Who is the biggest culprit?

[mintacular]

For the decline of bb card collecting?

1) Price Guides (Namely Beckett) for assigning monetary value to cards
2) Grading Companies (Looking your way PSA) for overemphasizing condition
3) MLB for turning baseball's pastimes into 2 leagues of haves and have-nots
4) Technology (ex: video games) for making card collecting obsolete and/or less relevant
5) Various card companies for flooding the market during the 80s-modern era/overpricing
6) Other

In my opinion, price guides, turning the hobby into a business. Your thoughts?

[toppcat]

Originally Posted by mintacular

For the decline of bb card collecting?

1) Price Guides (Namely Beckett) for assigning monetary value to cards
2) Grading Companies for overemphasizing condition
3) MLB for turning baseball's pastimes into 2 leagues of haves and have-nots
4) Technology (ex: video games) for making card collecting obsolete and/or less relevant
5) Various card companies for flooding the market during the 80s-modern era
6) Other

In my opinion, price guides, turning the hobby into a business. Your thoughts?

4) and 6), 6) being the cratering of the economy

[vintagetoppsguy]

IMO, it is the card companies for pricing the modern packs to where kids can't afford them.

[packs]

Whoops, my response was more about the decline of baseball in general. I think the decline in card collecting is partly cost and partly the overwhelming amount of cards that are available.

I don't know much about the other sports. Is there an equal decline in football/basketball/hockey collecting?

[Bilko G]

Originally Posted by vintagetoppsguy

IMO, it is the card companies for pricing the modern packs to where kids can't afford them.

nah, there still are plenty of packs that can be bought for a buck or two. Kids just don't care about cards, nothing exciting about them for kids nowadays with the internet, i-pads, video games, portable video games, smart phones, etc.


technology has killed kids collecting cards

[bcbgcbrcb]

Agree with Bilko

[rainier2004]

Originally Posted by Bilko G

nah, there still are plenty of packs that can be bought for a buck or two. Kids just don't care about cards, nothing exciting about them for kids nowadays with the internet, i-pads, video games, portable video games, smart phones.

Ill go with a disagree here. I started collecting in 1984, NES was introduced in 1986 and I had time for both. Eventually the video games won, but it sounds like most of us put the cards down around 14-16 for a few years anyway.
Packs should be 50 cents each with 15-20 cards in them and MLB should subsidize the cost if necessary. The future to ANYTHING is children, not middle-aged men. Cards introduce the sport unlike anything else. The other big thing is 9pm playoff games? They need to be earlier so kids can watch and see them end!

[Exhibitman]

It is inaccurate IMO to think of the card collecting public as one market. I see three: vintage [pre WWII], boomer [1945-1980] and modern, and each reacts very differently to various things.

For me, two things have greatly diminished my interest in vintage and boomer era cards: prices and grading. I am unable to purchase many of the vintage cards I want--simply cannot afford them. That kills my interest in collecting many of the mainstay issues. On boomer era cards, I am so turned off by the TPG thing and resulting astronomical prices for minute and usually undetectable differences between cards that my interest has fallen off dramatically.

[Orioles1954]

Originally Posted by rainier2004

Ill go with a disagree here. I started collecting in 1984, NES was introduced in 1986 and I had time for both. Eventually the video games won, but it sounds like most of us put the cards down around 14-16 for a few years anyway.
Packs should be 50 cents each with 15-20 cards in them and MLB should subsidize the cost if necessary. The future to ANYTHING is children, not middle-aged men. Cards introduce the sport unlike anything else. The other big thing is 9pm playoff games? They need to be earlier so kids can watch and see them end!

Every year a card company tries to "go back to the roots" and issues a low-end 50 cents-$1 product with multiple cards and every year it fails. Kids aren't dumb. If they are one of the very few who are inclined toward cardboard, they certainly will want to buy something with possibilities. Baseball has lost its luster (thanks Selig). Those who still collect are more apt for something that is the new national pastime (the NFL). Upper Deck is starting to produce college football cards which I think could be a brilliant idea if done right. Kids are just done with MLB and I don't blame them.

[obcbobd]

Originally Posted by Bilko G

nah, there still are plenty of packs that can be bought for a buck or two.

Are there?

As a kid the price of a pack of cards mimic'd a price of a candy bar 5 cents and then 10 cents (starting in 69 I think).

I think a candy bar is now around $1, the few times I see Cards at a convenience store of five and dime, they seem to be in the $4 range. Too much, I think for a little kid.

[freakhappy]

Originally Posted by obcbobd

Are there?

As a kid the price of a pack of cards mimic'd a price of a candy bar 5 cents and then 10 cents (starting in 69 I think).

I think a candy bar is now around $1, the few times I see Cards at a convenience store of five and dime, they seem to be in the $4 range. Too much, I think for a little kid.

I believe there are a good amount of low dollar packs that are still out there. Problem is, who wants them? Like stated before, even the kids want the big dollar packs because that is where the hits are.

[dabigyankeeman]

Originally Posted by Bilko G

nah, there still are plenty of packs that can be bought for a buck or two. Kids just don't care about cards, nothing exciting about them for kids nowadays with the internet, i-pads, video games, portable video games, smart phones, etc.


technology has killed kids collecting cards

To me, that hit the nail on the head. Cards just arent exciting to a lot of the young people nowadays.

[Ronnie73]

For me personally, there is way too many new sets and subsets being created. I lost alot of interest in cards around 1992 and shifted back into my first love, coin collecting. It just got too hard to collect everything and then all the limited subsets like the copper, bronze, chrome, autos, it just got too crazy. Also the fact that all the new shiny stuff cost more to produce, so the cost to us went up also. At 3 dollars a pack of cards, gas stations, 7-elevens, and other places stopped carrying them. I miss the good ole wax packs and the days of only 3 different sets to collect.

[Brian Van Horn]

Other-In both the current and vintage markets, the seller has priced himself out of his own market. Auctions, in part, have ben popular simply because of the chance of pitting two bidders against one another. If it is a dishonest/rigged market, you are bidding against a phantom.

Now, a lousy economy can help neutralize the seller causing him to drop his price. If he considers an auction as his backup, the risk is whether the percentage to auction his goods wipes out his incentive to part with the card.

[Peter_Spaeth]

I blame shill bidding.

[Touch'EmAll]

All the new technology to interest kids today is a big reason kids don't collect cards anymore. With the ipods, itouch, ixxx, computer games, kids don't gravitate toward "boring" cards anymore.

The overwhelming variety of cards is just too much these days - tough to stay focused on one set of afforadable cards. The market is flooded with current collectible cards

However, without technology, ie ebay, the hobby may be just about dead. Imagine this hobby without ebay - dreadful scary. And like it or not, third party grading has helped prop up the hobby.

[36GoudeyMan]

FWIW, I think a great deal of blame is placed at the feet of the card companies and the major league sports and unions that licensed too many products. They killed the golden goose by overfeeding it.

When sports card collecting boomed (about when Topps stopped being the only legit choice, in the early 1980s), cards became innovative and interesting and visually appealing. Buyers (still mostly kids) appreciated the competitive look of the new manufacturers' products. When one or two experimented with short-subsets, insert cards, redemption cards, etc., collecting became a lottery (I don't care what that idiot judge in the midwest (?) said -- kids ripped open packs looking for the valuable insert cards, not to find the #377 card they need to finish their sets; it was gambling, pure and simple).

Once buying and searching packs, boxes, cases, became a money-making proposition, kids got squeezed out physically and monetarily. And then there were just too many cards to collect. I heard a stat a while back that I think is illustrative: in 1955 There was one mainstream Mickey Mantle card. In 1997 there were 135 Mantle cards issued by various manufacturers, all in subsets, chase cards, etc. The packs became valuable, and then were priced accordingly, even if value was generated by way of a manufactured scarcity (such as the new Sport Kings cards).

The market got overheated, flooded, and expensive, and kids could no longer keep up with the dealers who would buy up and break cases to find chase cards, then sell them for more than the cases were sold for. Point in illustration: I remember very clearly a dealer friend breaking cases of some basketball card to find the "insert" Shaq & Jabbar card (and he knew how to count the boxes down from the top to find the right box). The rest of the case was, essentially, trash, so he pretty much handed it out like candy. The Shaq card sold for more than he spent on the case. I know there are many more examples of this.

So I say #5, FWIW.

[barrysloate]

Of course, as Jeff and Peter said, fraud in this hobby is through the roof. That's going to cause a lot of collectors to take up a new hobby.

[jefferyepayne]

And not just kids ripping packs open looking for inserts. I stopped going to our local card shop as I got tired of listening to blowhard adults talking about some 1/1 auto card they pulled out of a $100 pack and then flipped on ebay to make some cash.

Also pretty depressing to watch people come into the shop with what looked like their paycheck and buy tons of pack. They'd rip them open, find nothing of great value, and then sit there with their head in their hands wondering how they were going to explain what happened to their wife. If you don't think that's a gambling habit, you haven't watched people at 7-eleven play scratch-off lottery games.

jeff

[Jcfowler6]

I blame:

The X games (most kids follow this kinda thing and can tell you all the major players and can't name most baseball teams)

Over saturation of the product

And scandal.

Those three are my opinion.

[mintacular]

To summarize, "eff" the kids, if they don't like cards that's their issue

[HaloFan]

I don't believe the hobby nor baseball is going down like some detractors think they will even with the Astros in the AL West. And the popularity of the NFL shouldn't be compared with MLB because they are two completely different things. There are definitely much more specialties in this hobby then many people are aware of. I'm mostly a vintage card collector, but I never get tired of meeting other collectors who are experts in areas I don't collect. The modern side is much more diverse then we think. I met a guy who collects current non sports stuff and he was telling me how different that crowd views grading than we do. Modern football collectors are said to not be into collecting sets just draft picks like Cam Newton and soon to be Andrew Luck. My father pulled Mantle cards for pennies on the dollar as a kid and grandma threw them all away like many collectors here, but when I was a kid, I was a fan of Griffey and Frank Thomas but could not afford their cards because they were expensive. Now that their cards are cheap, I'm collecting them now. A lot of guys I grew up with have cards that are worth nothing, but we have endless conversations about the hobby from when we were kids. "How much is that '86 Donruss Canseco?....$2?? Man, I had two of them when they were $100 a piece--I was a huge Canseco fan." or I'll hear something like this. "How much is that '90 Leaf Frank Thomas?..."$7? If you find one at that price buy me one. I wanted that card for years as a kid, but it was $80 at the time!"
The hobby will always be there but the way the generations view it will be different and that's not always a bad thing.

Craig

[novakjr]

Originally Posted by HaloFan

I don't believe the hobby nor baseball is going down like some detractors think they will even with the Astros in the AL West. And the popularity of the NFL shouldn't be compared with MLB because they are two completely different things. There are definitely much more specialties in this hobby then many people are aware of. I'm mostly a vintage card collector, but I never get tired of meeting other collectors who are experts in areas I don't collect. The modern side is much more diverse then we think. I met a guy who collects current non sports stuff and he was telling me how different that crowd views grading than we do. Modern football collectors are said to not be into collecting sets just draft picks like Cam Newton and soon to be Andrew Luck. My father pulled Mantle cards for pennies on the dollar as a kid and grandma threw them all away like many collectors here, but when I was a kid, I was a fan of Griffey and Frank Thomas but could not afford their cards because they were expensive. Now that their cards are cheap, I'm collecting them now. A lot of guys I grew up with have cards that are worth nothing, but we have endless conversations about the hobby from when we were kids. "How much is that '86 Donruss Canseco?....$2?? Man, I had two of them when they were $100 a piece--I was a huge Canseco fan." or I'll hear something like this. "How much is that '90 Leaf Frank Thomas?..."$7? If you find one at that price buy me one. I wanted that card for years as a kid, but it was $80 at the time!"
The hobby will always be there but the way the generations view it will be different and that's not always a bad thing.

Craig

Yeah, when I first got back into collecting, one of the first things I did was search out those cards that were priced out of my range when I was a kid...And then moved on from there. Any time I mention collecting to non-collectors, one of the first things they ask me is if I have a Ripken F*ck Face card...And normally they insist that it was Cal, because they have no clue who Billy is/was.

Completely agreed about the specialties, or niches. What we all view as phases, some people will settle on one or another as their main focus.. So yes, modern collecting is all across the board, which is one of the reason's that the industry might seem worse off than it really is...Because no one product really dominates..

[campyfan39]

Oversaturation
Grading

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by HaloFan

A lot of guys I grew up with have cards that are worth nothing, but we have endless conversations about the hobby from when we were kids. "How much is that '86 Donruss Canseco?....$2?? Man, I had two of them when they were $100 a piece--I was a huge Canseco fan." or I'll hear something like this. "How much is that '90 Leaf Frank Thomas?..."$7? If you find one at that price buy me one. I wanted that card for years as a kid, but it was $80 at the time!"Craig

That is what drove off a lot of the collectors who got into cards during 1984-1995; the collapse of the modern market was a huge energy suck. I recall shows in the early1990s that were just electric with excitement because cards were just flying off the tables, but it was really a game of musical chairs--whoever ended up with the cards at the end lost badly. In fact, I used to do some local shows here in L.A. with vintage cards and it used to really chap my @$$ how people would blow past my stuff to buy 100-card stacks of modern rookies with the guy next door. I remember one show when the price of a UD Griffey finally topped the price of a 1971 Topps Ryan in near mint--just blew my mind because I could not believe that things sold in muti-card lots and even 100 card stacks could be valuable.

[fkw]

removing the product.

A true collector card was always issued FREE with a product or service of some kind.

Issues other than that were called "Collector Issues" and usually were issued in boxed sets ie TCMA, Exhibits, R316, Berk Ross, etc. and usually suffered demand wise (too easy to collect/buy a set)

Now almost every card is a "Collector Issue" and is the product