Anyone Else Feeling Marooned on Vintage Collector Island??

[Exhibitman]

Sometimes the best response is music, in this case, the great James Brown from Drive That Funky Soul:

You don't miss nothin' you never had
But you miss so much you wish you could get

It is a weird zeitgeist when card prices boom. On the one hand, we (purportedly) celebrate unfettered capitalism and individual wealth building, and we love to see the value of our stuff go up, but there is also a ton of vitriol unleashed on rich collectors who use their money to buy the most expensive toys, like the T206 Wagners that we mere working stiffs cannot afford. I get that feeling; I really do. I wanted to extend a double-barreled middle finger to the hobby in the early 2000s when it became apparent that I could never hope to finish certain prewar baseball sets I was into, especially the T206 HOFer portrait run. Before that, I could theoretically add a Plank or even a Wagner to my collection, but the meteoric price increases on those and so many other vintage cards pre-2008 just buried me and the pandemic price run dances on my grave.

Seems to me you have two choices when you feel like that: get out or find something else to pivot to in the hobby and enjoy what you can. I started collecting oddball cards and ephemera and Exhibit cards. As prices on those rose in turn (who’d ever have thought a Jackie Robinson anti-prejudice blotter would be a four-figure item?), I pivoted to other stuff, like inserts, premiums, Wheaties and matchbook covers, cards from other sports and even some non-sports cards and ephemera.

Ryan is one of the nicest guys you'll meet in this hobby and truly passionate about collecting. He is fortunate to be able to amass great stuff, and is great about it. No reason to hate on him, James.

Look, I get it, I get envy and jealousy. When someone else scores a great card, you wouldn’t be human if there wasn’t some envy or jealousy rearing its ugly head. I get cranky. For a minute. Then I congratulate my friend on his good fortune and move on. We’re (nearly) all human, after all, so I am good with a little green envy goblin skittering across the mind’s eye for a moment. More than that is unhealthy and unproductive. I don’t hate on people who have the resources to amass a great collection, unless they are dicks about it, in which case it is hate-on, but because they are dicks, not because they have the resources to collect large.