Lots of different points of view, and certainly a topic we've all thought about many times.
I lean towards the "there will always be collectors of old stuff", and the fact that sports cards have well defined numbered sets, lots of history, and popular iconic figures, will help keep card collecting alive ... at least through our lifetime.
Although, I do worry that the hobby could see a premature death due to simple corruption and greed.
As much as everyone likes to think that the hobby only has a fairly small percentage of fakes and altered cards in it now ... how many more scandals and "bad press" can it absorb, before the smart money starts to walk away in disgust?
The fact of the matter is that we're all dealing with vary cheaply printed pieces of old cardboard, that really aren't that old, and can be easily reproduced ... by someone with the means to do it.
The U.S. Treasury has been scurrying about for the past 15 years, changing the way our money is printed, because the quality of the forgeries reached a point where no one could tell the difference. The only salvation of our current paper monetary system, is the fact that someone was smart enough, many years ago, to make it almost impossible to acquire the exact paper we used to print our money on. Those little pens that all the cashiers use to see if our $20's, $50's and $100's are bogus, are a slowly failing "last line of defense" because the counterfeiters are that good. The odds are that our grandchildren will not be using any form of paper money.
There's absolutely nothing in our hobby today that could stop a few "quality" forgery rings from slowly slipping bogus cards into the hobby.
The cardboard, ink, printing process, and cutting methods that were used to originally create our cards, can all be reproduced today ... and if done correctly, no one can tell the difference. Not on a new card, and not on a 100 year old card. I don't care how good you think you know cards and cardboard ... it can be done by the right people, with the right equipment.
If I were in the forgery business, and I was looking for a low risk / high reward way to make a living ... I'd get out of the counterfeit money printing business and move into sports cards .. where the only line of defense is a few grading companies and guys with opinions, that can neither prove or disprove their opinions.
Now with that said .... imagine that tomorrow, a story breaks on the news that a forgery print shop was raided over the weekend, and in it they found sheets of freshly printed T206's, lots of Mantles, Ruths, Jordans, and all kinds of new and old valuable cards. The cards had been slowly (and very calculatedly)trickled into the hobby over the past decade or so, in an effort not to flood the market or raise suspension. Investigators have determined that the forgery ring was responsible for tens of millions of dollars worth of fake cards, and estimating that as much as 20% of the higher priced cards in the hobby today may actually be nothing but fake reproductions.
What would a story like that do to the health of our hobby?
- Mike
PS - Sorry if that's too much doom and gloom and conspiracy theory, but I was in the printing industry for years, and it's a possibility that's always fascinated me.
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