Postwar Vintage vs Modern ?

[jchcollins]

Originally Posted by todeen

The dial will change soon, seeing as players with 1989 rookies are being elected to the hall of fame. Adrian Beltre's retirement was the death knell for players playing in the 90s. So the dial should move to pre-1990. Albert Pujols debuted in 2001.

Your viewpoint is totally valid.

My argument would be that the definition has more to do with what was going on in the card hobby at the time than just what was happening only on the ball field. By the calendar, all dates will be "vintage" at some point by a dictionary definition. But the card hobby changed dramatically in the 1980's vs. how it had worked for 30+ years before, one because of the loss of Topps' monopoly, and two due to the fact that the hobby exploded mainstream; card shops appeared on virtually every corner, and even people who didn't collect cards now knew they were at least supposed to be "worth something." I think the landscape of the hobby has to count for something. Junk wax then later in the 80's was another difference. Cards in the 1960's and earlier were perceived as scarce because nobody knew they were supposed to be worth anything, and threw them out. They were temporary ephemera. By the mid-80's, card manufacturers were overproducing everything one because it was selling, but two - it could be argued to counter what had happened earlier. Either way, history has shown us a dividing line between "junk" that hit it's apex in the early 90's and cards that came before it. The "junk" is not scarce by a longshot - even 30 years later.

When I was growing up in the hobby (1986 - about '94), many dealers considered "vintage" pre-1974, because that was when Topps went from packs in series to one single series. Later in the 90's, the definition kind of pesudo shifted to 1980, since that was the last year of Topps monopoly dominance.

Again, there is no one 100% correct definition. My point is that in 1976, many kids were still buying packs and flipping cards and carrying them around rubber-banded in their pockets. By 1986, many packs were being opened with the cards going straight into plastic, because by then everyone knew they were supposed to be worth something. That's a huge difference in hobby self-awareness. Today the more-or-less accepted definition of "vintage" on the internet and in trading groups seems to be 1980 and earlier. I would agree with that, and then keeping the "junk era" it's own separate thing, because the philosophy and facts about the cards of that era are just so unique. "Modern" to me refers to a time starting around the early 2000's or a bit before maybe, when card manufactures had realized their folly of the junk era, and had moved on to producing things like shiny numbered autos and parallels, making use of deliberate scarcity, and (also importantly) when they decided it was no big deal to totally price kids out of the hobby.