1971 Sports Advertisers' Journal -- Mastro column, etc.

[trdcrdkid]

Below I've scanned all 18 pages of the July-August 1971 issue of The Sport Advertisers' Journal, edited by Jay Knapp. This was one of several ragtag hobby publications that came and went in the 1960s and 70s, but this one lasted longer than most -- this was the third anniversary issue, as the cover tells us.

This issue is notable for including a column by 18-year-old Bill Mastro on page 6, the earliest hobby writing of his that I've seen, though it's entirely possible that there are earlier things of his that I haven't seen. Mastro lists all the baseball card sets that had come out so far in 1971, and announces "I guess you all heard I bought the T206 Eddie Plank card", that being the one he won from Dan Dischley for $320 in an auction in the June 1971 The Trader Speaks, as I posted about here: http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=218999. Mastro goes on to ask whether anyone has a Wagner for sale, but I doubt he got one from this article, since he didn't get his first Wagner until sometime the following year. He also has a "Wanted to Buy" ad on page 16 of this issue.

Among the other articles of interest is the one by John Kennedy on pages 10-11, in which he starts out by proclaiming that "Our hobby is slowly dying" and complains that the hobby gets no publicity. This is all part of his plan to get people to pay $1.50 a year to join his International Sports Collectors Association, one of numerous failed attempts in the 1970s to form a national sports collectors' group. It's interesting that Kennedy was so pessimistic about the hobby's future at a time when it was about to enter a major boom period, with the 1971 Detroit convention just a couple of months later (and the attendant publicity) being a major catalyst for that boom.

Sorry for the marginal readability of some of the pages; as you can see, this is dittoed, and parts of it are pretty faded.

[Leon]

And the publication was also addressed to quite the hobby pioneer. Thanks for posting...

[trdcrdkid]

Let me point out another article in this issue that's interesting to me, Dan Dischley's item on page 5. He says:

"Too many collectors are fooled by dealer pricelists and are duped into thinking a Mickey Mantle or a Hank Aaron is worth more than a Darrel Chaney or a card with Chico Ruiz appearing on it. The same number of cards are printed of super star and sub alike. The only reason a dealer "dubs" a Mantle or an Aaron "rare" or "scarce" is the fact he receives 10 times as many orders for these cards and see a chance for a better profit."

Dischley is expressing an attitude that was very common in "old-school" collectors of the 1960s and earlier -- the idea that a card's value should only be determined by its relative scarcity, and that charging more for high-demand star cards is morally dubious (unless a star card is scarcer than others in the set, a la T206 Wagner and Plank). This seems very odd to us today, but it was a corollary of the then-common idea that "real collectors" were concerned only with completing sets, and that it was gauche or immature to be more interested in stars than in common players. Dischley admits that even in 1971 there was much more demand for Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron cards than for other players, but he still thinks that dealers who responded to this demand by charging higher prices for those cards were somehow "fooling" or "duping" their customers. Bruce Yeko of Wholesale Cards was the first dealer to start charging more for star cards, in the 1960s, and it was a very controversial practice, believe it or not.

Even after the practice of charging more for star cards became generally accepted (a process that was well underway by 1971), there was still a feeling in some quarters that it was morally dubious to charge "too much" over common prices for stars. This was highlighted when demand for the 1954 Topps Hank Aaron skyrocketed as he chased and passed Babe Ruth's home run record, and the price of that card spiked accordingly; some old-school collectors thought the spike was too much, and that dealers who charged the market price for the card were somehow gouging their customers. Jim Beckett addressed this issue in his first price survey in 1977, which I posted in this thread: http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=216495. See under "Beckett's Additional Comments" below:

[53Browns]

All I want to know is if I can still buy 77 Topps baseball sets for $9 each!

[ls7plus]

Very interesting posts, David. Two things spring forth from them for me: (1) Mastro was a lot like most of us before greed set in and led him to the destruction it usually does in the long run ("the wages of sin..."); and (2) while I was aware of the earlier philosophy that star cards, printed in equal quantities as commons, should therefore be worth no more than the latter, it always puzzled me that the people that espoused that line of thinking had no realization whatsoever that value is linked to demand, and that star cards were in demand not only by set collectors, but devoted followers/fans of star players as well, thereby vastly increasing the TOTAL market for their cards.

Great posts,

Larry