Baseball Card Industry Finally Being Given Respect In Business Press

By Wesley Hein

For the past few years the general purpose media has written almost exclusively about the slow death of baseball card collecting. For example:

Baseball card collecting has gone through an evolution during the past 20 years. The sports card industry generated estimated sales of $1 billion in the early 1990s before interest began to wane and fall drastically to where in 2008 sales were about one-fourth of what they were at the high point. 

Card sales fell dramatically in the 1990s after manufacturers thought the future of the business was focusing on the demand of adult buyers who transformed collecting from hobby to investment. 

 And like many investments, what goes up often comes down, and the business fell like a house of cards in a tornado. 

  However a recent article in the Las Vegas Journal has dug a little deeper by also showing the gains being made by the industry as it gets back to its roots.

"Card companies forgot about the essence of why cards started in the first place, and that was to give kids a piece of their baseball team and baseball hero," said Clay Luraschi, an executive for Topps Company Inc., the leader in the industry. ''We had to go back to the kids' world -- back to our beginnings.''

Efforts by Topps and other card companies seem to be working because collecting baseball cards lives on again, generating the same wide-eyed thrills for kids as it once did for their fathers and, in some cases, their grandfathers. 

 

It's nice to see public recognition that the hobby is not irrelevant nor destined for obscurity. While there are still significant challenges ahead, not the least of which is the current (and gloomy) economic environment, sports cards have been around for more than one hundred years and have survived two world wars, the great depression, paper shortages, among others. To keep up on the hobby, make sure you are reading the articles being posted by Bob Brill here at SportsBuy as well as the other bloggers on our SportsBuy Collectors Network.

Tags: baseball_cards