Lifetime Piling Up

Being an older collector is a mixed bag.

On the one hand, the decades of experience under my belt means that I have accumulated a nice collection with some hefty unrealized gains in it, and a ridiculously deep pool of knowledge. Speaking of which, I will be launching a premium content section after the holidays that will delve into some of the questions both technical and encyclopedic that I receive regularly. With videos. The cost to subscribe will be small, the value will be big. But anyhow…

On the other hand, having watched the transformation of this thing of ours from an enjoyable little pastime to a financial behemoth means that prices have increased to the point where I simply cannot have many of the cards I want. And so, I come neither to mourn nor to praise the old fart collector but to contemplate what the future holds for him (her, whatever; let’s just say “him” and avoid the annoying grammatical constructs and portmanteaus that makes modern writing so clunky).

I’m a middle-class collector, I guess, since I would rather pull 200 cards from a picker box than spend $500 on a single card. Or I could just be cheap. Regardless, middle class collecting has become a victim of its own success. With prices the way they are now I could afford any single card I own but nowhere near all of them. I suspect that the vast majority of experienced collectors are like me: priced out of completion of many of the ongoing projects we have and at the same time frozen in place by our incumbency. It is an odd place to find yourself; that’s for sure. I skipped the green background T206 Cobb for years because it was pricey and I had a red one, so why do I need another just to have a different colored background? In 2025, I have to put up $6,000-$10,000 if I want one that doesn’t look like it was stored in someone’s butt. The idea of doing that when I could have had one years ago for a fraction of that just chaps my hide, so I don’t do it, I just watch the card spiral out of my pain-free price zone. There was also the point where I could have swung a lower grade Plank or even a really shitty Wagner (if I liquidated most of my collection), but the costs were not an appealing tradeoff. For that matter, the right ten cards purchased 40 years ago retires me in style right now.

Which brings me to the vintage set collector in 2025. In a nutshell, “I pity the fool.” Unlike some of my friends, I am fortunate that I never got bit by the set bug. Oh, sure, I assembled a few sets of inexpensive cards from my youth that I enjoy and maybe I go for the oddball better set if I luck into most of it on the cheap, but the meticulous, grinding, hard work and expense of pulling together a significant vintage set never appealed to me. The few I’ve done I ended up selling. It always came down to a decision: tie up a bunch of money on a bunch of commons that I don’t care for or buy another Babe Ruth card. I opted for the Ruth every time. I don’t regret that one iota.

My one foray into hardcore vintage set building in the hobby after 1990 was my effort to assemble a complete run of 1920s Exhibit baseball cards in the 1990s. I got pretty close on some of the sets, but I ended up selling most of the cards because the tougher Ruths and Gehrigs (especially that damned rookie card) spun up into the stratosphere while I dicked around amassing the commons and made the whole endeavor pointless. That commons thing, I swore it off in the ‘aughts.

While the completists are not my people, they have my sympathies. I cannot imagine what it is like to have spent decades amassing hundreds of T210 Old Mill red bordered cards of minor leaguers and then realize you are down to Joe Jackson and Casey Stengel and won’t finish unless you sell your kidneys. And your wife’s kidneys. And all of your kids’ organs. Or going after a Zeenuts set only to realize that you need a Jim Thorpe or a Joe DiMaggio to finish it and it isn’t gonna happen without blowing a giant hole in the family finances. Heck, even the postwar era has cards that make me wince, and not just every Mickey Mantle. I don’t have a 1973 Topps Schmidt rookie. Not because I dislike Mike Schmidt: I think he was the greatest 3rd baseman of all time and I loved watching him play. It’s just that the card was easy but pricey, I think it is ugly, and I didn’t want to ante up when a pack-fresh looking one was cheap. I guess unless I find one in the wild at a flea market or something, I ain’t getting one now. My Nolan Ryan run goes from 1969-1980 because it is all 6-8 in slabs; I had a rookie card years ago, let it go, and get queasy whenever I look at replacing it with one that would match what I have. At least I have the Walter Payton rookie card. Sort of. In 1976 I was petering out on football collecting and I opened exactly one pack. It had a Payton RC. Solid near mint or better. I sold it a few years later when Sweetness emerged as a superstar, but the price was negligible compared to the cost of a near mint or better card today. I wanted another one but the usual coulda-woulda-shoulda qualms held me back. On that one I got lucky: I bought a box of junky cards at a flea market and pulled a Payton from it. Collector grade to be sure, but at least I have one now.

My point is, when you see an older set collector lamenting his fate at a show, have a little mercy, a little compassion for the poor besotted fool. He’s had a tough decade.

So, as long as we’re talking aged collecting, let’s ask the question on every Millennial collector’s mind: will vintage die as the Boomer and Gen X vintage collectors die? I think not. History is no guarantee but it is a guide. The vintage segment of the hobby hasn’t bit it so far with each passing generation of vintage collectors. I mean, the guys who build the hobby into its modern form are all pretty much taking dirt naps now, and vintage collecting did not get buried with them. The reason seems pretty obvious to me. Collectors by and large start as fans, and as a fan, a collector tends to look at the greats in the sport to benchmark the current players he follows. How many young Ohtani fans who collect are starting to take a hard look at that funny looking old guy Ohtani is compared to every time he pitches and slugs a homer? You know, the one with a lifetime slugging percentage over 100 points higher than Ohtani’s. That foray into the history of the sport leads to the older cards. It did for me. I started out with Aaron and Mays and Munson (NYC boy) and then learned about Ruth and Gehrig and Berra.

What vintage collectors are really asking is a variant on the same question we are all asking, all the time: what cards today are going to be substantially more valuable in the next several years, what cards are going to keep pace with inflation, and what cards will lose value relative to inflation? My often-expressed thought on it is that truly rare cards always have a niche, and rare cards of mega-superstars and mainstream cards of mega-superstars in top condition IF bought right are a safe bet to retain value, but that maximizing a return has to involve correctly handicapping the next big thing AND getting in and out at the right time. Easy to say, so friggin’ hard to do. Even when your analysis is spot-on, the hobby has a way of laughing at you. Star Jordan cards are great examples. During the pandemic there wasn’t a frothier card than the 1986 Fleer Jordan. The PSA 10s went up so far so fast that there is talk of a pump and dump bubble. So let’s talk lesser cards. I bought a raw (became a PSA 8) Dr. J rookie before the pandemic. Sold it about two-thirds of the way up the price spike. The 1986 Fleer Jordan had gone insane too, so I wasn’t getting one, but I read the room right and got into a few of the Star Jordan cards because they looked like bargains compared to the 1986 Fleer. I watched them go up and took a disciplined profit on all but one card that I happen to really like. Great move, until PSA made me into an idiot a year later by grading the damn things and blowing the costs of them into the stratosphere after I’d already sold. My nice little profit would have been 75x and climbing today. D’oh!

What’s the next big one? I don’t know, and I wouldn’t say if I did. That’s now how a pump and dump works. I need to get in there before I start hyping it. So don’t trust me…but F1 just signed a mega contract with Apple and is going to be cross promoted like crazy. It already has a worldwide fan base of 900 million viewers (not a misprint), and modern F1 cards are already very expensive. So what would an investor do to punch his ticket to the F1 party if the cards are already costly? Hmm…. Where F1 goes Indy Car and NASCAR try to follow. Hmm….

One last thing I wanted to touch on as an older collector is a cautionary tale about how easy it is to lose touch with the hobby when it doesn’t match your expectations. Many of us have watched the rise of TCG, especially Pokémon, with surprise, bemusement and more than a little disgust. To me, it feels like an invasion of the body snatchers as table after table at shows falls to the vacuous little demons. Feelings suck. Feelings can lead to mistakes. I made one for sure over the last several years as I watched TCG suck more and more of the oxygen out of the room but ignored the evidence and stayed siloed and bitter in more traditional card areas. I assumed that the whole TCG demand thing was astroturf rather than natural, the product of good marketing and little else, and would pass like a pog of a Beanie Baby when the pumpers stopped pushing it. Guess what? I was wrong. Pokémon is almost 30 years old, there are lots of 40-ish collectors with both genuine nostalgia for it and discretionary spending capacity to allocate towards it, and many people even play the game: there are actual tournaments all over the world. I still think there is a bubble forming in the newer cards right now, but I don’t think a pop will zero out TCG like Beanie Babies or pogs. I think of it more like junk wax baseball, where I do a steady trade on eBay in the superstars and inserts. It also reminds me of junk wax in the utter lack of value of base cards. No one collects newer base sets. May as well just throw those away, except for the few names that are ‘stars’ like Griffey, Jeter, Bo Jackson, and Charizard and Pikachu. In other words, the TCG field merits some further scrutiny as an investment, even if I have to swallow a little bile in the process.