Sportscards 101
The basics
As you may know, sportscards have been around for a long time and they are most widely known depicting baseball players, although all sports have cards. The first known cards that I know of were made in 1869 and you can google about a lady who actually found one in 2008. The earliest cards that are fairly easy to find are known as tobacco cards and were produced around the early 20th century, with the most famous being the Honus Wager T-206. These cards were included in cigarette packs to help push sales for the American Tobacco Company.
Cards became even more popular to drive gum sales by the 1930s. The most famous set of that period was made by Goudey in 1933. The big cards feature Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig among numerous other baseball Hall of Fame members. The same year includes the Sport Kings, which includes many other sports.
The cards most people think of began their popularity with Topps in the 1950s. To help drive candy sales, Topps included these cards with their gum. Eventually cards were popular enough to be the selling point on their own and gum was the bonus, until the 1980s came around. This was the time when cards started to become really valuable and card packs stopped including gum, as people learned that they often ruined the cards. By the 1980s Topps lost their exclusive licenses and new companies Fleer and Donruss began making sets, due to the increasing popularity and values of sportscards. Production levels and popularity of sportscards went crazy during the 1980s. It became a "bubble" that burst in the early 1990s and you saw many publications touting sportscards as investments like stocks.
By the late 1980s, Upper Deck started making cards and the landmark 1989 Upper Deck set changed things. These were considered by many to be "premium" cards with better cardboard stock and photography. In the early 1990s inserts or "chase cards" became very popular and this was the beginnings of what today brings where people buy packs for a few dollars in hopes of landing a valuable chase card. During this time chase cards evolved to include autographed singles that were included in packs. By the late 1990s these cards evolved and got more and more into adding value to them. These cards started to include "game used" pieces like cuts of a jersey a piece of a hockey stick embedded in them. Ultimately, now you can get cards in packs that are worth several thousand dollars or more.
After the peak of popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, the proliferation of sets and cards became too much for many and a large portion of people got out of collecting and never returned. In recent years things have become easier again as some companies have lost their licenses or gone out of business, which is actually a positive for many collectors.
Rookie cards
During the 1980s collectors moved to where the money was and that became rookie cards. A rookie card is simply the first card issued of a particular player. Most people consider the first big-time rookie card to be issued in 1984 by Donruss and it featured Yankees slugger, Don Mattingly. The value of this card went up so much, so quickly that created the buzz around rookie cards that was never there before. It spread into any set in the history of cards and now you can always hunt for someone's "rookie card". The reason is simple in that many collectors love to get the first one of anything, so even today a rookie card tends to go up in value more quickly than most cards. For some it becomes getting a copy of one before it becomes expensive, and for others it is about getting it before it gets valuable in order to make money.
Complete Sets
Complete sets are still a big hit with collectors, which means you have collected every card within a given set. This has always been around to some extent, but became easier with the base sets from the 1950s and onwards. It has been extended to include inserts or chase cards, where one collects an entire run of chase cards from a particular set and/or year.
Complete sets have become very expensive and difficult to finish over the years and this has hurt sportscard collecting because it feels daunting to some at times. The thing to focus on is you can collect anything you want to collect and if you put some limits on things, you can certainly complete many sets without a lot of money and time.
Graded cards
These are a polarizing area of sportscards today and they have been since it began. Due to the skyrocketing value of cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many unscrupulous people got into the hobby exclusively to make as much money as they could. Counterfeits and altered cards started showing up everywhere. Counterfeits became huge because it was a form of printing money for many of these goons. You could create 100s of fake cards that were valuable and begin selling them at trade shows and walk out with several hundred dollars or more.
Beyond that because a large portion of a cards value lies in its condition, some took genuine cards and "doctored" them to increase their value. Over the years, the older cards were not thought of by anyone as extremely valuable they were mroe like toys and kids would collect them and they would get worn over time. People would always pay a premium to get cards that survived time in better conditions. So people began to fix the worn cards that could be purchased for less and repair them and make money. Markers to fill in colors, scissors and more advanced devices to make the edges smoother, rebuilding corners. In addition, since condition was so important in value, people would embellish the condition and/or debate it with buyers.
Due to these reasons, in came sportscard grading to level the playing field. Graded cards evaluate a card's authenticity and condition objectively. This was a great idea that is very popular today, but not without cost. Literally.
The other side of this debate lies mainly in cost as the companies that grade cards, charge money for the service and many collectors pay wild premiums after a card is graded in a condition that they are looking for. A "mint" example of a guy who barely played can bring thousands at auction these days. This has made getting nicer cards considerably more expensive and many collectors and sportscard dealers are not fans of that. As with anything, grading companies make mistakes and that defeats the purpose of the grade in the first place.
Another point for many is that graded cards ruins the "fun" of sportscard collecting, which many still feel should be inexpensive and should stay in the roots of collecting where one can handle the card. You see once the card has been graded, these companies seal the card in a "holder" to preserve the grade the card received and to preserve the card in that condition from further wear.
Some take a mixed approach and buy inexpensive cards the old-fashioned way and save grading for the more expensive cards they want to purchase to prevent "doctoring" and the like, so they are not cheated.
That's all for now
I will expand on the basics of sportscards collecting and these areas as time goes on, but I wanted to post a basic overview of sportscards overall with this. Feel free to post comments for more information in the future.
posted by NESPORTSFAN @ 8:31 AM
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