Over the past 15 years baseball card collecting has undergone a drastic transformation. Due to conversations with SCZA I've decided to post about some of my cards but first I'll need to bring you up to date.
It is not like collecting when you were younger. All the rookie cards from the 80s are worthless. Steroids and overproduction ruined them all. Don't ask me about Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire Olympic or Don Mattingly. It's worthless. Trust me.
In 1992 Topps revived an old brand called Bowman. Basically they loaded it up with rookies, guys who were years away from making the bigs. But when Mike Piazza, Manny Ramirez, Chipper Jones, Mariano Rivera and Carlos Delgado became stars. The cards became valuable...and no other sets had those players rookie cards.
Bowman kept this tradition of putting in tons of rookies. Then in 1997 they introduced Bowman Chrome. A rarer more expensive version of Bowman.
About that time, the companies saturated the hobby with tons of products, and everything was an insert. Around 1999, we gave up on cards.
But Bowman still had the rookies, so every year I bought a few boxes of Bowman just to have.
Then a few years ago when I got out of college I got back into collecting. I bought some 2001 Bowman boxes to find this guy named Pooh Holes.
At the same time, for 2001, Bowman Chrome began shorting printing the best rookie cards, and having the players autograph them. And that was the only rookie card. It wasn't an insert, it was part of the regular set.
The 2001 Bowman Chrome Auto Albert Pujols is $3500. I do not have it. It is the most widely counterfeited card in the hobby today. Do not buy it if you see it at a show or in a store for $500.
Then another trend began. Grading cards for condition. You take your cards, send them to Beckett and they grade them on a scale of 1 to 10 on four areas of condition (corners, edges, centering, surface). Then they seal the card in a tamper proof case. Yes this system has problems but it's the only way to sell expensive cards. No one will spend more than a few hundred bucks on an ungraded card.
A few years ago I had my 1984 Fleer Update Roger Clemens graded for condition. It came back as a 9.5/Gem Mint (Beckett never gives out 10/Pristine). I sold it on eBay for $1600.
So now every year I buy Bowman, trying to make the set and find some good rookies. I also buy some Bowman Chrome hoping to hit the rookie autograph jackpot. And I buy Bowman Draft picks which has Chrome and regular cards. They do that so they can beat the other companies to the draft picks. I was late to the game on draft picks and unfortunately didn't buy any for 2002, 2003 or 2004 all of which have some great cards.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
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You can just tell when "speculators" took over and ruined everything. 1992 is also the year the comic book industry turned sour, as non-collectors bought up the "Death of Superman" issue by the boatload. By the time the speculator market collapsed around 1999, that comic, once worth hundreds of dollars, was landing in quarter bins.
I guess I should tell my father he can take those 1986 Topps cards out of the safe. That set was loaded with big rookies (Bo Jackson, Palmeiro, Bonilla, Bonds for example).
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