History doesn't matter unless it is a history OF something. In other words, most people need to love baseball to then love the history of baseball. So, a long view approach would be to help youngsters develop a love for the baseball of today.
The other part, and may be the bigger part, is to help them love a hobby, particularly a collecting hobby with real value involved. I think this is a big part of the modern difficulty in cultivating new hobbyists. The only modern cards with value are the inserts, and their value seems to me to be static, or degenerative. If you pull a HOF (best case scenario) game used materials insert out of a pack, chances are the BV will be the same for it ten years from now.
When I was a kid in the 80s you'd pay 50 cents for a pack and you could hope for a Mattingly or somebody's rookie. And you'd follow their Beckett price month to month and trade with friends. A big part of the draw of the hobby was how it combined the game and players we loved with the opportunity to trade and speculate and make money (in our dreams anyway). I don't know if that exists today, and if there is a critical mass to maintain it for the 4 or five years necessary to plant the seed for young collectors to turn to vintage when they get older and have an income.
But, if the love of the game is there, and there is a love of some sort of increasing value based collecting hobby, it seems like a turn toward vintage card collecting would be a natural move some time in the future. But maybe I am basing too much on my own experience.
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11-30-2011, 02:05 PM
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