I agree, the internet. I remember in the old days, buying cards and being excited to find out what they looked like. For instance, I remember getting a package of 1963-1966 Twins from George Husby and seeing many of them for the first time. The 1963 Zoilo and Bernie Allen cards were great, but the 1965 Mudcat Grant and Mel Nelson were disappointments.

Now that fun is gone, as I can easily find out what any card known to exist looks like, because of the internet.

I started my second collecting life in the late 1980s. The standardization of grading through the advent of TOG is certainly a big thing, but since I rarely grade my cards that is not a major item for me. For me the major differences are that:

1. Rare 19th century material has virtually disappeared. It used to be that you could walk the aisles of the National, or any big show for that matter, and see all kinds of rare 19th century pieces. Now you see some common Old Judges if you are lucky and very little more.
2. Virtually all good material goes to auction. Dealers used to keep inventories of scarce cards and that was where you went to find them. Now, what dealers there are have very little that is interesting to an advanced collector.
3. eBay used to have auctions and it was possible to find nice cards on the site. Now Ebay is predominantly BIN offerings at ridiculous prices.

Since I first started collecting many years ago, the thing that has changed the most for me is my age.

Otherwise, I would say the internet. I think it truly multiplied the avenues of obtaining cards, changed how dealers and auction houses do business, and it opened up a whoop-ass can of information and research possibilities, leading to a board like this where we can more readily share our passion for our little corner of the hobby.

Brian

Yeah, what Brian wrote. Nice summary.

Since back in the day when I used to ride my bike down to Safeway to buy a few packs and play video games during my misspent youth, the list of things that has changed is pretty long.

But if you want to stick to a short list, then I’ll go with the fact that I no longer ride a bike, I no longer get my cards in packs from Safeway, and I have more than a few bucks a month of disposable income to fritter away on luxuries like cardboard. That last one might be the biggest change.

Another vote for the internet. Once it took hold, the hobby which had been one of local card shops shows and mail order changed rapidly and radically.

A lot of great responses
Here's something more for the pile
VAULTS!
I know why they are available, but it doesn't sit right, buying a card you covet
& you never get to have it in your hands

For me, I'd say access to cards in general. When I started collecting, I was about 8-9 years old and besides packs at the local grocer that i could bike to myself, I was dependent on my parents to drive me somewhere or help me order through the mail. I had access to the newest cards in packs myself and that was it.

I don't just mean driving to a store though, obviously. There weren't any card shops or shows I was even aware of within a reasonable driving distance from me. I would get to stop by Pacific Trading Cards every so often when we'd visit my sister. I would also sometimes get to go to the Pike Place Market and there were a few shops in there or close by. That was my experience, along with TCMA and Renata Galasso catalogs.

Ebay and the internet opened up the world and changed my collecting and by that time, I was also an adult and even had a little extra spending money. Of course by that time, the types of cards available had also exploded. Inserts, autographs, memorabilia, etc.

eBay sucks in many ways. But what’s the alternative? There is none. Seen people post alternative venues in the past and when I go there there is like 147 cards for sale.

I’d say the proliferation of auctions. Now it’s non stop. Used to be a huge event when big auctions were coming. Now it’s mostly a yawn. Massive auctions, one after another. Monthly. Weekly. Pop up. Missed that green Cobb? Don’t sweat it …
…. There will be a few hundred more coming. Heritage does massive auctions no even comments on. Even the REA cheering section seems to be down to it’s hard core members.
The non stop dumping of collections should tell you something about the demographics of the hobby and where it’s heading.

I don’t flip cards anymore or store them in a shoebox.

Your second post (and Adam’s earlier post), answers the question - auction houses. The relative savings that eBay provides a seller no longer outweighs the risk, work, and poor treatment that EBay affords sellers today. I would rather give up that extra 5% and know that my job ends the minute I send my package to the AH (using their account and insurance). And, I think this is exactly why there are so many auctions today - they are absorbing all of the sellers that eBay has lost.

If I had a nickel for every consignor who came to me complaining about Ebay I'd have a buck or two. Their seller unfriendly policies absolutely drive people to us.

Agree that all of the best pieces of my collection (minus 3) have come from ebay. Last year I found a 1990 KGJ Desert Shield at my LCS. That is the first vintage card I can remember buying locally in years.

What I most agree with Adam about is the vertical integration that we are seeing with Fanatics. It is going to bring about a tectonic shift into our hobby that will be unfathomable. Us vintage collectors will be looking at modern collecting and collectors and feel even more disconnected from them than ever.

I think Adams comment is insightful; and I agree "tiered levels of collecting" is already underway. But I think the stratification has existed for a decade or longer. I always thought I was too poor for auction houses when big ones would come along - like the Halper collection. Even now, I can realistically only get 1 or 2 nicer items per year ($1500 or less), which isn't enough to compete in auctions. I'm certain however that other collectors look at me and think I'm a big dog. Maybe I'm middle class? I choose to buy lesser HOF players because I feel I can compete and purchase items for them. I recently got a Barry Larkin GU Bat from 1990 because I sold items to pay for it. There is no way in Hades I could buy a comparable Babe Ruth bat from 1927 even if I sold every collectible I own. And think of the collectors on this board that routinely state they are looking for a "collector grade" version of a card. Even on this board we know who the Big Dogs are. But we small pups enjoy being here and when someone buys the T206 big three in less than a week (like occurred last year...or two years ago?) we yippy dogs feel fortunate enough to be able to say congrats and we are excited for the buyer....and I believe the feelings are true.

Here's another example: Babe Ruth has almost become unattainable to the lower end collector. In 2019, the entry level Ruth cards were Sanella, Churchmans, Butterfinger, Quaker Oats, and some strip cards. Look at those prices now! Older collectors still look at those cards and think...that much for Quaker Oats? Newer collectors don't know a difference. Think of all the posts, at least once per month, that ask "I have $$$, what should I buy?" That's stratification.


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folks at shows filming themselves interviewing themselves like their movie stars. YouTube channels telling you what to buy or and what not to buy . people taking huge and scary losses on the new stuff. miss going to the East Coast national Gloria show and just having a nice day.thx

One thing that has changed for me is
 

when I started buying seriously on eBay, I could search for "Baseball" and get a few hundred hits a day. Easy to work through. Today, one puts in a single player; say "Pete Rose" and the hit list has to be truncated.

I do not wish to return to the old days, for the continuing upsurge in prices has driven many desirable items onto the market. For example, Old Judge N172s and N173s of Sam Thompson were priced at five to ten dollars, but you could not find them, even at Bob and Paul Gallagher's booth at the old Astor House Card Show in New York. Today I'm lucky to find an example priced in mid four figures, but they are available.

Maybe you are right. Too many maniacs for me to deal with. And when work is busy I have no time to deal with a lot of stupid question, special shipping instructions, sending payment reminders, etc. Much easier to send to an AH. Though I do like selling smaller items myself occasionally.

I agree with, or at least don't disagree with, most of the previous posts, but in my mind most, if not all, of the things mentioned are a part of one over all encompassing change to 'the hobby' :

Very few of us collect for purely the FUN of it anymore.

This. Card discourse used to be mostly about cards, now it is mostly about profit margins. Compare money thread and pumper thread replies to research thread replies - almost nobody really cares about the cards themselves anymore. Most of the big changes are the result of this shift in approach.

A lot of us spend way more for cards and photos, etc. that we would ever have imagined. It's nice at least to sell a few items once in a while at a profit to offset the costs that could have been deployed elsewhere. Unless you are insanely wealthy or don't really care about condition or rarity, it's hard not to have some interest in the economic side of things.

If you don't watch out, Ed is going to Kargerize all your heads.

Attachment 574141

Brian (I suggest more fun, and less doughy residue)

I'm happy being one of the "very few of us."

I'm under the very few of us collector category. Outside of shill bidding, it's a ball.

If you are truly happy, no need to spend any time worrying about what other people are doing.
There are all sorts of collectors. Jay Leno loves cars. So does my brother in law. One has dozens of rare cars. One has a Camaro he has been working on for years. Both are car collectors. But very different types of collectors. To each his own. I would never say Jay Leno is less of a true collector because he spends a fortune of cars.

What doesn’t seem to have changed, at least on this forum, is the proliferation of “collectors” who seem to hate everyone and everything about collecting. And they come to a collecting site to tell everyone else all about it.

I'd say over the next 10-15 years there won't be any changes with nearly as large an impact as the spread of internet access and TPGs have had. If I had to predict something though, I'd say there will be more of a flattening of interest across different sports as in 15 years most sports card collectors will be outside of the U.S.

This, ironically, may be exactly what saves the interest in baseball (o beisbol) cards per se when the first generation of Topps collectors are no longer part of the hobby.

Anyway, stock up on those vintage field hockey and badminton cards while you can still afford them.

The One Thing That Changed the Most Since I Started Collecting
 

The Beatles broke up. Ba dum bum.

You could go to any collecting community and hear the same basic gripes. Somewhere right now on the Internet some collector of mid 1930s German S&M porn is bitching about the influx of new collectors who are in the hobby for all the wrong reasons and are ruining it. Seems to be a universal part of the collecting experience for some reason. It's important to some people to establish that their motives are the only pure and righteous motives for collecting. Kind of silly.

+1. We rarely talked so much about the money aspect 20+ yrs ago. I think the new age of flippers, big private equity buying into the hobby, and investors in the hobby have all changed it. And it's mostly for the worse for me...
.

What is the internet for if not complaining, virtue signaling, and porn?

My access to $

6 year old me was broke and not a kid smoker in 1909 unfortunately


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More money more problems....also the profiteers look at it like this...don't hate the player hate the game. The game is on the side of the profiteer not the collector...now to me that's what's changed the most. The deck has never been stacked more against the collector and less against the machine.

I have accepted it...it's just the way it is.

Wow
 

Looking at gemrate
361,000 ja morants graded
271,000 Nolan Ryan’s graded

Two of the biggest thing are the internet like many have said, and the price paid for packs.

I bought my first computer in early 1997 and the world immediately opened up. Suddenly I had opportunities to buy things I'd only ready about, and certainly never seen for sale. Up until 1997 my collecting was limited to buying out of the SCD mags (which I did a lot), buying from one of the two "local" card shops I had within 30 miles of me, or buying at the 1-3 local/reginal shows I would go to. I didn't attend my first National until 2002.

The price of packs: I bought more packs in 1984 as a 10 year old than any other year. Between baseball and football I probably ripped through two cases of wax, and did so buying 3-20 packs at a time, never a full box. Packs were $0.30 each so for $1.00 I could get three packs, pay tax, and get a couple pennies back. In the last ten years I've paid as much as $500.00 for packs I've ripped. I never imagined doing that back in the day.

I think there are a few big changes that play a significant role:
-the relationship between players/teams and the kids who followed them as opposed to now is a big part of it. When I was growing up in the ‘70’s in central NJ, kids were either Yankees or Mets fans for the most part because that was what was on the radio and tv. If you wanted the score of a Twins-A’s game, you’d need to rely on the post-game show of the local game or wait until the paper the next day. And given that local favoritism, a pack with Chris Chambliss or Fred Stanley was better than a pack with Willie McCovey or Dave Concepcion. And,
-those packs were cheap and plentiful. Local deli had wax packs behind the counter. Woolworth/McCrorys/Two Guys/KayBee and Toys R Us always had rack packs and even a 12 year old could afford them. In part, that’s because there were no
-parallel sets, chase cards, intentional errors, autographs not to mention multiple releases every year which have rendered ‘base’ cards essentially worthless.

I think without exposing kids to baseball in that manner (and not even mentioning the relative rise in other sports), you don’t get kids interested in learning more about Goudeys, T206 or even Bowman.

how collecting has changed
 

Money, of course, but I've been in and out of this since I was a child. What I remember best about, say, 1958, is that you couldn't find people who did this.
Conrad Anderson, who sold autographs; George Husby, cards; and Goody Goldfadden, who sold EVERYTHING, advertised thru TSN and Baseball Digest, but that was it.

There were hobby papers, like The Sport Hobbyist (that was Charles Brooks in Detroit), but they mostly looked like they were printed on the grade school mimeograph machine and you never knew when they were going to come out.

You started having regional conventions in the mid 1970s and the hobby papers got better and actually came out on time.

And with big money, serious auction houses became involved.

I think about those weird old guys who started all of this 90 years ago and wonder how they ever found one another.

You can find more information from five minutes of looking at Net54 than you could have discovered in ten years of nosing around in 1965 or '70.

Money. Graded cards. Either/or. Neither one good, unless you're using the hobby as an investment and have deep pockets. I've come to realize that there are WAY MORE raw cards people than I could ever imagine based on the majority of threads here.

Ja about to get a lengthy suspension. I’d imagine pricey purchases of his bogus gold refractor cards are well under water. For good.

Where you get cards. As a kid I would always go to the grocery with my mom in hopes she would buy me a grocery rack pack, we rode our bikes to the corner store to buy packs and every time we were at the mall we went to the drug store to buy packs. Sadly none of those options are available today.

I am convinced eBay is the source of a lot of the increased AH inventory. I did a column on eBay's seller punishment system last week. If you are unlucky enough to get caught in it (which I have due to accidentally double-listing some cards from a set break), you end up paying more to eBay than to an AH (19.25% of the entire sale including tax and shipping vs. 20% of the hammer price). I terminated 90% of my eBay listings this week and plan to populate my store with overpriced BINs until the subscription runs out in February. FWIW, anything you see in my eBay store (Exhibitman) as a BIN is available for the asking at a 20% discount (25% if you pay by Zelle) off eBay. Oh, and I sent over 100 cards to REA for this month's auction that i might otherwise have sold through my eBay store. All I can say to eBay is

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...0Impressed.gif
https://media1.giphy.com/media/tbw5i...VsZQ/giphy.gif

Jay, I recall that Terry Knause and son were the go to guys for nice 19th century material. I guess they have faded from the scene, perhaps because of the difficulty finding new stuff.