Saturday: Final Thoughts On The Show

After going back for the first time in six years, I can definitively say that the National is something every collector with the means should attend,. It is a truly unique event; on size alone, there is nothing remotely like it in the hobby. And it is getting even bigger. One seller told me that a member of the management said that they had presold more tickets for the 2025 show than they sold in total for 2024. All of the higher levels of admission sold out well in advance. There is even room for the show to grow at Chicago. I saw a lot of capacity upstairs.

On Saturday, the anticipated peak day, they opened the show floor to VIPs early due to crowd control issues; I walked right in well before 9:00. The general admissions also got in early. The place was packed by noon. I tried to get that Korean bulgogi lunch again. No dice: the food lines were massive. I even had to wait in a line that stretched out the bathroom door just to take a leak.

The show is an expensive trip. With airfare and hotel and food and amusements, I spent about $3,000 to be there for five days. The hotels in particular have skyrocketed since the ‘teens. I wonder how much longer I will be able to blow it out like that, especially if I retire, but as long as the money is there, I will be there.

The stuff at the show is pretty, pretty good. Oh Hell, it is phenomenal. Overwhelming. Amazing. A sensory overload. I saw cards this week that I haven’t ever seen in person before, even after 50 years as a collector. I like Babe Ruth cards, and I haven’t seen so many high value Ruth cards ever before in one place. Didn’t buy any, but damn, what eye candy. There was a ton of high-end vintage nonsports. I’ve been chasing a particular N card for a while; by the close of the sneak peek Wednesday I saw two and owned one. The prices were breathtaking, too. No matter how much money I bring, it still feels like too little at the National. I spent half my bankroll the first night. I saw a Babe Ruth photo I would really like to own but it just cost too much for me to pull the trigger; I got the vendor’s contact info and if the piece is still there in the near future, I will sell some other stuff and get it.

I purchased and traded into so much inventory that I had to ship my clothes home so that I could get it all in my carry-on bag. Cost me eighty bucks. Worth it. I finished three sets for resale, picked a ton of high-end 1950s-1970s cards to sell, and added a few items for the ol’ PC. Even being overloaded with stuff, some seemingly mundane items were hard to find. I had a hell of a time finding singles of 1970-71 Topps basketball poster inserts. I was only able to fill in one of the three I need to finish the set. I also struck out on some nonsport and racing sets. I did get a stack of early Marvel cards and stickers to flip; they are very hot right now. I also cleared a box of its 1960s Batman nicer cards, another hot subject. One great find for resale was a 1957 Brooklyn Dodgers postcard of rookie Don Drysdale, postmarked in Brooklyn and signed.

I also had some time in the airport to reflect on a peculiar thing that I saw over and over: two forms of virtue signaling. The True Collectors were out in force. There was even a writer from PSA Magazine who was asking collectors at picker boxes if they would be interviewed for an article about the true spirit of collecting, which he defined as the people at the Natty filling sets, chasing inexpensive cards, etc., aka True Collectors. I happen to disagree with the frame. There are many reasons that collectors go after lower end cards and cheaper cards; it doesn’t make them more or less pure than someone who spends thousands on a card. I ran into a friend at the show who’d just anted up for an exceedingly rare and appropriately expensive big card and he was smiling ear to ear. Of course, I heard many sincere announcements of non-financial reasons for buying an item, but they always seemed to coincide with an effort by the True Collector to negotiate a purchase price down. What a coincidence!

Although I make fun of the self-proclaimed True Collectors, I prefer them to the clusters of young men with Zion cases strutting the floor, allegedly making deals, and talking a nonstop stream of mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money, punctuated with so many F-bombs that it got boring to listen to. The real irony is that because all of the things they pursue have a sufficient ‘float’ for there to be a solid sales history, all are priced at market or above. I was walking towards the show this morning and two young (and fat; eat a salad, boys) men were whining and F-bombing away that there weren’t any bargains at the show. I asked them: “modern cards?”, they said yes, and I nodded and said: “I’ve been cleaning up on vintage.” “From dealers?” they asked incredulously. Yeah, guys, from dealers. Lemme put it this way: with live price updates available for modern cards across multiple data aggregation platforms, do you really expect dealers won’t know the current market value of what they sell? They do. One dealer told me that the biggest frustration of the show is that he has customers who expect to pay him 80% of book for his cards and sell their cards to him at 120% of book. My advice is to stay in items that a buyer feels lucky to see at all. Not much frustrated haggling there…

Still, the sheer dollars sloshing around the modern stuff is astounding and undeniable. People were sitting around the VIP Lounge all day buying and selling, and the numbers I saw were big. On a lark, I walked through one morning with a sign that said “F1?”. One guy pulled out an Oscar Piastri /50 signed rookie card (he’s the McLaren driver who is on the verge of taking his first title) and wanted $2300 for it. Umm, no thanks. I’d rather have the Ruth photo I saw. There are 50 of those Piastri cards, but only one of the Ruths.

Asymmetries of information still exist in sports non-mainstream issues, nonsports, and memorabilia. Case in point this week: those Indy 500 pit badges I saw on Friday buried under the boxes. Starting in 1937, the 500 issued metal pins for the lucky few who got special access, silver or bronze. They came on cardboard backings. The Table had about a dozen of them in the hidden showcase ranging from the Forties to the Seventies. On Friday I bought the 1948 (Mauri Rose victory) and the 1958 (AJ Foyt debut at Indy) because I knew those years were special and likely quite valuable, but I left the rest. After I researched the rest of them and realized that the pre-1970 badges were worth 3x-10x what the vendor was asking, I scooted over there the first thing in the morning Saturday and cleared out the rest of his grossly underpriced inventory; I even got a 20% discount on the total. It will likely be my best resale purchase of the show. That happens at the National.

I was sad to leave the show and especially the post-show fun, but by the time I went to the airport at 3:00 the show itself was becoming unnavigable, and I think I would have been done for the day anyway. I went upstairs to the annex part of the show, finally, and got stuck in a traffic jam on one aisle, just a seething mass of people moving nowhere, a New York subway car at rush hour. Oh, how I wish I could have farted just to see the looks on their faces as it wafted.

The strangest thing I saw at the show was right out of the movie Bachelor Party. I went into the Hilton bathroom just before getting on the hotel shuttle to the airport and was greeted by Marilyn Monroe. At the urinal. If she had been 6’5” and peed standing up. Takes all kinds to run a hotel…scruffy, fat ruffians who play with toys one week, drag queens the next.

I got pulled at the airport for additional screening. The bricks of cards in my bag looked odd. The young male TSA agent who opened my bags saw the cards and just smiled. “Baseball cards?” I nodded. “These are really neatly packed,” he said before sending me on my way. That happened to me in Cleveland a couple of times too when I lugged home too much inventory.

As much as I value the inventory of rare and mundane items I picked, spending five days with friends is priceless. I may interact with someone online nearly every day, on the phone, and even In a Zoom hang, but there is no substitute for breaking bread with a man, for sitting across from him in a bar talking face to face for hours, if you want to get the truest measure of who he really is. I was kind of shocked that I hadn’t seen so many friends in 6 years. Travel is hard and expensive—I totally get that—but it is too easy to get complacent in the heavily connected virtual world we live in and not go somewhere. Don’t do that. Time flies. When I last saw most of the guys who make up my ‘family’, I had living parents, a child at home, and I didn’t have to rely on a walking stick (alright, a cane) sometimes. How things change.

One thing I did notice is that we are older and more appreciative of our times together. Some of us have died; others are too sick to come. They are a sobering reminder that we don’t have forever to enjoy these events and each other. I heard more than one friend who has become a septuagenarian since I last saw him face to face wondering how many more of these shows he has in him. It definitely slows you down. Covering 5-7 miles a day on those unforgiving concrete floors is more taxing than hiking the equivalent distance. It shows. One night, we had to wait for a guy to finish his nap before dinner, and we then ate at the hotel because none of us was up for the walk to another venue.

And yet, things also do not change. Even after several years, we pick up right where we left off when we last got together. The inside jokes, the personalities, they are still there. Half an hour into dinner or sitting at the bar and it is like we last met last week.

That is the real secret sauce of the National: the enduring friendships.

YOLO, my friends; carpe diem.