Sports Collectors Digest

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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You've seen it time after time on these very boards; by the time this information gets to ink on paper, the value data is obsolete.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.