I'm glad I'm a vintage collector-Interesting article about hobby

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Posted By: steve k

<<< I think baseball cards themselves as the "product" will eventually fade out altogether.>>>

Interesting topic. My first year of collecting and opening packs as a young boy was in 1962. I bought the card packs strictly for the cards - the Topps gum in those packs sucked - LOL. There were other gums such as those little Bazooka gums with the tiny comic strip Bazooka Joe that was so much better.

As far as the cards themselves as the “product” fading out - interesting point. I remember thinking about 10 or 15 years ago that actually cards might fade out altogether. Back in 1962 there was of course no internet, TV’s were mostly black & white, and the sports magazines didn’t always have information about the players you wanted information on. There were local newspapers of course but that rarely gave you the history of the players. Having that beautiful little color card in your hand, with the nice picture of the players and those stats - I loved those stats on the back and spent countless hours looking at them. I used to absolutely hate the years when Topps would only print the lifetime stats and last years stats and not the total year to year stats - LOL. But the point is that all this information is now readily available on the internet and even elsewhere. Why buy a little baseball card when you can quickly click on a website and get all kinds of pictures, information, stats, etc., on every player - way, WAY much more “stuff” than any baseball card could possibly provide unless there was a little microchip in there (might eventually happen). However, we still love our cards and kids seem to still love their cards. The kids possibly love their cards because their parents and grandparents loved their cards.

Will the next generation of kids say 20 years from now be collecting baseball cards? I have no idea and nobody can really accurately predict the future. All I know is despite the consolidation of the baseball card printing industry, I strongly believe the hobby of collecting baseball cards is very alive and healthy, and appears that it will stay that way in the foreseeable future.

Steve