Value and Demand
In recent weeks we discussed rarity and obscurity. Today, we tackle demand and the product of the equation, value.
The question of how a card is valued and becomes valuable is an issue kicking around the vintage card segment of the hobby; a current thread on Network 54 is entitled: “the trouble with cards that don't often come to market” and touches on the subject.
Why does something obscure become the next great thing? As I remarked before, a category of items needs three things before it can move out of obscurity and become a genuine collectible with a durable audience: taxonomy (a system of classification), lexicon (a vocabulary of a branch of knowledge that must be above the mere bare bones basics such that consciousness of the subject is raised and discussed), and publicity. Put those together, you get demand and its product, value.
Publicity can be managed (or manipulated), especially in the world of social media and internet research. The decision to make with obscure items you own is when and how to go public with what you know about them. I’ve never been much for hoarding information. I happen to enjoy collecting and want to share it with others and collecting on the down-low is not very sociable. Not everyone agrees. There are some collectors I know who hide information, never show anyone any of their obscure cards, never publicize them, all in the hope of finding more of them in the wild on the cheap. The most famous example of this behavior was Larry Fritsch buying every T206 Doyle hands over head, even advertising for them at above market, because he realized there was a rare variation and he wanted to try and get as many as he could before word got out. He nabbed a few that way.
On one level, I can respect a hoarder who keeps information close to his vest. Shutting up is always a good idea if just amassing items is the goal (the most valuable commodity of all is information), but it sucks as a long-term financial plan. Ultimately, you gotta say something if you want to make something of what you know. There comes a point where I want to cash in on my bets and it won’t happen without publicity.
Once you decide to take information public, the formula is pretty simple: write an article, try to get it published, try to get the item catalogued, perhaps even try to get it into a third-party grading holder and maybe get it added to the PSA Registry. Then watch the collectors and if they go mad for the item, decide if you want to cash in or if it has real potential for future appreciation.
My modus operandi when I come across an item like this is to spend some time doing a deep dive into research on the item while trying to amass what I can of it, then once I am certain that the item is not readily found and isn’t something I can hope to get more of unless I get lucky, publicize it to create a market and take the profit while the item is still buzzy. A perfect case study is what I did with the 1960 Los Angeles Examiner Lakers issue.
In 1960 the Los Angeles Examiner made cut-out player pin-up cards in its newspapers for the Dodgers and Lakers. This sort of cut card has been something sporadically issued in newspapers since the 1930s and was popular all over the country in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Each Examiner card was issued for one day only in the paper. I first became aware of the Dodgers set because I collect Sandy Koufax and I saw it and wanted one for my Koufax collection. They are uncommon but do pop up from time to time (getting Koufax, Drysdale and a rookie Maury Wills took me several years, but that is another story).
I then saw the Lakers. Rare as hens’ teeth; I’d never seen them before during years of looking for the Dodgers Examiner cards. I don’t think anyone saved them because basketball was new to Los Angeles and not popular, and I never saw one other than the full set of 12 that one seller offered on eBay. When they popped up for sale, I was all over them. I bought 11 of the 12 cards that the seller offered as stand-alone lots, and I spent several hundred dollars for them in the process.
Why did I spend what it took to take down a bunch of obscure newspaper clippings? If you know basketball, you know that two all-time greats had their debuts around that time with the Lakers: Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. Their mainstream RCs are the 1961 Fleer cards. West also has a 1960 Kahn’s card that sells for thousands, and there are some insanely rare 1961 cards of both men from Bell Brand, a Los Angeles based chip company. I realized that the two 1960 LA Examiner cards were true rookies for both players, West especially, who was a first-year player in 1960. Other factors specific to basketball collecting played into my decision. Basketball cards from the early decades of the NBA were only sporadically issued by traditional sources: from 1949-1968 there were three gum card sets, one Bowman, one Topps, and one Fleer. By default, vintage basketball collecting involves a variety of team issues, local issues, oddball premiums and so on. Finally, it was apparent that no one had them besides me and probably no one even knew of them besides me. They were uncatalogued and obscure early items of two of the greatest players of all time. That meant they had untapped potential.
I then dug into the items to see what was known of them and, more importantly, whether there were others out there I could snap up. I was able to trace back the cards I bought to another eBay seller who sold the group and said he got the cards from an estate sale in a Southern California retirement community. Other than finding the information on the pick and first sale of the group of cards I’d bought, I came up empty. I was confident that these cards were truly rare and truly obscure. I then decided to write them up and get an article published.
Timing is everything, too, as I’ve said before. At the time this went down, we were in the middle of an historic surge in the prices of basketball cards. The details of the surge are generally documented in the hobby press and await a truly granular analysis once the market stabilizes, but in a nutshell in case you don’t collect them, in the early days of the pandemic, ESPN released an unprecedented ten-part series on the Chicago Bulls’ last championship season of the Jordan era, The Last Dance. The series aired on ESPN from April 19 to May 17, 2020, then went to ABC, and then streamed on Netflix in July 2020, when I saw it. MJ came across as a demi-god, and the series was immensely interesting and compelling. MJ cards started to soar early in the year, quickly followed by other basketball cards. Rookie cards of the all-time greats in particular went through the roof. FWIW, I had always thought that it was ridiculous that a rookie card of someone like Kareem Abdul-Jabber or Julius Erving could be had so cheaply, but nothing prepared any basketball collector for the skyrocketing prices on these cards in 2020.
I found the West and Baylor Examiner cards during that Bull(s) run. I realized what I had and that I was in a fortuitous, unprecedented asset bubble centering around this very category of cards. I decided to try and publicize the set immediately, so I wrote an article on the Examiner sets. The article was published at Sports Collectors Daily on September 11, 2020. A short while later, I posted the cards I’d acquired on eBay as a set at a price commensurate with the rarity and desirability of the West and Baylor. A West super-collector saw the SCD article, saw the set, and bought it immediately, generating a massive profit.
Now, if I can just do that once a week…