Sports Collectors Digest

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Posted By: CN

I have a neighbor who still collects the shiny stuff and autographs. About 3 months ago I noticed that he subscribed to SCD. I asked him if I could look at the publication when he was done. I have seen the last 12 issues and it is sad that this publication has regressed so much. They have almost exactly the same ads week after week and it is down to about 60 pages. I know the hobby has changed and we have Old Cardboard to look forward to(I still miss waiting every month for the Trader Speaks to arrive). I just think it is sad that this publication which has been at the forefront of the hobby for the last 25 years has turned into such a piece of garbage. CN

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Posted By: joe

I subscribed to SCD starting around 1975. I just let my subscriptoin lapse in January this year. It was a great magazine in it's time, but with internet and other changes in the hobby is has faltered. Also, you have to remember this is only 1 of many magazine they produce. Coins, records, and lots of others.

Joe

Ty Cobb, Spikes flying!

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Posted By: MikeU

T.S. O'Connell has done nothing creative, innovative or intersting with this magazine. The hobby has changed greatly in last 10 years and SCD/T.S. has done absolutely nothing to adapt. Until he is replaced, the publication has no chance to improve.

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

I've known T.S. for about 20 years and worked side by side with him for many of those years. He is a life-long, true collector with little or no interest in the dollars and cents aspects of the cards he collects. He also has a real passion for keeping the hobby alive for future generations. In my opinion, no blame attaches to him for the state in which SCD finds itself. He is given precious little to work with in terms of personnel and editorial budget resources and is under constant pressure to keep "the bottom line" attractive for the next new owner. I see that he and other staff members have started blogs on sportscollectorsdigest.com; read it and you'll get a better feel for the man on whom uneasy rests the crown of SCD editorship.

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Posted By: Dave Hornish

I have to say I am an SCD subscriber for over 25 years. It has waxed and waned a few times in a quarter century. Just before F+W bought them they started publishing more vintage articles. After the purchase it was a wasteland for two months or so but the last 3 or 4 issues have all had some good vintage stories in them. I don't buy too much out of SCD anymore but have always liked the more in-depth articles. I do think they should publish every two weeks though.

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Posted By: MikeU

"I've known T.S. for about 20 years and worked side by side with him for many of those years. He is a life-long, true collector with little or no interest in the dollars and cents aspects of the cards he collects. He also has a real passion for keeping the hobby alive for future generations. In my opinion, no blame attaches to him for the state in which SCD finds itself. He is given precious little to work with in terms of personnel and editorial budget resources and is under constant pressure to keep "the bottom line" attractive for the next new owner. I see that he and other staff members have started blogs on sportscollectorsdigest.com; read it and you'll get a better feel for the man on whom uneasy rests the crown of SCD editorship."


I do not doubt that T.S. is a true collector, has a passion for the hobby and cares about the future generation of collectors. Unfortunately, those qualities may make you a good person or even a good contributor to a publication. It does not necessarily make you a strong editor. The limited resources and bottom line focus are common in any industry.

Giving 5 minutes of thought to the matter:

1. Old Cardboard covers a niche. SCD could have done this and still could with regularly scheduled features.
2. There is a Post-War vintage gap currently. SCD could take advantage of this.
3. There is a gap for an independent print version of an accurately graded card/pack price guide. SCD could fill this gap. They could partner with VCP or CT on this.
4. No independent publication, excluding Old Cardboard, has any decent articles for the most part. SCD could really help in this area.
5. No publication has ever developed a knowledge database of all articles published on particular sets or articles published on particular dealers, particular collectors etc. SCD could do this with 30+ years of information. Who would not pay to click a link to read every single article ever written in SCD on the T206 set or anything else? Or click on every article ever written on Nagy etc.
6. There are a significant number of colleges in the area of SCD. I would bet money that many kids would love to intern at Krause Publications for next to nothing.

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

I firmly believe that the staff and management of SCD recognize the various information gaps in the hobby and have left no stone unturned in studying their feasibility. My guess is that it always comes down to the fact that regardless of how active this forum is, and how vocal and knowledgeable its regular contributors, the "vintage" market is simply too thin to support these initiatives.

Old Cardboard is a great magazine, but it is edited and published by its owners, who have nobody to answer to if it never turns a dime of profit. In the case of SCD, there are layers of management each of whom has stringent financial expectations cast on them by the boys in the big teepee. Current ownership's stated goal upon purchase was to put lipstick on the pig and find a buyer at a profit within about five years. Anybody who can't meet the numbers assigned to them by the beancounters is history.

I don't share your view that there is a market for an independent print price guide for vintage cards, packs, etc. You've seen it time after time on these very boards; by the time this information gets to ink on paper, the value data is obsolete. With so much nearly instantaneous data available by searching eBay past sales, and with fledgling on-line vintage price guides starting to emerge, print price guides became even less germane. (Although I am not conivnced that on-line price guides of the type now available will actually be commercially viable in my lifetime. It might be fun for their creators to get them off the ground, but when it comes time to hire the staff needed to maintain the data, promote the product and fend off competition, I don't believe the business model indicates sufficient cash flow for the purpose.)

Any type of searchable data base of SCD content is unlikely to become reality. The entire history of the Internet shows people are too cheap to pay for such content in the necessary numbers to make it possible, leaving aside the technical aspects of scanning, indexing and otherwise massaging something approaching a million pages of printed media.

I'm now out of the SCD loop, but I have a lot of respect for T.S., the current publisher Jeff Pozorski and the other guys on the front line. I don't know how they talked Keith Olbermann into contributing, or what strategic alliances they may be working on at the upcoming "Hawaii" trade conference (now in Florida), but I believe they are working as much for the future of the hobby as they are to save their own jobs by keeping SCD viable.

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Posted By: barrysloate

So maybe SCD is sticking around just long enough to find a buyer. Because as a weekly magazine, it doesn't really offer much. When every other page has an ad for "consignments wanted" you know you are in trouble.

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

I do not subscribe to SCD, but I pick one up every once in a while at the local card shop...Picked one up this past week and there was a very interesting article about collecting Cap Anson items....there is also an article on collecting at the end of WW2 with lots of stuff in there about the hobby pioneers like Burdick and Bray. Sure the magazine is not what it was 10 years ago, but what hobby publication hasn't had this happen since the explosion of the internet and ebay???

Nobody should be knocking SCD for a lack of articles on prewar collecting because every issue I pick up has at least one or two articles. I also noticed this week that they started some type of collector directory which could be helpful for people looking for similar items.

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Posted By: JimB

The current issue is one of the best in a long time with interesting articles on Cap Anson and on the early history of the hobby. I don't know if that is an anomoly or a turn in the right direction, but I enjoyed it very much.
JimB

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Posted By: Pcelli60

SCD is not what is was back in the day, but then again who is? It still has the potential for some useful information..ANY hobbie publication is welcomed by me..I hope it sticks around a while longer...

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Posted By: barrysloate

In its heydey SCD was an exciting weekly marketplace. I would run down to the mailbox the day it was due and if it arrived on time, I poured through every ad to try to find some great deal or rare item before it was sold. Now there is no longer anything left to buy. That is what made SCD great- the deals.

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Posted By: Frank Evanov

Agree with Barry. EBAY has replaced SCD for me. This week SCD did, however, have a nice vintage issue with several nice articles.

Frank

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Posted By: Richard Masson

Bob commented that a printed price guide is obsolete the moment it is printed, but as MikeU implied, what may be useful is a price report that reported actual transactions on a timely basis. VCP is linked to eBay and covers all major auctions. A minor shortcoming is that it is search driven- you can't see a price unless you are looking for it- but a monthly or quarterly summary of actual prices paid would be interesting and useful. Who knows if they even "own" the data for resale in a different (printed) format.

MikeU also pointed out that the gap between post-war and shiney is underserved. I think SCD ceded this area to Beckett and that their new forthcoming publication will attempt to exploit that.

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Posted By: Larry

If SCD ever wants quality dealers to advertise, they would have to lower rates to those that sell actual quality goods in a special section designated and those that are just looking for consignments be billed and placed separately, and frequent advertisors should get a better pricing overall than curently offered(8 week deal etc.)..

Due to the extremely high cost of advertising in the current format which is amateurish, quality dealers and or advanced collectors that just wish to sell their goods cannot make money as it was when Stommen published, that is why we turned to e bay, I much rather sell thru a newspaper....I understand Mr Lemke comments that corporations look at only the bottom line but as the SCD drifts into nothingness rapidly, so does their bottom line eventually anyway, what a shame of a paper it has become. They need to find a bandaid fast, get people back to the table & dump corrupt dealers that sell fake autographes such as CC. They MUST try to get advanced sports dealers such as Yorktown, SC Gaynor, B&E, Legacy, BMW, David Levin etc to place ads and try again to sell these ads of quality so collectors will again subscribe and participate, affordable advertising brings in subscriptions where SCD should make more money, that is what SCD must do.

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Posted By: davidcycleback

I understand the concept of making money and that Harper's Bazaar is not endorsing every eye liner that is advertised in their pages, but in my opinion promoting Coaches Corner to unsuspecting beginners is morally wrong.

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Posted By: Bunk Congalton

"...the vintage market is simply too thin to support these initiatives"(price guides).

I agree with Mr. Lemke...My anecdotal observations over the last 7 active years of vintage collecting is that the vintage market is 'thin' relative to most markets. If I listed a 1975 Topps George Brett on ebay, i'd have a potential market of tens of thousands, If I listed a t215 on ebay, the pool is probably 40-50 bidders. imo

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Posted By: barrysloate

If you listed a T215 on ebay and had 40-50 potential bidders, wouldn't you consider that a very deep pool? How many people do you need to see a card to get a retail price?

When I run my catalog auctions if I have 5 or 6 good bidders qualify on a lot, I know already that it will get a good price. You just don't need more than that.

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Posted By: DJ

Mr. Lemke,

One simply question: What happened to SCD?

When I read and enjoyed the hell out of it in the early 1990's, the magazine was between 350-400 pages.

Today, the issue is barely 50 pages. Based on the threads here on the VBC Forum (and from those within the hobby that I consider friends), the magazine appears to be a dead issue as everyone has turned their back on this once tour-de-force. It's kind of like the whole Wall Street world turning their back on the "Journal".

I have not read one single issue in some twelve years and I was it's biggest fan at the time, but what I see is what has been explored through a number of threads on this Forum as simply rather unstimulating journalism and of course the issue with the bias regarding "certain" advertisers and questioning why there isn't a further investigation to protect the consumer.

You mentioned in a previous thread that the purchase of the magazine from F&W was a bad thing.

A few questions:

1) Why was it a bad thing?
2) What happened between to the magazine and to why the hobby feels so strongly about the way it does to a once loved periodical?
3) What is the role of the publisher?
4) Can a sports memorabilia magazine exist and profit today in such a large scale as it once did in the 1990's?

Thank you Bob in advance.

DJ

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Posted By: Bruce Babcock

My experience with SCD was that the so-called customer service awards meant nothing.

I had a problem with an auction advertised in SCD. They declined to act on my complaint because, while the auction was advertised in SCD, the lot I won was not specifically mentioned in the ad. So, note to auctioneers who advertise in SCD, if you plan to hide the fact that the cards you are selling are skinned, put those lots in the catalog but don't mention those lots in your SCD ad.

I had another problem with a different SCD advertised auctioneer. Let's call him Mr. Poor. After going a few rounds with both of them it dawned on me that that would not take action against their biggest advertiser. Shortly after that they began putting his mug on their cover.

Both of these guys continued to display the SCD Customer Service Award logo, implying zero complaints from customers.

I have nothing but the greatest respect for Bob Lemke. I can't say the same for SCD.

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Posted By: leon

I had a new sales rep call me from SCD a month or so ago. He had found my personal website and asked if I wanted to advertise in his magazine. Heck, naive me thought he was calling about Net54 to DO some advertising. (not sure if I would let them after all I have read) I told him about this board and that I too sell advertising....however we are all booked and there is no more room on the front page. I don't think he had the same problem for his magazine, though I guess the front page is filled by a big clown looking guy, who unfortunately resembles me a little bit......I am a newbie in the hobby (10 yrs or so) so don't remember the good ole days of SCD.........I wasn't interested in advertising my site in their magazine. best regards

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Posted By: davidcycleback

I don't know the financials/profits, but know that the publisher of SCD, Tuff
Stuff, Standard Catalog, etc is the largest publisher of collecting books
in the world, and their titles go far beyond sports. The original publisher,
Krause, had over 400 employees and was sold for $120 million to the current
publisher.

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

What happened to SCD is the same thing that happened to Beckett, every other magazine in the hobby, every card show and every card shop . . . eBay.

When SCD was weekly, it was the fastest medium for advertising to buy and sell cards and memorabilia; it was the 800 lb. (or 400-page) gorilla. When eBay came up with something faster, they became the #1 marketplace.

To a lesser extent, the consolidation of the auction market, from hundreds of individual collectors and small dealers in every issue of SCD, to a handful of super-firms that have huge quarterly or annual auctions, removed the cream of the crop type items from SCD. Black-and-white ink on newsprint that goes obsolete with the next week's issue is no match for a slick-paper color catalog that sells the sizzle as much as it does the steak. In the days before every home office had a color scanner and every corner a Kinko's, the proces of putting together an auction catalog was a specialized field that SCD could package with its "regular" advertising to help the auction firms reach the advanced bidders, but today SCD no longer has an "exclusive" on that technology.

It was not my intention to state that the sale of F+W to its new owners was a bad thing for SCD, but rather that the sale of (then) Krause TO F+W was a bad thing. The reason is that the magazine (and the rest of the company) passed from the hands of owners who cared about the hobbies they served and felt their long-term future lay in the heath and growth of those hobbies to owners who only saw the company as a component of a larger publishing entity that could be polished up, repackaged and sold for a profit.

The role of a publisher, that is, the man who sits in the publisher's chair -- at least in the current F+W -- is to develop, monitor, adjust as necessary and achieve a business plan that provides the dollar volume and/or percentage of profit dictated by the corporate headquarters.

Lastly, no, I do not feel an ink-on-paper sports memorabilia magazine can profit to the extent that SCD, Beckett, et al, did in the pre Ebay days. The hobby world has moved beyond that business model.

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Posted By: barrysloate

Bob- one related story that I recall about SCD is you could auction great stuff and not even picture the lot you were selling.

I once got a small consignment of cards and told the owner I would be happy to auction them by themselves. Maybe there were a dozen cards and I took out an eighth of a page ad. You might think I was just selling some odds and ends but one of the cards was an E90-1 Joe Jackson in VG condition! Imagine doing that today. The print was tiny and it was just buried in the middle of a page somewhere. And the card still sold for $1700, which was unheard of in those days. No hype, no color picture, no 400 word description filled with superlatives. Just a great baseball card. And everybody who needed to find it found it! I probably ran more than a 100 auctions in SCD of all different sizes but that one little one always stays with me. Those days are gone forever!

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Posted By: MikeU

"I firmly believe that the staff and management of SCD recognize the various information gaps in the hobby and have left no stone unturned in studying their feasibility." - Bob Lemke

"I had a new sales rep call me from SCD a month or so ago. He had found my personal website and asked if I wanted to advertise in his magazine. Heck, naive me thought he was calling about Net54 to DO some advertising." - Leon Luckey

The fact that SCD has never contacted Leon in the last 6 years to advertise or even discuss Net54 is an absolute indictment that many stones have been left unturned by the staff. I wonder who else has never been contacted? VCP? Dean's Cards? Just Collect? Card Trader?

"the "vintage" market is simply too thin to support these initiatives" - Bob Lemke

I agree that the pre-War market is entirely too small of a niche for SCD to cover. However, I was not stating that SCD should have taken the Old Cardboard route. Pre-War cards could simply be a feature e.g. weekly, bi-weekly, monthly etc. This small carrot alone would have kept many of the pre-War vintage guys subscribing. SCD could probably even entice people to write articles for free.

"I don't share your view that there is a market for an independent print price guide for vintage cards, packs, etc." - Bob Lemke

I disagree. People by the masses in all categories of collecting are sick of inaccurate price guides, be it Beckett or Tuff Stuff or SMR. Printing VCP's/Card Traders auction/eBay realized prices on a quarterly or monthly basis and there could be a complete paradim shift in Beckett, Tuff Stuff and SMR's need to exist.

"Any type of searchable data base of SCD content is unlikely to become reality." - Bob Lemke

The content and information that SCD has published throughout its history is its only real value. If people are willing to pay $10/month for VCP or $5/Month for Beckett Pricing/Checklists, there is certainly value is selling 30 years of industry leading information. Get free interns to scan the articles.

"Lastly, no, I do not feel an ink-on-paper sports memorabilia magazine can profit to the extent that SCD, Beckett, et al, did in the pre Ebay days. The hobby world has moved beyond that business model."

From 1984 to 1991, I could not wait until I received Baseball Cards Magazine and SCD in the mail. It would literally be devored front to back upon delivery. I do not have quite the same feeling today, but I still look very forward to receiving Old Cardboard and SGC Collector. Both of those are immediately read from front to back. I also enjoy and view every auction catalog I receive. Print media is far from dead. It may never be as profitible as before, but there is certainly profit to be made, just have to adapt.

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Posted By: DJ

Bob,

I appreciate your response.

I find it hard to believe that in a world full of periodicals (there must 200 different magazines at my super market alone), that one day, there will not be one magazine dedicated to sports memorabilia...but what, like six magazines dedicated to exotic pets and log cabins? How are Stamp and Coin magazines doing it?

Everyone on the VBC Forum has expressed their disappointment at the magazine (which I'm sure we all loved at one point) and their reasons for turning their backs on it. These are all valid points that have in most cases been expressed for many years directly to the staff that simply ignored any of these concerns. I'm sure everyone here misses sitting on a chair on a Saturday and spending all day getting cruel newsprint off their fingers. But you can multiply frustration and you have a cluster of collectors who are now not even willing to pluck down a half of a dollar a week for the "Voice Of The Hobby"?

One of the major concerns mentioned was of "one company", but as publisher of the periodical during the 1990's, weren't you responsible for allowing them to advertise within the pages of the magazine?

Where was Dan A.'s nose at the time?

DJ

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

Refresh my memory: what "one company" do you refer to?

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Posted By: FGN

Bob,

I think I can safely answer for DJ and tell you that it is Coach's Corner to whom he is refering.

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Posted By: MikeU

I have a complete run of the first 100 issues of BBCM e.g. until they changed to Sports Cards. I am going to scan the card articles from each issue and categorize them into their appropriate categories. The first issue had two card articles. One regarding 1981 Fleer error cards and one about 19th Century Baseball Cards. See attached link for the 19th century article. Who would subscribe to SCD if there were a follow up article?

http://boards.collectors-society.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=1737908&an=0&page=0#Post1737908

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Posted By: Richard Simon

My question is how do they have the nerve to charge the same ad rates for the large ads when their circulation is down so much?
--

I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
Unknown author
--
We made a promise. We swore we'd always remember.
No retreat baby, no surrender.
The Boss

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Posted By: MikeU

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

I honestly don't remember whether or to what extent CC was advertising when I was publisher of SCD. I can say authoritatively that if they were advertising, they were being held to the letter of the law in regards to customer service issues (again, if there were any) the same as every other advertiser. Nobody got a passon the complaint procedure in those days, not the biggest advertiser, not the biggest names, not my best friends.