1) What I liked as a kid and a teen, adjusted for cost effectiveness. I pick up 1971 Topps football lots whenever I see them cheap because I loved that set as a kid and it was the first one I built to completion. I focus on T/E boxing because that was what I decided to focus on in my teens since I could afford to build a nice collection of them but I couldn't baseball. I pick up as many poor grade T206's and T205's as I can find cheaply because those were exciting in my childhood. Topps/Bowman run for the same reasons.
2) Baseball celebrates its past beyond living memory whereas no other sport really does. Football, Basketball, Boxing, none of these make any real effort to promote their history and celebrate their lineage outside of an occasional trivia question or when politically convenient. Only Baseball has really built a culture of history, where players you or your dad don't remember seeing are held up as important and worth the knowing. Baseball makes it easy, other sports tend to require one to specifically choose to do research and educate oneself.
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