What I Don't Understand about Baseball Card Economics

[Dpeck100]

One of the things you have to keep in perspective is that many cards just simply mirror the income distribution and their price is driven by basic supply and demand forces.

The most popular baseball card is the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle. A copy that has been run over by a car might still go for 10k and a PSA 10 would bring 10 million.

What this tells you is there is far too much demand for the number of copies that exist and then the cards are allocated across the income distribution and land in the hands of those who want them most. What motives they have to purchase are irrelevant and all that matters is if they can complete the transaction. Looking forward the hands they land in can certainly play a role in the long term prices but as long as collectors still covet the card it will hold fairly strong.

You are going to need to see a significant shift in the demand for the card for prices to come tumbling down significantly. Buyers just accept the fact that you buy one graded and that isn't going to change.

All of the reasons to want to own this historic baseball card still exist. It is still one of the ultimate symbols of Americana. He is still arguably the most popular baseball player ever. The 1952 Topps is still one of if not the most popular baseball card sets ever produced. All of these demand drivers create the environment where this is considered a prized collectible and so the animal spirits aren't going to go away and the rewards of ownership and the bragging rights associated still exist.

There are a lot of people who just simply hate grading and so they are always going to have an issue with graded cards but the overwhelming majority have accepted it as a principle of the card market.

I can remember it like it was yesterday going into a short lived card shop in the Fashion Square mall in Orlando during the home run chase and seeing the eye popping print of the 1985 Topps Mark McGwire going for $7,500 in a PSA 10 in the Beckett. As much as I wanted to think my copy was just as good it wasn't. It was obvious it wasn't. It looked nothing like a 10. It is hard to diminish the fact that it is quite frankly a better card and it is visible and the red flip reminds you of the fact that it is nicer than yours and when you go to look up the selling prices it sells for more than yours by a wide margin too every time.

All of this isn't going away. The movement to try and turn cards into assets and make them legitimate financial investments isn't going to stop. Brent in many ways just has taken the bull by the horns but there are clearly others under the surface trying to do the exact same thing.

As long as there is money that needs to find a home and humans are living collectibles of some form will be sought after and trading cards have a long history of collection and it is only natural with the supply constraints many have that prices have risen significantly.

There is never going to be an environment where a card like a Mantle isn't differentiated in price by grade and the spreads are going to stay very wide. Just the other day we saw the report of the Honus Wagner PSA 2 that was reported to have sold privately for 1.2 million. People take these cards seriously and when you have a market where people will pay these kinds of prices for relics of history this saga we are going through isn't going to change it.