Are Baseball Cards Destined to Slowly Diminish in Value?

[Rich Klein]

Both Larry and Barry are correct

The very hiigh end material is not always indiciative *sic* of the market however, when the high end stuff goes up in price and gets noticed then in many cases the rest of the material goes up as well

2nd --- yes most of the trading is obviously done on a lower end, since we're talking about rarities, they just don't show up that often

And one other issue to go with why we don't have many 18-29 year old here (in addition, usually at that age we don't have the perspective that we gather a biit later)

The other issue is that beginning with the true movement of the hobby to a focus on adults after the BB Strike of 94-85, there ended up being an insane growth on number of products.

That culminated in 2004 when we had approximately 90 products issues or one ever 4 days. About 20 years earlier -- we really had maybe 5-6 major products for a year which also allowed collectors to go backwards in time easier.

That's another story for another day -- but the current monopoly in baseball cards by Topps is not neccessarily a bad thing because it controls the number of products issued. If, let's say Panini was granted a licence again to print BB cards --- then there would also have to be a limit on combined products from the 2 companies.

This is a different story, but we'll go more into this later as well

Rich