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Joe K.I think everyone has had made some excellent and accurate points. First, IMO too memorabilia is most definitely not on the decline. Availability may be getting tighter, but demand continues to rise. As has been said memorabilia can mean so may dozens of niche areas. In any one area, the market can be quite thin.
Most references to memorabilia in the main stream refer to the Big Three: Cards, Autographs and Game Used items. Outside of these Big Three the fact is there is just a much much "smaller world" of collectors. I don't collect anyone of these Big Three, and often it seems that in some corners there is just no recognition of what I collect as even being part of baseball memorabilia collecting because it's not one of these three.
Within our "smaller world" people tend to focus in one or a few areas and have less in common with someone who collects something else – less in common than say someone who collects T206 v. N172. There are other Forums out there for specific areas too. For example there is a successful glove collecting forum and folks from this forum are not likely to contribute much to a more general forum like this.
For memorabilia there also isn’t much controversy so unlike the Card and GU forum there is just often less to debate.
Dan- I saw that Fan-Taz pin too. My snipe also got beat. I don’t even collect pins that much and I wanted that one. 
Scott – Love your rule …”The rule with memorabilia is that if you like it, buy it, because you may never see it again.” Always have to think of that when I feel I have went a bit overboard on what I spend. Of course how objective can you be? . I would expect you to say that!! I bet you wished all your bidders followed that mantra!
-Joe