Who is the biggest culprit?

[Peter_Spaeth]

I blame shill bidding.

[Touch'EmAll]

All the new technology to interest kids today is a big reason kids don't collect cards anymore. With the ipods, itouch, ixxx, computer games, kids don't gravitate toward "boring" cards anymore.

The overwhelming variety of cards is just too much these days - tough to stay focused on one set of afforadable cards. The market is flooded with current collectible cards

However, without technology, ie ebay, the hobby may be just about dead. Imagine this hobby without ebay - dreadful scary. And like it or not, third party grading has helped prop up the hobby.

[36GoudeyMan]

FWIW, I think a great deal of blame is placed at the feet of the card companies and the major league sports and unions that licensed too many products. They killed the golden goose by overfeeding it.

When sports card collecting boomed (about when Topps stopped being the only legit choice, in the early 1980s), cards became innovative and interesting and visually appealing. Buyers (still mostly kids) appreciated the competitive look of the new manufacturers' products. When one or two experimented with short-subsets, insert cards, redemption cards, etc., collecting became a lottery (I don't care what that idiot judge in the midwest (?) said -- kids ripped open packs looking for the valuable insert cards, not to find the #377 card they need to finish their sets; it was gambling, pure and simple).

Once buying and searching packs, boxes, cases, became a money-making proposition, kids got squeezed out physically and monetarily. And then there were just too many cards to collect. I heard a stat a while back that I think is illustrative: in 1955 There was one mainstream Mickey Mantle card. In 1997 there were 135 Mantle cards issued by various manufacturers, all in subsets, chase cards, etc. The packs became valuable, and then were priced accordingly, even if value was generated by way of a manufactured scarcity (such as the new Sport Kings cards).

The market got overheated, flooded, and expensive, and kids could no longer keep up with the dealers who would buy up and break cases to find chase cards, then sell them for more than the cases were sold for. Point in illustration: I remember very clearly a dealer friend breaking cases of some basketball card to find the "insert" Shaq & Jabbar card (and he knew how to count the boxes down from the top to find the right box). The rest of the case was, essentially, trash, so he pretty much handed it out like candy. The Shaq card sold for more than he spent on the case. I know there are many more examples of this.

So I say #5, FWIW.

[barrysloate]

Of course, as Jeff and Peter said, fraud in this hobby is through the roof. That's going to cause a lot of collectors to take up a new hobby.

[jefferyepayne]

And not just kids ripping packs open looking for inserts. I stopped going to our local card shop as I got tired of listening to blowhard adults talking about some 1/1 auto card they pulled out of a $100 pack and then flipped on ebay to make some cash.

Also pretty depressing to watch people come into the shop with what looked like their paycheck and buy tons of pack. They'd rip them open, find nothing of great value, and then sit there with their head in their hands wondering how they were going to explain what happened to their wife. If you don't think that's a gambling habit, you haven't watched people at 7-eleven play scratch-off lottery games.

jeff

[sycks22]

I remember back in 1990 when the Thomas Leaf (my favorite player) was at a local card shop and they were asking full book $80 for it. My bro and I both wanted a new bike for our b-days and I assured my dad I would get a Giant impactor ( $100 bike + Thomas) while my bro would get the higher valued bike (diamondback tailwhip, $250). Those were the days when the only chance you had at finding a Brett rookie was one with 12 creases and a corner missing for $20 and you still debated getting it. Once the packs hit $4+ everyone started getting out it appears. Every now and then I'll buy a couple packs at target, but after getting 3-4 cards for $5 it's depressing. I kinda of blame the downfall of the hobby on card companies that need that 1 of 1 item to compete with the other 25 companies. I remember back in 1990 when Donruss Elite came out and they were numbered out of 10,000 and you were the man if you owned one. Now every other card is numbered out of 100 and nobody cares.

[dougscats]

Some very interesting answers and good points,
but I'm sort of stunned that everyone seems to accept the premiss:

Baseball card collecting is on the decline?

Funny, my guess would be that there is more money, far more money, being spent on baseball cards every year now than ever before, and that there are probably more collectors as well.
Not that there's not plenty wrong with the hobby.
Nor that kids and modern baseball card collecting are much different than they used to be.
Nor that, ironically, a lot of the reasons given for a decline are also reasons for an increase in the business end of the hobby, as several post-ers pointed out [Ebay being the best example of technology].

I also see prices stabilizing and much greater expertise on behalf of the average collector [because of forums like Net54, for example].
These are positive developments.
And the competition for cards is greater than ever [why it's so tough to get a steal on ebay anymore, for instance].

Hope I'm not spoiling this thread [as I'm enjoying it], but I'm just not sure if I agree that the hobby is on the decline.
I do think kids' foci have changed, though, and this could lead to big trouble for the long-term future of the hobby [especially once there are fewer dads who enjoyed collecting to do it with them].
Personally, I have little interest in modern cards [partially because they seem so overproduced], but even that overproduction points out that there's an awful lot of money still being spent on them at this point.

Enough,

Doug