioneer’s pre-sale hype and estimate, and REA has a bit of egg on its face for the frothy estimates and hype, and rightfully so. When Goldin Auctions over-hyped some shiny card that undersold, everyone was all over the auction house for it. I get that Goldin is a hobby cartoon villain to some and that REA is a bastion of the hobby, but to be consistent, this result is just as disappointing and should merit the same commentary.

While the card did not meet the projections of the public relations machine, it was a record price for that card, a fact that some people saw but that many lost track of (including me). What this means is that the spin was more important than the facts for most observers. That is where it gets interesting for our purposes.

The problem the Ruth sale highlights and that most of us face in assessing our collections is a variation of what is called “social comparison theory”, what our folksier ancestors called “keeping up with the Joneses.” So much of how we view things depends on the people we run with and use as our baseline for comparison rather than the objective facts. For example, in his book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck”, the writer Mark Manson tells a story about Dave Mustaine, a guitarist who was kicked out of Metallica on the eve of recording its first album. Mustaine regrouped and formed Megadeth, a band that sold in excess of 25 million records and toured all over the world for decades, but Mustaine said that he felt like a failure because Megadeth wasn’t as successful as Metallica, with its 100 million-plus in sales. We tend to do the same thing with our collections: you may have a stunning T206 HOF portrait collection, one that is certainly the envy of 95% of collectors, but if you can’t have a Wagner or a Plank, you somehow feel incomplete. Well shit, if your metric as a collector is owning a T206 Wagner, you are screwed pretty much whatever you do. That’s absurd, objectively speaking, but it is all too commonplace for collectors to think that way.

I bring this up now because we are at a point in the economic cycle of collecting where more and more segments of the hobby are in a correction. Prices are down even on vintage baseball cards. My own very unscientific tracked basket of investment caliber vintage cards has lost about 15% of its value over the last six months, and I expect prices to continue to trend downwards until interest rates level off and sticking your cash into a high yield savings account becomes less attractive. Now, there are two ways to look at this: the sky is falling, or the market is giving back a piece of the insane gains since 2020. Where you land on the spectrum between the two extremes is dependent on what you own and when you bought it, but more critically on how you choose to view things. If you are engaging in social comparison, you are always going to find someone who has more and better than you do, but if you see a downturn as an opportunity, your entire outlook will be sunnier.

The point of this little missive is that I find myself in continual need of a reality check to keep from getting down on myself for not measuring up to certain other collectors, when the reality is that I have a great collection that many collectors themselves envy. I have to remind myself of two things: be grateful for what I have and look for things in the hobby that inspire me and are attainable rather than making social comparisons that will inevitably come up short. That, in my view, is the formula for lasting happiness as a collector. To quote the great James Brown, “you don’t miss nothing you never had but you miss so much you wish you could get.” Your mission this holiday season is to reflect on what you have and find inspiration in the hobby areas where you can participate.

Next time, a Festivus grievance for all to enjoy.