Netflix baseball card documentary
 

Trailer
https://youtu.be/q0GsVS2gSAE


Does anybody have any cool stories
relating to Jack or the Sluggers stores?

You can watch the whole movie on Netflix.


Jeff

I watched it. I thought it was entertaining and pretty well done given the circumstances. Stu’s father is exactly what I remember all the hustler dealers back in the 80’s and early 90’s acting like. What a tool bag.

It was fun to watch. I wish they dug deeper into the inner workings of the card business back then. It strayed a little when it became about Stu and his dad.

Yeah, pretty scatter brained. It touched on a lot of things but never went deep enough to make me care about any of them. The only thing I really took away is that the dad is a complete loser POS and Stu needs therapy.

Damn, I wasted a whole dollar buying this on Amazon last month when it was posted on another site. :D

It was really good, but a lot less about baseball cards, and more about family. I would recommend it to anyone, not just baseball card collectors.

This movie actually really pissed me off. There is a real and poignant story here but it get lost in the dishonesty of the presentation. There was no need to start by pretending he didn’t know about the cards or pretending it wasn’t going to be a story about how relationship with his dad. Just tell your story, don’t pretend you just came across it while you happened to have a film crew following you.

Sort of agree with you Jason. Going into the tiny motel show and being “shocked” that junk era cards were virtually worthless offended my sensibility like a scripted reality TV show. Demanding an answer so let’s go talk to Jose Canseco...whatever. There was a much better story that could have been told about the faded dreams of the junk wax era. I do think that the awkward father-son meeting was real though. Have a feeling they just scratched the surface of the family secrets there. Burning the cards at the end was quite a reach too.

Still waiting for the "attic find" reality show

I didn't really like it
 

Thought it was kind of poorly done. i did feel bad for Stu hell i even felt bad for his dad at one point, though i agree if you say he doesn't deserve sympathy. But as a documentary it was scatter brained and not really accurate at times or certainly exaggerated. It clearly at times lumped the junk era and the value of those cards in with all others. I guess it was Ok, but certainly not worthy of an hour and a half of my time that i spent on it.

Totally agree.
A guy that was raised as a kid of one of the biggest 80’s baseball card dealers,
Thought his cards were worth thousands and when he found out they were not worth anything, then his mission was to find out why?

Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. You know why!!

Just tell your story, like about 50 million other kids that come from broken homes.

I wasted an hour and 20 minutes or whatever it was I'll never get back watching this.

Kind of a commercial for why an economics class should be mandatory in high school if the producers thought it was believable that the protagonist had no tools to even come up with a theory as to why the cards weren't worth anything and that treating it as a mystery would work.

I don't think this documentary was about cards at all. Clearly this guy knew his cards were worthless. This was an excuse used by his buddy to make a documentary about getting this guy back together with his estranged father. People still in the hobby today will recognize this, but I get people weekly coming in to my store wanting to sell their baseball cards (all 80s and 90s junk) thinking they've hit upon a gold mine. Anyone expecting a documentary about the 80-90s junk wax era are going to be disappointed.

For what it’s worth I thought it sucked.

Waste of 90 minutes

Hi all,

I don’t post here much, but i did watch the movie and want to add my $.02.

I loved this movie, deeply connected with Stu, and frankly think we should applaud anytime someone’s love for baseball cards and our hobby is brought to mainstream media.

YES some of the storyline and scenes were scripted and premeditated, but come on - this was a low budget movie about junk era baseball cards!!

Anyway, maybe i feel more connected than others because I’m the same age as Stu and (started) collecting the same time as him. My parents are still
Married, but i have kids of my own who i share this great hobby with my children so understand the father/ child bond that baseball cards bring and could only imagine what it was like for Stu and his sisters to deal with their hero/ dad walking out on them.

Yes, the story got away from the cards, but i was ok with it and really enjoyed the movie and it’s general association with baseball cards. I also gave my kids an extra big hug and told them how much i love them after watching the movie.

So there’s my $.02, or maybe it’s a nickel worth but wanted to share my thoughts. Thank you for reading this (assuming you made it to the end! Ha!)

DZ

Time to add my opinions on this:

1- they knew the value of the cards. Anyone who knows anything about baseball cards would know that they weren’t worth anything. The bottom dropped on those prices when they were still collecting in the 90’s.
2- they needed to fact check before filming. Paul may have had the worlds largest collection, who knows, many can claim that. As for Paul having the worlds largest Canseco collection of 2,000 cards. I would say he isn’t even top 10, maybe not even top 50. I personally had over 2,400 different cards and items and know many other Canseco collectors that had as many of not more than me.
3- it was a marketing ploy to use baseball cards to get us to watch a show about the guy reconnecting with his father. Don’t be surprised to see a Sluggers store open up because of it!


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I had a few 5000 count boxes of all Canseco cards a few years ago.

Guess I should have never sold them. Lol

Living in a small(12,000) town I get a lot of people trying to sell me junk era cards also. I tell most of them I wouldn't even take them for free. Most are highly disappointed and some get mad.LOL

Had a really weird one a couple days ago. Had a fairly famous person email me and wanted some error cards. They said they would like to trade, I said great because i like to trade. He said we should do a couple small trades first and I agreed.

Then he said to start he wanted 2 specific cards. I emailed him back saying the cards you want are $200-$400 apiece cards. His response was I seen them listed in Beckett for $100 each so figured they really sold for around $50 each. I explained how completely worthless Beckett is and I use completed ebay listings.

Then he sent me a pic of around 40 junk era cards he wanted to trade me and said he valued them at $50. I would not have gave $5 for them so I politely said we probably could not do a trade at this time.

I would out the guy but maybe being nice will work out for me in the future with the gentleman. I will say though if you pulled one of his serial #ed cards from a pack in the last few years you would be very happy.

If he's fairly famous, he's probably broke :D

When I first read this posted I laughed out loud. Today, I watched the documentary. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Baseballcrazy62. I kept hoping and saying "good angle now run with it". Nope the story line would go off on another tangent of nothingness. I thought the documentary had the potential to be decent. Not everyone can pull off the Michael Moore style of presenting a story. On the bright side, I now have a new line when friends/colleagues/strangers learn that I collect cards and want to know how much their cards from that era are worth --- "hard toilet paper".

I fell asleep watching this program
I remember when the 1986 Topps baseball wax packs came in a display box with bonus (cut out) cards on the bottom Here I am a 32 year old adult running to every convenience store to buy out all remaining packs so I could collect the wax box bottoms because I was told they would be worth a fortune one day.
It didn't work out the way I had hoped

i watched it on the plane yesterday...at first I was really upset and disappointed at the angle taken...but when it was all said and done I enjoyed it and I think we all should burn as many cards from the 80-s-90's as possible!!!!

And sadly just gives a "hint" at how corrupt this hobby was and is today!!!!

I watched this last week, and I have to say, I actually liked it. I watched the entire movie without skipping ahead like I do a lot these days when parts get boring.

The fact that 80s/90s cards are practically worthless didn't really interest me. That's been know FOREVER. However, the human interest stories I did find interesting as it kind of showed the different ppl that got into the hobby. The father/son story of who might have one of the largest Canseco collections was interesting to me. Heck, it looked like Jose had the family on his speed dial on his phone, so it was great to see Canseco having such a connection with one of his fans. And the part about the guy being one of the world's greatest dad's for supporting his son's collecting habits was touching to me. A lot of parents would not do that. They would say it's crazy to buy millions of cards like that which are practically worthless.

One story that I wish was expanded was the story of the guy that Stu's dad sold the Sluggers chain to. Stu and his sister figured that that guy would hate them for the dad selling him a bag of lemons, but that guy's opinion was quite the opposite in that he appreciated Stu's dad, and was still doing well himself. I would've wanted to hear how that guy survived the baseball card crash and what he did to still last all these years.

Wasn't a fan of it.

Mike

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Like it's been said already, we didn't really need a movie on junk wax. But I did get interested in his family's story. I wanted to see how it ended and that is all you can ask for in a film.

Same here. I found it pretty ironic that he bought the whole franchise, with what amounted to (3) junk wax cases (French Upper Deck Hockey).

Very disjointed doc, with pockets of interest here and there.

As somebody who was doing weekly card shows as a teenager during that time period, a lot of it struck me as disingenuous, but hey, like some have said already..........it wasn't really about the cards.

Seems like the co-director already knew that, but was constantly being stymied by Stu. If they had both gotten on the same page, it might have actually have been somewhat compelling.