As a kid, I used to collect bottles and cans (which in Michigan are worth 10 cents each) and would mow lawns, rake leaves or shovel snow to support my dirty little habit. It wasn’t smoking, it wasn’t drinking or drugs, it was…baseball cards. Tens of millions of red-blooded American boys found their love of the nation’s pastime enhanced by those cardboard rectangles featuring athletes we all pretended to be as we played with our friends. The joy of completing a team or a whole set was matched only by a long wheelie or finding firecrackers somewhere.
That joy is gone now. Not from me, but from the hobby. I still have a collection, mostly for the sake of nostalgia. But kids, in general, can’t. It’s gone from a hobby to a vice.
What do I mean by that? When I was a kid you could buy a pack for 50 cents up to a dollar. At card shows you could buy a box for like $20. Now, the cheapest packs are $5-$10, with prices upwards of $1,000.
If your jaw hit the flood, you’re not alone. If you’re wondering who the hell would spend that kind of money on baseball cards, the answer is simple: gambling addicts.
While you weren’t paying attention, the sports card industry morphed from a hobby to a habit. It’s now a casino or scratch-off lottery tickets, with pay-offs in the six and seven figures, but with pay-off rates lower than a mob casino above a bakery.
Modern sports cards sell for a lot of money, but only certain ones. Gone are the days of making sets – sets have zero value and are largely thrown away – it’s about inserts, “rare” cards, autographs and jersey patches. Now people open a full box of packs looking for serial numbered cards and autographs, of which there may be less than five in a box of a couple of hundred cards. If they are the “right” player and rare enough, you can “win” and have a card worth multiple hundreds of dollars up to, well, the sky is the limit.
But the odds of pulling one of these cards is less than 5 percent, if not much lower. Yet, people are going broke in pursuit of “chase cards.” Topps, the largest manufacturer of sports cards, only encourages this because it’s money in their pocket. Catering to kids won't sell thousand-dollar boxes, but sucker adults will. Children be damned.
As if the hobby (to the extent the “ultra-modern market” can be called a hobby) weren’t about gambling enough, now there is a secondary market that you can spend yourself broke on from the comfort of your own home.
A new “product” is available that lets people buy “slab packs,” which are professionally graded cards that have already been pulled by others and stuck in protective plastic slabs to increase the value. These single card packs go for anywhere between $25 to $1,000 and you can buy and “open” them on your phone. If you managed to hit a “big” card, the selling company will offer you upwards of 90 percent of its value on the spot. That means you can get a big payoff immediately. It’s like hitting three bars across the slot machine.
Only the slot machine is required to pay out at a high rate, whereas these packs are, well, who knows? They sort of list odds and “hits” you can pull, but it’s digital and who knows how that works out.
These gambling houses are now flooding the zone on Facebook with ads, including one featuring Derek Jeter (who owns one of the companies), all of which dangle the promise of a big jackpot, er, payoff when you hit the huge cards.
If you buy a $100 pack and get a $90 card, you aren’t exactly ripped off, but it’s not something you would have purchased on your own so you sell it back to the company for $80 and buy another. The company makes out, as it can resell the card you didn’t want and already made money off of, multiple times. The customers get screwed.
Personally, I don’t really have that much sympathy for people who get screwed by this – if you’re dumb enough to think this is some kind of “investment,” I can’t help you and some people will make money. But the kids who are now being edged out of the hobby, kids with parents who don’t have large amounts of disposable income who can support a gambling habit are screwed. Maybe not as screwed as the people who go broke hoping the next pack is the “win” they’re desperate for, but screwed out of the fun of collecting and the love of the game that comes with it.
You have to be 18 buy these “packs,” so there is at least passive acknowledgement that it’s gambling, and the whole thing seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Honestly, I don’t care. If these companies are going to do anything possible to squeeze every dollar possible out of dupes falling for the promise of the highly unlikely, well, I hope whatever happens to them is something they deserve. It’s just sad what the hobby is being turned into.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, DC, and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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