March 23, 2023 • 54 mins
One of the all-stars of the hobby world is collecting baseball cards. Over time it’s gone from a kids’ hobby to a major investment vehicle, complete with its own bubble that recently burst. But at the heart of it is something both engrossing and endearing.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Steve Rich and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and it's just us today because we left
Jerry back in Vegas and one of us has to
go get her and we haven't cost a coin yet
(00:23):
to see who's who that's going to be. I'm not
going back to Vegas. I'm not either. The smoky casinos
destroyed my already weary, allergy ridden throat. Yeah, it wasn't
pleasant for my throat either. But we should probably tell
everybody why we were inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke in Las
Vegas recently and why Jerry is still there. Go ahead, well,
(00:44):
it's because we were honored this year by the Podcast
Academies ambi's basically the Oscars of podcasting with the Governor's Award,
which basically says, hey, you've been at this for a
while and we think you're doing a pretty good job,
and why don't you think about hanging it up? And
here's an award on the way out the door, right
(01:05):
And we were like, but we're a big career and
they're like, nope, too late, you got the award. You've
accepted it. You have to stop now. Yeah, it was
really cool. It's kind of a lifetime achievement. And we've
gotten a Webby or two here and there and some
other things that you know, it's always nice to get
those things, but this felt like a genuine honor and
like the one that we should go pick up in person.
(01:26):
And we had a great time and a epic dinner
celebration dinner afterward with Jerry and her friend and and
my friend and Nathan who does our marketing, and it
was just a really great celebration. It really was. It
was a wonderful experience. So thanks a lot Podcast Academy
because that was really cool. So it's really neat. Yeah,
(01:48):
and got heffed? Did you pick They didn't give us
one on stage because they're mailing them. But did you
pick that thing up in the green room? No? Did you? Yeah? Dude,
it's it's heffed. It's got heffed. I mean it looks
like it. It's like a genuine bona fide statuette. Yeah.
All my other statues you can blow on them and
they tip over. You're like, oh it's hollow. Yeah, this
(02:09):
one's got halfed. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you again to
the Podcast Academy, and honestly, thank you to everybody who's
ever recognized us with an award. That's really meaningful every time.
So thanks, Yeah, buddy, Well, and we said this you
know on stage. In fact, you buttoned it up nicely.
But you know, the listeners or the reason we have
this career in this job that we've been doing for
so long. And I know it sounds trite, but like
(02:31):
we wouldn't have gotten this award or even be doing
this job if we didn't have the amazing support over
the years from you guys. Absolutely means a lot. So
we should probably get going on baseball cards, right, Yeah,
another quick CoA for baseball cards. We have learned over
the years the hard way that when you do a
topic that is it's just like yeah, it's not like oh,
(02:55):
ballpoint pins or this or that. When some people are
very passionate about this thing, that we can get ourselves
into trouble because we get little things wrong here and
there that they think are major things. So we respect
the baseball card community and just want to not apologize
in advance, but just say that you know, we don't
(03:16):
know nearly as much about this as you do, so
so be kind. I think it's well put. I'm just
going to come out and admit right now, I cannot
find the difference between a bonus card, an insert and
a subset card. Okay, they may be all the same thing,
but I am terrified that there's a slight difference and
that we're going to get chewed up for it. Well,
(03:38):
I didn't even know that we were going to be
comparing those three things. So I'm in big trouble. Did
you collect baseball cards as a youth? Here's my deal
is I have somewhere a box of probably I don't
even want to hazard a guess, maybe five hundred, two hundred,
let's say two hundred cards of different kinds. Have some
(03:58):
old Star Wars card So I've got a few football cards. Yeah,
I have some baseball cards, but I was never a collector.
I would just get them as any kid who wasn't like,
oh I need to start collecting something gets them, which
is like, oh, sure they're in the stocking, or might
buy one here or there. But to answer your question, no,
(04:19):
I was never like a collector of baseball cards or
any card. That Star Wars card thing. Sounds familiar. I
think you talked about did you discover your collection again
recently in the last couple of years or something? Not
recently recently, but I could see we've been doing this
a long time, my friend. Yeah, recently, meaning like since
(04:39):
two thousand and eight. Yeah, we've been doing how long
have we been doing this show Governor's Award? Long? Is
what I'm just gonna say from now on. So okay,
So I actually was a collector. I was a kid
collector in that like every month I could not wait
for the new back Price Guide to come out. That
(05:00):
to me was like the Bible. Wow. Um, I had
friends that would like steal cards from me, like a
real collector at like age eleven twelve? Right now, Why
because you weren't that into baseball, were you? No? No, No,
I wasn't. There's something different. You don't have to be
into baseball to really be into baseball cards. It's a
(05:22):
really weird thing. Like it's impossible not to know a
lot more about baseball than you otherwise would if you
weren't collecting baseball cards, but means, well, no thing about it.
So like if you weren't, if you were, if you
were just into flying kites. Okay, you'd probably know almost
nothing about baseball if you weren't into baseball. But you
(05:42):
can collect baseball cards and you're gonna know a lot
more about baseball and baseball players, and you would if
you were just into kites. But that doesn't mean you're
actually you want to sit down and watch a baseball
game given time. Yeah, yeah, I get you. Baseball cards
are like that. It's really weird. I think that the
majority of people who collect baseball cards are into baseball,
(06:03):
but it's not requisite. Yeah. When I went through mine
recently out because I guess it was semi recently, because
I was like, I wonder if you know I have
some gem in here worth twenty grand and I didn't.
I think the best card I had was a Wade
Bogs rookie not wasn't a rookie, but it was like
a first year card. But that's a no. No No, no,
(06:26):
a first year like in the big league's card, not
like their rookie Minor league card or whatever. No, it
was the first year in the Big zis the rookie card.
It wasn't worth anything, Let's put it that way. So
you're like, please, don't want to end this conversation. Yeah,
because I looked it up and I think I sent
it to my friend who's a Red Sox fan. I
was like, here you go, you can have this. Oh
that was kind of you. Yeah. I discovered my old collection.
(06:49):
I had several hundred, and they were just loose. Any
good ones I started to go through. I was like,
I don't feel like doing this, so I just donated,
well because I knew that they there weren't any like
amazingly ridiculously valuable ones, in part because when I was
collecting it was smack dab in the middle of what's
called the junk era of baseball cards. Yeah, because the
(07:12):
market was so flooded. We'll talk all about it. But
to me, Chuck, just researching this and going back and
seeing like the design of some of those cards, like
seeing how Don Mattingly is like like just in the
midst of like tossing his bat to run to first base,
and like in nineteen eighty eight tops card, Like just
(07:33):
seeing these things. It's just these neural pathways that haven't
been like stimulated in decades are going off, and I'm
just like in nostalgia Heaven looking at all this stuff.
Because I forgot school. Well all of it looked like.
So it's been kind of a nice little journey down
the yellow brick road. But I want to circle back
to our CoA and say that doesn't mean that I
(07:53):
remember like all the ins and outs either. Yeah, I'm
no expert. I just was a big time fan back
in the day. That's cool. That surprises me too, but
I love it. Another little Josh factoid to stick in
my hip pocket. We need a little jingle for that,
like we have for Colon. So we're going to kind
of breeze through the earliest days of baseball card trading.
(08:15):
So we're not in here for two hours. But the earliest,
earliest sort of ancestors of baseball cards were trade cards
that you know today you might see a business that
hands out a calendar with like the local sports team
or something, or refrigerator magnet or something. These are kind
of what trade cards were. They were business cards and
(08:37):
they said, hey, why don't we just stick something interesting
on here so people will keep it. And sometimes that
became a baseball player or a baseball team. And these
cards weren't. I mean, I guess there may be a
market for them in some circles. But it's not like
this is considered like a tradeable baseball card today. I
(08:58):
don't think, right, No, I think that there's probably there's
collectors out there who collect that in the same way
there's people out there who collect like old timey potato
chip tunes, you know what I mean. It's like super antique,
and I think it's probably a niche market in the
baseball card market, you know what I mean, Yes, but
(09:19):
they are. It's questionable whether you can be like, this
is a baseball card, and there are a lot of
people kind of putting baseball teams and baseball players on
things at around the same time. So there's a lot
of different competing first baseball card ever, but the one
that usually gets pointed to is an eighteen sixty nine
(09:41):
Cincinnati Red Stockings card by Peck and Snyder, who were
and apparently still are a sporting goods manufacturer who took
a team photo super Victorian. There's like heavy curtains on
the edges of the photo and everything super Cepia, I mean,
just Cepia to the max. And then on the back
(10:01):
there's like a drawing in an advertisement for Peck and
Snyder's location on Nassau Street in New York, and a
lot of people are like, this is this is really it?
This is the genuine progenitor of the baseball card. Yeah,
and that one, I believe, and Ed helped us out
with this one he found that was valued at a
couple hundred grand. Certainly no slouch card wise, right if
(10:24):
you happen to have this one. In the eighteen eighties
is when things really kind of started taking shape, and
that's when tobacco got involved. There was a farmer named
James Buchanan Duke who started putting just cardboard cards and
cigarette packs to keep them from getting you know, bin
up and stuff when you sit on them. And they
(10:46):
started printing pictures of things on those cards to make
them interesting. And sometimes it might be a movie star
and sometimes it might be a sports star. And I
believe in eighteen eighty six is when the old Judge
cigarette company started including baseball players. And this is also
looked at as a kind of a milestone for a
(11:08):
couple of reasons. One was because you got a random
card that you didn't know you were going to get.
It's not like it was a cigarette pack for you know,
I know it was I can't name a baseball player
from Beckton, so I'm not even gonna try. It was random,
just like kids like you later on would buy packs
of cards, like not knowing who you're going to get,
(11:29):
and the other thing it was called a premium, which
is basically like this is just an extra thing and
something you were already buying, right, although I will argue
that the gum part was not White kids were buying
baseball cards, right. That gum was not good. No, it wasn't.
But that's how baseball cards later on would kind of
get their their restart well as we'll see, but that
(11:50):
I mean. But so that's kind of how it went
for about a century. Like they were random and then
they were extras to what you were buying. An old judge. Actually,
like you said, I think it was eighteen eighty six
that they were released their first That set, it's called
the N one sixty seven set is considered the first
official set of baseball cards. Pretty cool. Yeah, so you
(12:12):
can thank cigarette manufacturers for introducing baseball cards to the world.
But the thing is, it's not like it was like, okay,
it it just started from there and it just kept
going and developing. That's not the case, because baseball wasn't
the only thing that you would find on these cards
and cigarette packs. Eventually, because they were a premium, they
were like, well, here, we want you to have something
(12:34):
that you actually want. So here's a movie star who
you've never heard speak out loud. Here is a bird,
Here is a train. You don't know what train is, Well,
buckle up because you're going to within the next few years.
It wasn't just baseball players, and it wasn't just baseball
card collecting. That kind of it didn't develop immediately, I guess,
(12:56):
is what I'm trying to say. There were other like
detours and side tracks and stuff like that. Yeah, and
they you know, these early ones kind of look like
you would think they were black and white. Sometimes they
had a cepia tone. Color. Photography wasn't really a big thing,
at least a widespread thing at this point, and so
these cards didn't last long. They faded out in sunlight
(13:18):
and just basically being you know, on planet Earth. They
would degrade because they weren't very high quality, and a
lot of times they weren't even prints. They were actual
like photographs that were glued to cardboard. So it's it's
kind of a quaint early days of baseball card kind
of thing. The Library of Congress. If you ask them,
(13:38):
they will say that the first baseball card was a
printed photograph of a baseball team that was a souvenir handout.
And I'm not one to usually quibble with a Library
of Congress, but I'm not sure I would count that
as the first baseball card. Some people do, some people don't.
I think the one from Um Snyder or Peck and
Snyder's typically the one that, as collectors think of as
(14:01):
the first one. I'm sure we'll hear from people for sure.
You so yeah, oh, I know, so Um. There are
a lot of different um eras in baseball card collecting,
and they're not they don't necessarily follow chronological order. Weirdly,
they more are referred to by where the cards came from.
(14:22):
And like I was saying, there are a lot of
blind alleys and sidetracks and just weird, weird evolutions of
baseball cards. And one of the ways that's evident is
that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century,
there were a lot of different random places that you
would get a baseball card. It wasn't standardized yet, so
(14:43):
you might get one from the magazine that you subscribe to,
or from your cigarette pack, or you bought like a
box of biscuits and a baseball baseball card fell out.
So I think I think people who collect those kind
of cards are okay with things not being particularly standardized
and kind of hurly burly instead, because that's how baseball
(15:05):
cards were kind of kind of like a train just
is kind of like chug, good chug, chug chug, with
each like additional chug. A bunch of new baseball cards
spat out in different, weird, random places from non existence,
a lot of train refs so far today, Well, there's
a lot of train stuff going on at the same time.
Sure it's of the era. Should we take a break?
(15:27):
Oh yeah, all right, I'm gonna go study trains, I guess,
so I can keep up and we'll be right back,
(15:56):
all right. So, if you're looking at a modern baseball
car card, and you know, we're not jumping forward in
time that much yet, I'm just kind of talking about
the labeling of the cards. You're gonna probably see the
company that made it. You're going to see the player's name,
maybe a collector's number on the card if there was one,
there might be some additional things on there, like you
(16:18):
know how many sets were made that year. It might
be a set name or a subset name, so you
might see something like Ed gave an example two thousand
and four Bowmen Chrome number two sixty four. Hector Himenez
is like the official sort of name of the card, right,
so what your god is? The bowman is the maker
(16:40):
of the card. Chrome is the type of card of
the addition number two sixty four. I'm if I remember correctly,
that would be Hector Jimenez. Card was two sixty four
in the set of say like three hundred or something
like that. Okay, Those tobacco sets so we were talking
about that came with cigarettes are very popular. It's called
(17:02):
the Tobacco era T sets. So for instance, a list
of the T two O six, very famous set from
American Tobacco Company. And this was for a couple of
years between O nine and nineteen eleven, and this has
the very legendary the card that you may have heard of.
Even if you know nothing about baseball cards, you've probably
(17:23):
heard of the Honus Wagner because it is I guess
not the most expensive or valuable baseball cardot all time,
but maybe the most well known, and it's certainly up there.
I think it was the first baseball card to crack
one million dollars sail, all the way back in two thousand.
But one of the reasons why it's so well known
(17:43):
is because there just weren't that many of them. The
legend goes that Honus Wagner said that he didn't well,
some people say that he was a posed to tobacco product,
so he didn't want his card being sold within packs
of cigarettes, And he may or may not have been
opposed to tobacco. He just said that he didn't want
(18:04):
his picture in cigarettes. But the real truth is probably
that he didn't like not being paid for his likeness,
which was being used to market and sell cigarettes. Now,
regardless either way, there are not that many Honus Wagner
cards T two o six Honus Wagner cards. And then
one of the other reasons that it's really valuable and
(18:26):
probably overvalued is because of a price guide from nineteen
thirty seven. Right, yeah, there was a price guide that
it seems like the author who wrote this just himself
could not find this card readily and kind of I
guess misstated it's rarity because of that, because there are
(18:47):
other much rarer cards that from those sets even then
aren't worth what the Honus Wagner's worth. And then it
just kind of became one of those things where the
legend grew of the Honus Wagner card, and it kind
of became famous invaluable because people said it was famous
invaluable right exactly because that T two O six set,
which was I think from nineteen o nine. You can
(19:11):
get cards from that same set for one hundred bucks
or less today, but then it was yes, but that
Honus Wagner sold most recently for seven point two five
million dollars in the last few years. So it really
is just basically it's it's become iconic and legendary just
because people thought it was rare, and even when they
(19:32):
found out it wasn't that rare, it doesn't matter. It's
still a Honus Wagner card. Should I buy you a
T two O six card for eighty bucks online? Sure?
A stretchy brown Stash card. Stretchy brown sash. Oh man,
I'm glad we circled back to that because you were,
like I can't. I can't hazard a guess at a
name of a player from back then, and I was
like thinking about it, but then the time had passed
(19:55):
and then bam it came back again. So it's way
Brown Stash time. Okay, So that was off the eight
minutes ago exactly. Okay, very nice way to hang onto that. See,
you don't throw away jokes, not if they're okay or better,
because you never know when it might come up. That's
exactly true, man. And that's not just the case with
jokes too, Chuck. That's the case with just information in general.
(20:16):
Something that may seem trite or boring. Even at one
moment down the road, you might be like, oh, I
know the answer to that, and then yam, someone's fallen
in love with you. Well, you know it's funny too,
is you know. I've never done improv, but I know
a lot of improvers, and they all have a little
hip pocket stuff, you know, like they're they're certainly improving,
(20:36):
but they all have their little bag of tricks that
they keep in, little gags and jokes and names. And
when we did our TV show, Caitlyn Bits, a guy
who was played our boss Steve on the show and
was one of the legit talented actors that surrounded us. Caitlyn,
I don't know if you remember this, but in one
of the episodes, she she threw out the name Mike
(20:57):
Vlasney and that's stuff with me all these years as
somebody's who's like something something Mike Lasney said? And I
asked her it just killed me for some reason. It
was just to had a funny ring to it. And
I asked her after word if she had just made
that up, and she said, uh, She's like no, She's like,
I've been using Mike Lasney for years. Good. It's a
good one. It is a good one. It's like my Todd. Yeah,
(21:17):
well you true Todd. But now you've got stretchy black
what black brown brown stash. It's good stuff. Hang on
to it, thank you. Ironically, he was blonde. Oh wow,
See this story gets richer and richer. Yes, and so um,
let's get back to baseball cart shall we? Yeah? Um?
(21:40):
Oh well hell go ahead? No, no, go ahead? Uh.
The T two O six was one of the ones
we were mentioned with the Honus Wagner Uh card. Included
was one of the last tobacco sets and then World
War One comes along and kind of puts a halt
on production, because it seemed like warriors back then put
a halt like World Wars put a stop on lots
(22:04):
of production of things that weren't needed when you needed
other things. Not to mention the nineteen nineteen flu pandemic too, right, Sure,
So I saw Chuck somewhere the time between basically nineteen
hundred and World War One as the golden era of
baseball card collecting between Waight Ears nineteen hundred and basically
(22:25):
nineteen seventeen nineteen sixteen. Oh. Interesting. Yeah, I thought that
was interesting too, because again, these are the ones that
are like, they follow very little rhyme or reason, like
Nibisco was putting out like baseball cards. It's just weird. Yes,
they called they're notated with the D and that's your
bread baseball cards, yeah, or bread like products whatever. Um.
(22:50):
But apparently that's the golden age of baseball card collecting.
I disagree. I think when I was collecting, it's the
golden age of baseball card collecting. But it could just
be my skewed opinion, your first person point of view, right.
But the thing is, around this time, people started saying like, oh, kids,
maybe we should stop forcing them to start work at five,
(23:10):
and maybe we should have a problem with them smoking tobacco.
And about this time, people said, well, these kids are
starting to really get into this baseball card thing. They
like baseball, they like things that remind them of baseball,
so hence their fascination with baseball cards. But I don't
really think we should be pushing old judge cigarettes on
them so that they can get their baseball cards. What
(23:31):
if we package these things with candy? And here was
a huge, huge step in the evolution of baseball cards. Yeah,
they said, why try and sell cigarettes to ten year olds.
They shouldn't start smoking till they're twelve, so let's start
putting them in caramel packages and things like that, and
that kind of birth, some real kind of fun oddity,
(23:54):
is at least fun to me. Yeah. I don't know
how the baseball card community looks at this. I can't
stand it. Oh really, I like things to be standardized
and follow like a set of rhyme and reason. So
sometimes these things were round, which is kind of fun,
I think. And then sometimes, like in the case of
the nineteen twenty American caramel or caramel set, they were
(24:15):
die cut cards that were just in the shape of
the player. It was a little cut out of a player. Ah, well,
hurt your sensibilities. I just don't like it. No, I
don't like it at all. It's just too random. I
think it's neat. I know, and I can understand how
some whoult would. It's my own foible for sure. Yeah,
I got you. So it was basically like the Wild
(24:37):
West for baseball cards all the way until about World
War two, and actually passed World War two. But a
little after World War two, Bowman, a gum maker, started
taking over baseball cards. They started adding baseball cards sets,
they started kind of professionalizing the whole thing, and in
(24:57):
very short order, another gum maker called Tops said, oh,
I like what Bowman's doing. They're really like increasing their sales.
Let's see if we can figure out how to build
a monopoly out of this, And they actually did. Tops
had a monopoly on baseball cards, like literally, you could
not get a baseball card that wasn't a Tops baseball
(25:18):
card from about the early fifties till about nineteen eighty.
They were all that they had because Tops had figured
out that they could go to individual players and say, hey,
sign this contract so that we're the only one who
can reproduce your likeness, and we'll give you X number
of dollars every year. And players would be like, sure,
why not, I don't have any allegiance to bowmen or
(25:39):
flear or anything like that. And Tops just dominated the
market somehow survived an FTC investigation. They were a literal monopoly.
They would get sued all the time, and they just
withstood all of it until finally the players Union was like, hey, guys,
these other companies are willing to pay way more stops
(26:00):
signing these Tops contracts. And it wasn't until the players
themselves stop signing these contracts with Tops that the monopoly
ended up getting broken up in that way. Yeah, I
think it was just kind of what you did, Like
you got you went to Major League Baseball and you
signed with Tops. Was just part of your deals, like
signing with an agent or whatever. Right now, were there
(26:21):
not any other companies making cards for nobody baseball players?
Even I don't know if they were for nobody. The
way that Ed puts it is that basically you had
to not even be a prospect in the minor leagues,
like maybe a mascot level player, right. I'm just wondering
if there were any other Baseball cards aside from Tops
(26:44):
during that thirty year period. Surely there was something, right,
not that I understand. There were like football cards, there
were hockey cards, but Baseball seems to have been totally
locked down by Tops, essentially because think about it. If
you're safe fleer arrival the Tops and you want to
put out a baseball card set, but you can only
sign seven players out of all the players in Major
(27:06):
League Baseball, Like, you're not even gonna go to the trouble.
Nobody's gonna buy it, right, right, So I would guess No,
I think that it was basically just Tops this whole time,
as just exclusively with baseball, is all I'm saying. Well,
what was flearmaking? Were they making other sports cards? Probably
hockey and football, Yeah, and maybe basketball, because those those
(27:26):
cards have been I think hockey cards were almost as
old as baseball cards. They were put in tobacco packs too. Yeah.
You know what's funny is now that I'm remembering my
pseudo collection, I had a few NBA cards and a
few NHL cards in there too. Everybody's I know. I
remember seeing the random toothless hockey player. Uh, you know
(27:51):
mulitied toothless hockey player. Yep, that is standard issue stuff
right there. It's pretty good. And I also get the
same neural pathways when I opened that box. It's like
it's the best. That's pretty strong stuff. One other thing
I ran across the chuck is that, ironically, there's a
company from Italy called Panini, and Panini has a lock
(28:13):
on the licenses for NBA and NFL until twenty twenty six.
So Tops got beaten at their own game. They can't
produce an NFL or NBA official cards until twenty twenty six.
Now we look at you, Panini locking down the sandwich
making process and the football cards right this. There's a
(28:35):
little sidebar it included which I think is interesting, which
was that you know you mentioned I don't know if
you actually said it, but Flear sued Tops in nineteen
seventy five, and a lot of case law has to
do with baseball cards, including a very interesting side note
that the whole idea of name and likeness and like
(28:56):
owning your image and being able to profit from your
own image and keeping people from profiting from your image
came from a baseball card case in what nineteen fifty three? Correct, Yeah,
Halean Laboratories, which is a terrible name for a gummaker,
but that's who they were. They bought Bowman and Tops
was poaching their players that they had contracts with, and
(29:17):
they sued Tops, and Tops argued, look, Bowman doesn't own
the person's likeness. Yeah, they have a contract with the player.
But what the player was saying is I won't sue
you Bowman for making a baseball card with my likeness.
Not that I'm giving you any ownership over my likeness.
I'm just waiving my right to sue you with this contract.
(29:38):
And Top said, you can't see us because you don't
own the likeness. You can go sue the player, but
you can't see us. And the court said, you know what,
You're absolutely right. It resides in the person, and the
person not only owns their likeness, but they're able to
sell it or lease it to third parties. And it
was all because of baseball cards. It took a little
while to develop. Remember our legal precedent episode. Oh yeah,
(30:00):
I think the decision came from the Second Circuit Court
of Appeals. Um, so it wasn't binding in other courts,
but it was eventually cited as precedent and spread and
spread and spread, and then in the seventies it was
like a thing. Yeah, and boy, talk about a monumental case. Yeah,
especially these days. I mean, they're the human beings are
brands these days with influencers and not just influencers but
(30:23):
I hate even saying that word, but just celebrity image
or whatever, and that that was a huge, huge case.
And I think, you know, one of the most important
reasons is it kept like it meant you could profit.
But I think the big thing was it kept other
people from being able to steal your image. So if
you just want to be like a George Clooney class
(30:46):
act and not put your face on a he probably
does those ads in Japan and stuff. Though, I bet
he does presso adds here, Oh does he? Okay, it's
so weird. It's so random because it's like the only
thing he does. Yeah, that is weird. Maybe he's just
into it. I guess I just think classy. I think Clooney,
that's it just comes out of my mouth. He's cold. Uh.
(31:10):
Should we take another break on that wonderful joke? Yes,
all right, we'll talk about the kind of getting into
the modern era right after this. Okay, Chuck, So this
(31:44):
guy is my guy that we're going to talk about.
His name is cy Burger. I say Burger. He codified
things and you love him for it. He did. That's
absolutely right. He said, Hey, everybody, let's start acting like
we actually care about the product that we're putting out
and standardizing some of this stuff. Let's get the look
up up to date. Let's, oh, I don't know, put
(32:05):
the logo of the team on the card, right, Let's
start using color in normal, coherent fashion, like we are
all sane. Um. So, Cyberger he was the one. He
worked for tops appropriately enough, and he did such an
amazing job that he's set just basically standards that are
still around today. Yeah. The those stats on the back
(32:28):
that you love so much, that was Cyberger, the little
printed signature Cyberger. Yeah, well he wasn't signing them Cibergers
a card. The size, the three and a half by
two and a half size became standard in nineteen fifty
seven because of Cyburger. Well that was a cost saving
(32:49):
measure too, right, Well, yeah, I mean it, it definitely
made sense because I think it just that was less
less waste right on the printing sheets. Yeah, you could
just more cards per sheet, so you could save some
money with printing. When you're printing millions of cards, you know,
the thing is, Chuck is I think also that's another
reason why I love baseball cards starting in this era,
(33:11):
because they're all the same size too. It's very much
like my love for the right size g I Joes
and not the overly large, weirdo g I Joes of
the days of your as you hunting me, well, I
mean I think there's I'm not like particularly m OCD,
(33:33):
but I have a little bit of that stuff. We've
talked about it before, and a stacked thing. If there
are irregularities in that stacked thing, it drives me crazy.
So I kind of get where you're coming from there. Yeah.
Imagine like a die cut arm sticking out of your
Oh my god, you know how I feel. Oh geez.
(33:55):
One of the other things about Cyberger's success, Chuck, is
that it was his transition. This is the nineteen fifty
two set that his first that debuted his work. I
guess the first one. Yeah, he was so successful that
TOPS was like, oh my gosh, like this is amazing.
Our sales are through the roof. Let's release a second
set in nineteen fifty two. We'll catch everybody just in
(34:17):
time for the playoffs, so they'll be all super psyched
about that, and we'll just sell even more than we
normally do. And they missed the mark. I think they
came out a little late. They missed playoff fever and
instead ran into base or football fever, so people weren't
really interested. So they actually took all of these leftover
remnant This is like the et the game version of
(34:39):
baseball cards. They took all of these just overstocked leftover sets,
and they warehoused them for a few years, I think,
and finally in nineteen sixty they're like, we're paying for
these cards that we're never going to do anything with.
Let's just put them on a barge and dump them
in the ocean. And they did. They dumped him in
(35:00):
the ocean. It's so strange, like little decisions like that,
like not to bury them, not to incender him to
dump them in the ocean, so yeah, not to go
through them and maybe pick out ones that might be valuable. Exactly, Well,
that's the thing they didn't know that any of these
things were going to be valuable, but it just so
happened that the most expensive, the most valuable baseball card
(35:20):
of all time, the nineteen fifty two Mickey Mantle, is
down there at the bottom of the sea in droves.
But because they're at the bottom of the sea, the
ones that are top sides still are incredibly rare and
incredibly valuable, so much so that the nineteen fifty two
Mickey Mantle sold for twelve point six million dollars last year. Yeah,
(35:44):
that was a nine point five on the condition scale,
and it is not even a rookie card, but it
is that first TOPS card that had that sort of
modern baseball look in nineteen fifty two. Yeah, so it's considered,
you know, or at least valued as the most expensive
you know, topsnas Wagner even Yeah, yeah, it topped Honas Wagner,
(36:08):
and I think the nineteen thirty three Babe Ruth is
third for most valuable card, right, which makes sense. So
now we're going into the next era of trading and collecting,
which was Hey, you kids, I know you're kind of
into this thing, but you know, you put them in
your bicycle spokes and you play games with them, and
(36:29):
you handle them and muck them up. Adults are going
to start collecting these and keep them in pristine condition
because there's an actual trade and buy and sell market here.
And we'll even have a convention. And the very first
West Coast Sports Collector's Convention was in Brea, California in
nineteen sixty nine at a guy's house named Jim Knowle
(36:53):
because he was there wasn't enough people basically, I think
a couple of dozen people, and he was a prominent
collector who I guess had a good enough house. Uh.
They point to nineteen eighty eleven years later is the
first true convention, and then I guess they held it
at a hotel, the National Sports Collector's Convention, and you
(37:14):
know they were there between that time, there were little
shows here and there. But they point to nineteen eighties
the first like real deal convention. Yeah, totally. And I
saw an article on counterfeit cards, which we'll talk about
in a little while, but just right off the bat,
I mean, within a year or two of that first convention,
counterfeit I think Pete Rose rookie cards started showing up. Yeah,
(37:35):
just almost immediately. But it's like you said, like it
went from just something that kids got, as you know,
kind of like um, imagine collecting ring pops. Okay, okay,
it's virtually the same thing, where like like kids would
just go buy it and you know, mess around with
it for a little while, and then that was it. It
(37:56):
It was discarded. Whatever. Imagine if a adults suddenly were like,
we want to buy those, Sorry, you don't have adult money.
Maybe you shouldn't have stopped working starting at five years
back and you would have adult money, but you don't.
So now these things are really going to go up
in price. And it didn't happen immediately chucked, but slowly
but surely, starting around nineteen eighty and then onward, it
(38:20):
went from a hobby or something fun for kids in
grown up to like to something incredibly amped up and
almost on cocaine. Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it,
but I think I agree the market is generally driven
(38:40):
by exactly what you think, which is rarity, which we'll
talk about, and condition, because you know, like I said,
kids actually played with the cards and things like that
and traded them and touched them, so a lot of
these cards were not as valuable because they were mucked up.
Sometimes these little cards were designed to be folded as
(39:02):
little stand up things, and like, this is one of
the things that can drive a rarity. So if you
have a card that was supposed to be folded in
half as a little stand up tent or something like
a little pop up, but you never did that, it's
like the grido that you never opened and played with
as a kid or whatever. That means. It's a low supply.
It's just very simple supply and demand kind of thing.
(39:25):
And Ed very stutey points out it's not exclusively but
a lot of baby baby boomers and their kids are
the ones that are really into this community, and they
created a very big demand in those two decades in
the seventies and eighties, and manufacturers were like, hey, we
can make more money here, so then they ruined it
(39:47):
by over producing. In the nineties, Upper Deck came along
and did a really good job of debuting like next
level cards that just looked awesome. The photos were better,
they were on higher qualit card stock as opposed to
just like junkie cardboard. Sometimes they were hand autographs. Those
are the really really expensive ones now, and they would
(40:10):
include little bits of like a shard of a baseball,
a splinter of a baseball bat that was used by
a player, or a little tiny little thing of a
baseball jersey. So these little extras started popping up, and
it was really cool, but they not upper deck, but
just the market was flooded overall, and there were just
too many baseball cards. Yeah, there's one with like a
(40:30):
lock of Jose Canseco's hair. Just oh, really, is that
one you do? That would not surprise you. It wouldn't
me either, man, after reading this, I had no idea
that this was the state that baseball cards were in.
But they just embed the weirdest stuff into cards now
and it makes them just incredibly valuable. So what's happened
is the companies that make cards have they used to
(40:54):
just make cards? They said, oh, there's X number of
Major League Baseball players, we're gonna make x number of cards.
And then for some of the ones that are stars,
well we'll put them in a different outfit. We'll say, here,
hold this feather duster like a bat for this one.
We'll use like slightly different colors and things like that
for a few of them. So and those will be
produced in you know, a little lower quantities, but they
(41:18):
it's just been so juiced now that they're like, yeah,
give me a little bit of Brett Farve's game Jersey
and we're gonna embed it in a card and there's um,
you know, we're gonna make two of them. And what's
interesting is they put them in packs. Still, it's not
like you can only you have to walk on foot
to the company's factory and buy this thing with gold bullion.
(41:40):
They put them in packs, but then they automatically become
incredibly valuable on the secondary market, and so people buy
packs in the hopes of like they're about to like
strike it rich because there's a million dollar cards stuck
in there. Yeah, it's I mean, it's hard not to
be a little cynical as a as a non enthusiast
and be like they they kind of ruined it in
(42:00):
a way in my opinion, because it's you know, the
old days, it was like you you would open a
card or open a pack or whatever, and it was that, um,
what you wanted to find was a player that ended
up being really good and you're like, wow, I've got
this thing now of this Ken Griffey Junior rookie card,
while they kind of knew he was going to be
because of his dad and his legacy or whatever. But
(42:21):
you know what I mean, like Mark the player that
kind of yeah, sure, why not Mark Grace? Is that
the only baseball player you can think of? No, No,
Mark Grace's I think eighty eight rookie card was just yeah,
and I interest it was very sought after at the time. Okay,
I thought you just like pulled that out of your
back end. I thought that was pretty good. Oh thanks, um.
(42:41):
But anyway, now it's become like almost like gambling, like
buying a like looking for a lottery ticket or something
that's a winner. And because of that, there have been
rico anti trafficking laws and like lawsuits brought up saying
the same thing, which is like you're kind of running
a gambling business these days. And all those lawsuits have failed.
(43:02):
But Ed pointed out there was one against Panini just
like a few months ago this year. So people are
still trying to to paint them as you know, gamblers
or not gamblers, but whatever. It's called casinos, no lottery
ticket printers, card sharks. No, that's not it either. You
(43:25):
know what I mean, everyone knows what I mean. I
think the card sharks so one of the things that's
lost though, chuck it. I don't mean to get cynical about,
you know, the present or the future in favor of
the past either, but it's hard not to because as
a kid, you could go to the grocery store on
your bike and buy some packs of baseball cards and
(43:46):
go have fun opening them. Good luck finding baseball cards
in the store these days. No, really, you, yes, you
go to a really well outfitted hobby shop, or you're
just buying it online basically immediately from the secondary market.
And yes, you can still have the thrill of like
buying an unopened pack or whatever, but you have to
buy it online and wait for it to arrive in
(44:07):
the mail. And it's just it's just a different thing
to me. I guess it's not necessarily worse, it's just
the reality now, but I just feel like kids in particular,
and then also like people who just don't have nearly
as much income are having trouble keeping up. You can't
buy baseball cards unless you're fairly well off these days,
(44:28):
because the possibility of buying a really valuable one is
very high, or getting a really valuable one, and then
you can just buy valuable ones right out of the
gate too, off of the internet, So it just seems
different to me. Well, it's it's less magical, for sure,
and it is hard not to say that it's worse. Yeah,
(44:51):
go ahead and say it. Sorry, everybody. We try not
to be terribly opinionated, but this one, this one really
was pretty opinionated if you think about it. Yeah, you know,
we talked about rookie cards. They're usually the most valuable
and sought after, and one of the reasons is because,
like I was mentioning earlier, you don't know necessarily you
(45:11):
might get a King Griffey Jr. That you have a
pretty good idea that he's going to be a great
player because of his family, but usually it's like, well,
you know, baseball is a hard sport and a lot
of really good prospects don't pan out, so you don't
know for sure if a player is gonna pan out
and be a hot commodity as a baseball card. So
that's why rookie cards are worth more. And then also
(45:31):
Ed points out too, there's just it's sort of the tradition,
like the rookie card is more valuable because we say
it's more valuable. It's not necessarily because it's the rarest
thing out there, right, it's just very collectible. Yeah, and
then Chuck, we talked a little bit or I mentioned
counterfeit cards. Yeah, being a thing. I mean, they were
a thing back in the day when you know, the
(45:53):
first convention started. Now that cards have gotten like ultra valuable,
the counterfeit are becoming even more difficult to detect, in
part because it's just worth the effort now because of
the payoff. And then secondly because the technology to make
really good fake cards is becoming more widespread and cheaper,
(46:16):
so there's more people putting more time into counterfeit cards.
So as a result, there's um in a cottage industry
of basically valuators and what's the word where you verify indicators. Yes,
authenticators has grown up as well, and there's one company
(46:37):
called Professional Sports Authenticator. They're not the only ones. I
think Beckett who used to make my I think still
do make my beloved Beckett price guides they also authenticate too,
But these there's a need has developed for professionals who
employ experts to look at these things say yes, this
thing is for real and all the and by the way,
(46:58):
it's also a nine in mint condition. Basically, I'm surprised
they haven't started putting like a you know, a chip
or a little stripe that the money has the little
when you hold it up to the light, you know,
stuff like that to legitimize it. Because it's such a
big money industry. I guess maybe the Professional Sports Authenticator
(47:22):
company that's a great interest in that not happening because
it would well, I wouldn't drive him out of business
because of all the previous cards, I guess, but I'm
surprised there isn't something like that embedded in the card
these days. I think that they're the really high value
ones do have some sort of security measures. I know
they have things like holograms and foil like printing and
(47:44):
stuff like that to duplicate. It is hard to duplicate,
but it is possible too, especially if you're not a
professional authenticator. There are it's probably harder to detect. But
I think if you are a professional, it's probably not
that hard. Like I said, for example, um on, I
think a PSA slab so if you if you have
(48:05):
a card that the PSA is authenticating, they encase it
in plastic and basically say like this is forever more verified.
This card is verified. They call them slabs that you
can buy um on PSA slabs. It has like their
patent number for the case that they use, and there's
there's a counterfeiter out there who uses the same patent number,
(48:29):
same thought and everything embossed on that plastic case, but
they forgot the period after pat And that's the way
that you tell that it's a counterfeit. Everything else is
like that, amazingly well done. And instead of spending so
much time trying to rip people off, yeah, it seems
like you have enough ingenuity to make money, you know,
(48:51):
doing something else. Yeah, you're good enough to be a counterfeit.
Or maybe it's the thrill of yeah crime or something.
I don't know. I think for some people, crime is
very romantic, especially baseball counterfeiting very romantic. The last thing
I have is just a kind of cool little footnote
that Ed points out, which is in a lot of
trading markets, the or collectible trading markets, the rarity and
(49:14):
value comes sometimes for mistakes and errors, like the stamp
that is misprinted, or the java that looks like it
had an erection that they quickly like stopped on the
assembly line. Not always the case with baseball, and there
are exceptions, but generally baseball card errors are not so valuable.
(49:37):
There is at least one exception that I came across,
um Billy Ripken, Cal Ripken's brother, his nineteen eighty nine
Flear card. He's holding a bat and on the bottom
of the bat written it looked like a sharpie it
said F face, but it was all spelled out. It
was not And he basically just trolled the Fleer company
(50:00):
and they printed it. No one noticed it for a while,
and they finally I think, I'm not sure what they
did with it, but that's a very highly sought after
card too. The face. Yeah, they call it the Billy
Ripken F eighty nine Fleer or something like that. Oh wow,
I love that. The triple F. Yeah, yeah it is.
I didn't notice that third F. You got anything else?
(50:21):
I got nothing else. This was fun. I hope we
got it mostly right. Yeah, and don't forget. I mean, like,
there's podcasts out there dedicated to baseball card collecting. We're
just doing a general view of it. So if you
like it, go seek out some of those baseball card
podcasts and enjoy those as well. And since I just
said that, of course it's time for a listener mayl.
(50:41):
I'm gonna call this a follow up on them the
Catherine the first lineage. Remember I couldn't quite remember all
that stuff from the Amber Room. Yeah, from the Amber Room.
And I'm a big huge fan of the TV show
The Great and it comes back first season three, I
believe in May Okay, So it's also a good way
(51:02):
to plug that show because this will come out kind
of closest to them. This from Rebecca. Hey, guys, been
listening for quite a few years now. Very informative and
I'm not generally one to write in with corrections, but
the Russian succession in the Amber Room areas such a
good story could be an entire episode. Peter the Great
imprisoned his son an heir, after a failed revolt, and
(51:22):
he died after torture. After Peter died, the crown bounced
around various family members, including the wife that survived him,
the Peasant, to born Catherine, the First, for whom the
Katherine Palace is named for. Finally, Elizabeth secured the throne,
ruled for many years. She apparently lived extravagantly with something
like two hundred shoes or I guess one hundred pairs,
(51:46):
never wearing the same dress twice. But she never married,
so to ensure the succession, she named her nephew her heir,
and also arranged his marriage to a German prince's named Sophia,
who converted to Russian Orthodox and took the name Katherine. Wow. So,
after Elizabeth died, her nephew was so unpopular that only
(52:07):
a few months later he was thrown overthrown by his wife,
who ruled is Katherine the Second aka the Great? And
that is wherein the TV show takes place. Had a
chance to visit the Catherine Palace a few years ago.
See the recreation of the amber room. It's smaller than
I imagine, but still beautiful. Picture frames and tables are
also made with amber mosaic. Thanks for the podcast. P S.
(52:31):
If you're not ps, you're not supposed to take pictures
in the room, but I attempted to sneak a pick
before I was called in sculpted. Oh wow, lucky, just
scolded and not thrown into the good Rebecca. I'm pretty
good about rule following in those cases because I like
to I'm a rule follower generally, but I snuck one
photo in of one of the Elvis's jumpsuits in Graceland.
(52:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, you know. I was like, I did
a quickie and that was it. I wasn't trying to
get too greedy, but I had. And you took a
photo too, you may said on his bed. I think
I told you on the seven forty seven and set
the alarment. Oh I don't think I remember that story.
Did you get off that plane pretty quick? That's so
(53:15):
just one thing that we're talking about Russia. I want
to make a correction from way back in the past.
I think in our Louisiana purchase episode, I mentioned that
NATO is fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine. Right,
I grossly misused the term proxy war. I did not
(53:36):
know that proxy war in every case means that the
person fighting the proxy war started it. I do not
think that NATO started this war at all. I think
Russia was the aggressor, and I am definitely not pro
Russia in any way, shape or form. As a matter
of fact, I have a tremendous amount of admiration for
the Ukraine, and I hope that dumb American politics don't
(53:58):
get in our way of continuing to support Ukraine. F YI,
yeah you were. You were very misunderstood, and I felt
terrible for you because we got quite a few letters
and that is is not what you meant. But also
I learned my lesson too. I should probably double check
um big words before I used them. So yeah, apologies
to all um Ukrainian Canadian listeners. Apparently there's a bunch
(54:20):
of you um for any offense I caused. Yeah, uh,
good stuff, Yeah, good stuff. Indeed, if you want to
get in touch with us, like any of our Ukrainian
Canadian listeners or Rebecca, you can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should
(54:40):
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Steve Rich and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and it's just us today because we left
Jerry back in Vegas and one of us has to
go get her and we haven't cost a coin yet
(00:23):
to see who's who that's going to be. I'm not
going back to Vegas. I'm not either. The smoky casinos
destroyed my already weary, allergy ridden throat. Yeah, it wasn't
pleasant for my throat either. But we should probably tell
everybody why we were inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke in Las
Vegas recently and why Jerry is still there. Go ahead, well,
(00:44):
it's because we were honored this year by the Podcast
Academies ambi's basically the Oscars of podcasting with the Governor's Award,
which basically says, hey, you've been at this for a
while and we think you're doing a pretty good job,
and why don't you think about hanging it up? And
here's an award on the way out the door, right
(01:05):
And we were like, but we're a big career and
they're like, nope, too late, you got the award. You've
accepted it. You have to stop now. Yeah, it was
really cool. It's kind of a lifetime achievement. And we've
gotten a Webby or two here and there and some
other things that you know, it's always nice to get
those things, but this felt like a genuine honor and
like the one that we should go pick up in person.
(01:26):
And we had a great time and a epic dinner
celebration dinner afterward with Jerry and her friend and and
my friend and Nathan who does our marketing, and it
was just a really great celebration. It really was. It
was a wonderful experience. So thanks a lot Podcast Academy
because that was really cool. So it's really neat. Yeah,
(01:48):
and got heffed? Did you pick They didn't give us
one on stage because they're mailing them. But did you
pick that thing up in the green room? No? Did you? Yeah? Dude,
it's it's heffed. It's got heffed. I mean it looks
like it. It's like a genuine bona fide statuette. Yeah.
All my other statues you can blow on them and
they tip over. You're like, oh it's hollow. Yeah, this
(02:09):
one's got halfed. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you again to
the Podcast Academy, and honestly, thank you to everybody who's
ever recognized us with an award. That's really meaningful every time.
So thanks, Yeah, buddy, Well, and we said this you
know on stage. In fact, you buttoned it up nicely.
But you know, the listeners or the reason we have
this career in this job that we've been doing for
so long. And I know it sounds trite, but like
(02:31):
we wouldn't have gotten this award or even be doing
this job if we didn't have the amazing support over
the years from you guys. Absolutely means a lot. So
we should probably get going on baseball cards, right, Yeah,
another quick CoA for baseball cards. We have learned over
the years the hard way that when you do a
topic that is it's just like yeah, it's not like oh,
(02:55):
ballpoint pins or this or that. When some people are
very passionate about this thing, that we can get ourselves
into trouble because we get little things wrong here and
there that they think are major things. So we respect
the baseball card community and just want to not apologize
in advance, but just say that you know, we don't
(03:16):
know nearly as much about this as you do, so
so be kind. I think it's well put. I'm just
going to come out and admit right now, I cannot
find the difference between a bonus card, an insert and
a subset card. Okay, they may be all the same thing,
but I am terrified that there's a slight difference and
that we're going to get chewed up for it. Well,
(03:38):
I didn't even know that we were going to be
comparing those three things. So I'm in big trouble. Did
you collect baseball cards as a youth? Here's my deal
is I have somewhere a box of probably I don't
even want to hazard a guess, maybe five hundred, two hundred,
let's say two hundred cards of different kinds. Have some
(03:58):
old Star Wars card So I've got a few football cards. Yeah,
I have some baseball cards, but I was never a collector.
I would just get them as any kid who wasn't like,
oh I need to start collecting something gets them, which
is like, oh, sure they're in the stocking, or might
buy one here or there. But to answer your question, no,
(04:19):
I was never like a collector of baseball cards or
any card. That Star Wars card thing. Sounds familiar. I
think you talked about did you discover your collection again
recently in the last couple of years or something? Not
recently recently, but I could see we've been doing this
a long time, my friend. Yeah, recently, meaning like since
(04:39):
two thousand and eight. Yeah, we've been doing how long
have we been doing this show Governor's Award? Long? Is
what I'm just gonna say from now on. So okay,
So I actually was a collector. I was a kid
collector in that like every month I could not wait
for the new back Price Guide to come out. That
(05:00):
to me was like the Bible. Wow. Um, I had
friends that would like steal cards from me, like a
real collector at like age eleven twelve? Right now, Why
because you weren't that into baseball, were you? No? No, No,
I wasn't. There's something different. You don't have to be
into baseball to really be into baseball cards. It's a
(05:22):
really weird thing. Like it's impossible not to know a
lot more about baseball than you otherwise would if you
weren't collecting baseball cards, but means, well, no thing about it.
So like if you weren't, if you were, if you
were just into flying kites. Okay, you'd probably know almost
nothing about baseball if you weren't into baseball. But you
(05:42):
can collect baseball cards and you're gonna know a lot
more about baseball and baseball players, and you would if
you were just into kites. But that doesn't mean you're
actually you want to sit down and watch a baseball
game given time. Yeah, yeah, I get you. Baseball cards
are like that. It's really weird. I think that the
majority of people who collect baseball cards are into baseball,
(06:03):
but it's not requisite. Yeah. When I went through mine
recently out because I guess it was semi recently, because
I was like, I wonder if you know I have
some gem in here worth twenty grand and I didn't.
I think the best card I had was a Wade
Bogs rookie not wasn't a rookie, but it was like
a first year card. But that's a no. No No, no,
(06:26):
a first year like in the big league's card, not
like their rookie Minor league card or whatever. No, it
was the first year in the Big zis the rookie card.
It wasn't worth anything, Let's put it that way. So
you're like, please, don't want to end this conversation. Yeah,
because I looked it up and I think I sent
it to my friend who's a Red Sox fan. I
was like, here you go, you can have this. Oh
that was kind of you. Yeah. I discovered my old collection.
(06:49):
I had several hundred, and they were just loose. Any
good ones I started to go through. I was like,
I don't feel like doing this, so I just donated,
well because I knew that they there weren't any like
amazingly ridiculously valuable ones, in part because when I was
collecting it was smack dab in the middle of what's
called the junk era of baseball cards. Yeah, because the
(07:12):
market was so flooded. We'll talk all about it. But
to me, Chuck, just researching this and going back and
seeing like the design of some of those cards, like
seeing how Don Mattingly is like like just in the
midst of like tossing his bat to run to first base,
and like in nineteen eighty eight tops card, Like just
(07:33):
seeing these things. It's just these neural pathways that haven't
been like stimulated in decades are going off, and I'm
just like in nostalgia Heaven looking at all this stuff.
Because I forgot school. Well all of it looked like.
So it's been kind of a nice little journey down
the yellow brick road. But I want to circle back
to our CoA and say that doesn't mean that I
(07:53):
remember like all the ins and outs either. Yeah, I'm
no expert. I just was a big time fan back
in the day. That's cool. That surprises me too, but
I love it. Another little Josh factoid to stick in
my hip pocket. We need a little jingle for that,
like we have for Colon. So we're going to kind
of breeze through the earliest days of baseball card trading.
(08:15):
So we're not in here for two hours. But the earliest,
earliest sort of ancestors of baseball cards were trade cards
that you know today you might see a business that
hands out a calendar with like the local sports team
or something, or refrigerator magnet or something. These are kind
of what trade cards were. They were business cards and
(08:37):
they said, hey, why don't we just stick something interesting
on here so people will keep it. And sometimes that
became a baseball player or a baseball team. And these
cards weren't. I mean, I guess there may be a
market for them in some circles. But it's not like
this is considered like a tradeable baseball card today. I
(08:58):
don't think, right, No, I think that there's probably there's
collectors out there who collect that in the same way
there's people out there who collect like old timey potato
chip tunes, you know what I mean. It's like super antique,
and I think it's probably a niche market in the
baseball card market, you know what I mean, Yes, but
(09:19):
they are. It's questionable whether you can be like, this
is a baseball card, and there are a lot of
people kind of putting baseball teams and baseball players on
things at around the same time. So there's a lot
of different competing first baseball card ever, but the one
that usually gets pointed to is an eighteen sixty nine
(09:41):
Cincinnati Red Stockings card by Peck and Snyder, who were
and apparently still are a sporting goods manufacturer who took
a team photo super Victorian. There's like heavy curtains on
the edges of the photo and everything super Cepia, I mean,
just Cepia to the max. And then on the back
(10:01):
there's like a drawing in an advertisement for Peck and
Snyder's location on Nassau Street in New York, and a
lot of people are like, this is this is really it?
This is the genuine progenitor of the baseball card. Yeah,
and that one, I believe, and Ed helped us out
with this one he found that was valued at a
couple hundred grand. Certainly no slouch card wise, right if
(10:24):
you happen to have this one. In the eighteen eighties
is when things really kind of started taking shape, and
that's when tobacco got involved. There was a farmer named
James Buchanan Duke who started putting just cardboard cards and
cigarette packs to keep them from getting you know, bin
up and stuff when you sit on them. And they
(10:46):
started printing pictures of things on those cards to make
them interesting. And sometimes it might be a movie star
and sometimes it might be a sports star. And I
believe in eighteen eighty six is when the old Judge
cigarette company started including baseball players. And this is also
looked at as a kind of a milestone for a
(11:08):
couple of reasons. One was because you got a random
card that you didn't know you were going to get.
It's not like it was a cigarette pack for you know,
I know it was I can't name a baseball player
from Beckton, so I'm not even gonna try. It was random,
just like kids like you later on would buy packs
of cards, like not knowing who you're going to get,
(11:29):
and the other thing it was called a premium, which
is basically like this is just an extra thing and
something you were already buying, right, although I will argue
that the gum part was not White kids were buying
baseball cards, right. That gum was not good. No, it wasn't.
But that's how baseball cards later on would kind of
get their their restart well as we'll see, but that
(11:50):
I mean. But so that's kind of how it went
for about a century. Like they were random and then
they were extras to what you were buying. An old judge. Actually,
like you said, I think it was eighteen eighty six
that they were released their first That set, it's called
the N one sixty seven set is considered the first
official set of baseball cards. Pretty cool. Yeah, so you
(12:12):
can thank cigarette manufacturers for introducing baseball cards to the world.
But the thing is, it's not like it was like, okay,
it it just started from there and it just kept
going and developing. That's not the case, because baseball wasn't
the only thing that you would find on these cards
and cigarette packs. Eventually, because they were a premium, they
were like, well, here, we want you to have something
(12:34):
that you actually want. So here's a movie star who
you've never heard speak out loud. Here is a bird,
Here is a train. You don't know what train is, Well,
buckle up because you're going to within the next few years.
It wasn't just baseball players, and it wasn't just baseball
card collecting. That kind of it didn't develop immediately, I guess,
(12:56):
is what I'm trying to say. There were other like
detours and side tracks and stuff like that. Yeah, and
they you know, these early ones kind of look like
you would think they were black and white. Sometimes they
had a cepia tone. Color. Photography wasn't really a big thing,
at least a widespread thing at this point, and so
these cards didn't last long. They faded out in sunlight
(13:18):
and just basically being you know, on planet Earth. They
would degrade because they weren't very high quality, and a
lot of times they weren't even prints. They were actual
like photographs that were glued to cardboard. So it's it's
kind of a quaint early days of baseball card kind
of thing. The Library of Congress. If you ask them,
(13:38):
they will say that the first baseball card was a
printed photograph of a baseball team that was a souvenir handout.
And I'm not one to usually quibble with a Library
of Congress, but I'm not sure I would count that
as the first baseball card. Some people do, some people don't.
I think the one from Um Snyder or Peck and
Snyder's typically the one that, as collectors think of as
(14:01):
the first one. I'm sure we'll hear from people for sure.
You so yeah, oh, I know, so Um. There are
a lot of different um eras in baseball card collecting,
and they're not they don't necessarily follow chronological order. Weirdly,
they more are referred to by where the cards came from.
(14:22):
And like I was saying, there are a lot of
blind alleys and sidetracks and just weird, weird evolutions of
baseball cards. And one of the ways that's evident is
that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century,
there were a lot of different random places that you
would get a baseball card. It wasn't standardized yet, so
(14:43):
you might get one from the magazine that you subscribe to,
or from your cigarette pack, or you bought like a
box of biscuits and a baseball baseball card fell out.
So I think I think people who collect those kind
of cards are okay with things not being particularly standardized
and kind of hurly burly instead, because that's how baseball
(15:05):
cards were kind of kind of like a train just
is kind of like chug, good chug, chug chug, with
each like additional chug. A bunch of new baseball cards
spat out in different, weird, random places from non existence,
a lot of train refs so far today, Well, there's
a lot of train stuff going on at the same time.
Sure it's of the era. Should we take a break?
(15:27):
Oh yeah, all right, I'm gonna go study trains, I guess,
so I can keep up and we'll be right back,
(15:56):
all right. So, if you're looking at a modern baseball
car card, and you know, we're not jumping forward in
time that much yet, I'm just kind of talking about
the labeling of the cards. You're gonna probably see the
company that made it. You're going to see the player's name,
maybe a collector's number on the card if there was one,
there might be some additional things on there, like you
(16:18):
know how many sets were made that year. It might
be a set name or a subset name, so you
might see something like Ed gave an example two thousand
and four Bowmen Chrome number two sixty four. Hector Himenez
is like the official sort of name of the card, right,
so what your god is? The bowman is the maker
(16:40):
of the card. Chrome is the type of card of
the addition number two sixty four. I'm if I remember correctly,
that would be Hector Jimenez. Card was two sixty four
in the set of say like three hundred or something
like that. Okay, Those tobacco sets so we were talking
about that came with cigarettes are very popular. It's called
(17:02):
the Tobacco era T sets. So for instance, a list
of the T two O six, very famous set from
American Tobacco Company. And this was for a couple of
years between O nine and nineteen eleven, and this has
the very legendary the card that you may have heard of.
Even if you know nothing about baseball cards, you've probably
(17:23):
heard of the Honus Wagner because it is I guess
not the most expensive or valuable baseball cardot all time,
but maybe the most well known, and it's certainly up there.
I think it was the first baseball card to crack
one million dollars sail, all the way back in two thousand.
But one of the reasons why it's so well known
(17:43):
is because there just weren't that many of them. The
legend goes that Honus Wagner said that he didn't well,
some people say that he was a posed to tobacco product,
so he didn't want his card being sold within packs
of cigarettes, And he may or may not have been
opposed to tobacco. He just said that he didn't want
(18:04):
his picture in cigarettes. But the real truth is probably
that he didn't like not being paid for his likeness,
which was being used to market and sell cigarettes. Now,
regardless either way, there are not that many Honus Wagner
cards T two o six Honus Wagner cards. And then
one of the other reasons that it's really valuable and
(18:26):
probably overvalued is because of a price guide from nineteen
thirty seven. Right, yeah, there was a price guide that
it seems like the author who wrote this just himself
could not find this card readily and kind of I
guess misstated it's rarity because of that, because there are
(18:47):
other much rarer cards that from those sets even then
aren't worth what the Honus Wagner's worth. And then it
just kind of became one of those things where the
legend grew of the Honus Wagner card, and it kind
of became famous invaluable because people said it was famous
invaluable right exactly because that T two O six set,
which was I think from nineteen o nine. You can
(19:11):
get cards from that same set for one hundred bucks
or less today, but then it was yes, but that
Honus Wagner sold most recently for seven point two five
million dollars in the last few years. So it really
is just basically it's it's become iconic and legendary just
because people thought it was rare, and even when they
(19:32):
found out it wasn't that rare, it doesn't matter. It's
still a Honus Wagner card. Should I buy you a
T two O six card for eighty bucks online? Sure?
A stretchy brown Stash card. Stretchy brown sash. Oh man,
I'm glad we circled back to that because you were,
like I can't. I can't hazard a guess at a
name of a player from back then, and I was
like thinking about it, but then the time had passed
(19:55):
and then bam it came back again. So it's way
Brown Stash time. Okay, So that was off the eight
minutes ago exactly. Okay, very nice way to hang onto that. See,
you don't throw away jokes, not if they're okay or better,
because you never know when it might come up. That's
exactly true, man. And that's not just the case with
jokes too, Chuck. That's the case with just information in general.
(20:16):
Something that may seem trite or boring. Even at one
moment down the road, you might be like, oh, I
know the answer to that, and then yam, someone's fallen
in love with you. Well, you know it's funny too,
is you know. I've never done improv, but I know
a lot of improvers, and they all have a little
hip pocket stuff, you know, like they're they're certainly improving,
(20:36):
but they all have their little bag of tricks that
they keep in, little gags and jokes and names. And
when we did our TV show, Caitlyn Bits, a guy
who was played our boss Steve on the show and
was one of the legit talented actors that surrounded us. Caitlyn,
I don't know if you remember this, but in one
of the episodes, she she threw out the name Mike
(20:57):
Vlasney and that's stuff with me all these years as
somebody's who's like something something Mike Lasney said? And I
asked her it just killed me for some reason. It
was just to had a funny ring to it. And
I asked her after word if she had just made
that up, and she said, uh, She's like no, She's like,
I've been using Mike Lasney for years. Good. It's a
good one. It is a good one. It's like my Todd. Yeah,
(21:17):
well you true Todd. But now you've got stretchy black
what black brown brown stash. It's good stuff. Hang on
to it, thank you. Ironically, he was blonde. Oh wow,
See this story gets richer and richer. Yes, and so um,
let's get back to baseball cart shall we? Yeah? Um?
(21:40):
Oh well hell go ahead? No, no, go ahead? Uh.
The T two O six was one of the ones
we were mentioned with the Honus Wagner Uh card. Included
was one of the last tobacco sets and then World
War One comes along and kind of puts a halt
on production, because it seemed like warriors back then put
a halt like World Wars put a stop on lots
(22:04):
of production of things that weren't needed when you needed
other things. Not to mention the nineteen nineteen flu pandemic too, right, Sure,
So I saw Chuck somewhere the time between basically nineteen
hundred and World War One as the golden era of
baseball card collecting between Waight Ears nineteen hundred and basically
(22:25):
nineteen seventeen nineteen sixteen. Oh. Interesting. Yeah, I thought that
was interesting too, because again, these are the ones that
are like, they follow very little rhyme or reason, like
Nibisco was putting out like baseball cards. It's just weird. Yes,
they called they're notated with the D and that's your
bread baseball cards, yeah, or bread like products whatever. Um.
(22:50):
But apparently that's the golden age of baseball card collecting.
I disagree. I think when I was collecting, it's the
golden age of baseball card collecting. But it could just
be my skewed opinion, your first person point of view, right.
But the thing is, around this time, people started saying like, oh, kids,
maybe we should stop forcing them to start work at five,
(23:10):
and maybe we should have a problem with them smoking tobacco.
And about this time, people said, well, these kids are
starting to really get into this baseball card thing. They
like baseball, they like things that remind them of baseball,
so hence their fascination with baseball cards. But I don't
really think we should be pushing old judge cigarettes on
them so that they can get their baseball cards. What
(23:31):
if we package these things with candy? And here was
a huge, huge step in the evolution of baseball cards. Yeah,
they said, why try and sell cigarettes to ten year olds.
They shouldn't start smoking till they're twelve, so let's start
putting them in caramel packages and things like that, and
that kind of birth, some real kind of fun oddity,
(23:54):
is at least fun to me. Yeah. I don't know
how the baseball card community looks at this. I can't
stand it. Oh really, I like things to be standardized
and follow like a set of rhyme and reason. So
sometimes these things were round, which is kind of fun,
I think. And then sometimes, like in the case of
the nineteen twenty American caramel or caramel set, they were
(24:15):
die cut cards that were just in the shape of
the player. It was a little cut out of a player. Ah, well,
hurt your sensibilities. I just don't like it. No, I
don't like it at all. It's just too random. I
think it's neat. I know, and I can understand how
some whoult would. It's my own foible for sure. Yeah,
I got you. So it was basically like the Wild
(24:37):
West for baseball cards all the way until about World
War two, and actually passed World War two. But a
little after World War two, Bowman, a gum maker, started
taking over baseball cards. They started adding baseball cards sets,
they started kind of professionalizing the whole thing, and in
(24:57):
very short order, another gum maker called Tops said, oh,
I like what Bowman's doing. They're really like increasing their sales.
Let's see if we can figure out how to build
a monopoly out of this, And they actually did. Tops
had a monopoly on baseball cards, like literally, you could
not get a baseball card that wasn't a Tops baseball
(25:18):
card from about the early fifties till about nineteen eighty.
They were all that they had because Tops had figured
out that they could go to individual players and say, hey,
sign this contract so that we're the only one who
can reproduce your likeness, and we'll give you X number
of dollars every year. And players would be like, sure,
why not, I don't have any allegiance to bowmen or
(25:39):
flear or anything like that. And Tops just dominated the
market somehow survived an FTC investigation. They were a literal monopoly.
They would get sued all the time, and they just
withstood all of it until finally the players Union was like, hey, guys,
these other companies are willing to pay way more stops
(26:00):
signing these Tops contracts. And it wasn't until the players
themselves stop signing these contracts with Tops that the monopoly
ended up getting broken up in that way. Yeah, I
think it was just kind of what you did, Like
you got you went to Major League Baseball and you
signed with Tops. Was just part of your deals, like
signing with an agent or whatever. Right now, were there
(26:21):
not any other companies making cards for nobody baseball players?
Even I don't know if they were for nobody. The
way that Ed puts it is that basically you had
to not even be a prospect in the minor leagues,
like maybe a mascot level player, right. I'm just wondering
if there were any other Baseball cards aside from Tops
(26:44):
during that thirty year period. Surely there was something, right,
not that I understand. There were like football cards, there
were hockey cards, but Baseball seems to have been totally
locked down by Tops, essentially because think about it. If
you're safe fleer arrival the Tops and you want to
put out a baseball card set, but you can only
sign seven players out of all the players in Major
(27:06):
League Baseball, Like, you're not even gonna go to the trouble.
Nobody's gonna buy it, right, right, So I would guess No,
I think that it was basically just Tops this whole time,
as just exclusively with baseball, is all I'm saying. Well,
what was flearmaking? Were they making other sports cards? Probably
hockey and football, Yeah, and maybe basketball, because those those
(27:26):
cards have been I think hockey cards were almost as
old as baseball cards. They were put in tobacco packs too. Yeah.
You know what's funny is now that I'm remembering my
pseudo collection, I had a few NBA cards and a
few NHL cards in there too. Everybody's I know. I
remember seeing the random toothless hockey player. Uh, you know
(27:51):
mulitied toothless hockey player. Yep, that is standard issue stuff
right there. It's pretty good. And I also get the
same neural pathways when I opened that box. It's like
it's the best. That's pretty strong stuff. One other thing
I ran across the chuck is that, ironically, there's a
company from Italy called Panini, and Panini has a lock
(28:13):
on the licenses for NBA and NFL until twenty twenty six.
So Tops got beaten at their own game. They can't
produce an NFL or NBA official cards until twenty twenty six.
Now we look at you, Panini locking down the sandwich
making process and the football cards right this. There's a
(28:35):
little sidebar it included which I think is interesting, which
was that you know you mentioned I don't know if
you actually said it, but Flear sued Tops in nineteen
seventy five, and a lot of case law has to
do with baseball cards, including a very interesting side note
that the whole idea of name and likeness and like
(28:56):
owning your image and being able to profit from your
own image and keeping people from profiting from your image
came from a baseball card case in what nineteen fifty three? Correct, Yeah,
Halean Laboratories, which is a terrible name for a gummaker,
but that's who they were. They bought Bowman and Tops
was poaching their players that they had contracts with, and
(29:17):
they sued Tops, and Tops argued, look, Bowman doesn't own
the person's likeness. Yeah, they have a contract with the player.
But what the player was saying is I won't sue
you Bowman for making a baseball card with my likeness.
Not that I'm giving you any ownership over my likeness.
I'm just waiving my right to sue you with this contract.
(29:38):
And Top said, you can't see us because you don't
own the likeness. You can go sue the player, but
you can't see us. And the court said, you know what,
You're absolutely right. It resides in the person, and the
person not only owns their likeness, but they're able to
sell it or lease it to third parties. And it
was all because of baseball cards. It took a little
while to develop. Remember our legal precedent episode. Oh yeah,
(30:00):
I think the decision came from the Second Circuit Court
of Appeals. Um, so it wasn't binding in other courts,
but it was eventually cited as precedent and spread and
spread and spread, and then in the seventies it was
like a thing. Yeah, and boy, talk about a monumental case. Yeah,
especially these days. I mean, they're the human beings are
brands these days with influencers and not just influencers but
(30:23):
I hate even saying that word, but just celebrity image
or whatever, and that that was a huge, huge case.
And I think, you know, one of the most important
reasons is it kept like it meant you could profit.
But I think the big thing was it kept other
people from being able to steal your image. So if
you just want to be like a George Clooney class
(30:46):
act and not put your face on a he probably
does those ads in Japan and stuff. Though, I bet
he does presso adds here, Oh does he? Okay, it's
so weird. It's so random because it's like the only
thing he does. Yeah, that is weird. Maybe he's just
into it. I guess I just think classy. I think Clooney,
that's it just comes out of my mouth. He's cold. Uh.
(31:10):
Should we take another break on that wonderful joke? Yes,
all right, we'll talk about the kind of getting into
the modern era right after this. Okay, Chuck, So this
(31:44):
guy is my guy that we're going to talk about.
His name is cy Burger. I say Burger. He codified
things and you love him for it. He did. That's
absolutely right. He said, Hey, everybody, let's start acting like
we actually care about the product that we're putting out
and standardizing some of this stuff. Let's get the look
up up to date. Let's, oh, I don't know, put
(32:05):
the logo of the team on the card, right, Let's
start using color in normal, coherent fashion, like we are
all sane. Um. So, Cyberger he was the one. He
worked for tops appropriately enough, and he did such an
amazing job that he's set just basically standards that are
still around today. Yeah. The those stats on the back
(32:28):
that you love so much, that was Cyberger, the little
printed signature Cyberger. Yeah, well he wasn't signing them Cibergers
a card. The size, the three and a half by
two and a half size became standard in nineteen fifty
seven because of Cyburger. Well that was a cost saving
(32:49):
measure too, right, Well, yeah, I mean it, it definitely
made sense because I think it just that was less
less waste right on the printing sheets. Yeah, you could
just more cards per sheet, so you could save some
money with printing. When you're printing millions of cards, you know,
the thing is, Chuck is I think also that's another
reason why I love baseball cards starting in this era,
(33:11):
because they're all the same size too. It's very much
like my love for the right size g I Joes
and not the overly large, weirdo g I Joes of
the days of your as you hunting me, well, I
mean I think there's I'm not like particularly m OCD,
(33:33):
but I have a little bit of that stuff. We've
talked about it before, and a stacked thing. If there
are irregularities in that stacked thing, it drives me crazy.
So I kind of get where you're coming from there. Yeah.
Imagine like a die cut arm sticking out of your
Oh my god, you know how I feel. Oh geez.
(33:55):
One of the other things about Cyberger's success, Chuck, is
that it was his transition. This is the nineteen fifty
two set that his first that debuted his work. I
guess the first one. Yeah, he was so successful that
TOPS was like, oh my gosh, like this is amazing.
Our sales are through the roof. Let's release a second
set in nineteen fifty two. We'll catch everybody just in
(34:17):
time for the playoffs, so they'll be all super psyched
about that, and we'll just sell even more than we
normally do. And they missed the mark. I think they
came out a little late. They missed playoff fever and
instead ran into base or football fever, so people weren't
really interested. So they actually took all of these leftover
remnant This is like the et the game version of
(34:39):
baseball cards. They took all of these just overstocked leftover sets,
and they warehoused them for a few years, I think,
and finally in nineteen sixty they're like, we're paying for
these cards that we're never going to do anything with.
Let's just put them on a barge and dump them
in the ocean. And they did. They dumped him in
(35:00):
the ocean. It's so strange, like little decisions like that,
like not to bury them, not to incender him to
dump them in the ocean, so yeah, not to go
through them and maybe pick out ones that might be valuable. Exactly, Well,
that's the thing they didn't know that any of these
things were going to be valuable, but it just so
happened that the most expensive, the most valuable baseball card
(35:20):
of all time, the nineteen fifty two Mickey Mantle, is
down there at the bottom of the sea in droves.
But because they're at the bottom of the sea, the
ones that are top sides still are incredibly rare and
incredibly valuable, so much so that the nineteen fifty two
Mickey Mantle sold for twelve point six million dollars last year. Yeah,
(35:44):
that was a nine point five on the condition scale,
and it is not even a rookie card, but it
is that first TOPS card that had that sort of
modern baseball look in nineteen fifty two. Yeah, so it's considered,
you know, or at least valued as the most expensive
you know, topsnas Wagner even Yeah, yeah, it topped Honas Wagner,
(36:08):
and I think the nineteen thirty three Babe Ruth is
third for most valuable card, right, which makes sense. So
now we're going into the next era of trading and collecting,
which was Hey, you kids, I know you're kind of
into this thing, but you know, you put them in
your bicycle spokes and you play games with them, and
(36:29):
you handle them and muck them up. Adults are going
to start collecting these and keep them in pristine condition
because there's an actual trade and buy and sell market here.
And we'll even have a convention. And the very first
West Coast Sports Collector's Convention was in Brea, California in
nineteen sixty nine at a guy's house named Jim Knowle
(36:53):
because he was there wasn't enough people basically, I think
a couple of dozen people, and he was a prominent
collector who I guess had a good enough house. Uh.
They point to nineteen eighty eleven years later is the
first true convention, and then I guess they held it
at a hotel, the National Sports Collector's Convention, and you
(37:14):
know they were there between that time, there were little
shows here and there. But they point to nineteen eighties
the first like real deal convention. Yeah, totally. And I
saw an article on counterfeit cards, which we'll talk about
in a little while, but just right off the bat,
I mean, within a year or two of that first convention,
counterfeit I think Pete Rose rookie cards started showing up. Yeah,
(37:35):
just almost immediately. But it's like you said, like it
went from just something that kids got, as you know,
kind of like um, imagine collecting ring pops. Okay, okay,
it's virtually the same thing, where like like kids would
just go buy it and you know, mess around with
it for a little while, and then that was it. It
(37:56):
It was discarded. Whatever. Imagine if a adults suddenly were like,
we want to buy those, Sorry, you don't have adult money.
Maybe you shouldn't have stopped working starting at five years
back and you would have adult money, but you don't.
So now these things are really going to go up
in price. And it didn't happen immediately chucked, but slowly
but surely, starting around nineteen eighty and then onward, it
(38:20):
went from a hobby or something fun for kids in
grown up to like to something incredibly amped up and
almost on cocaine. Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it,
but I think I agree the market is generally driven
(38:40):
by exactly what you think, which is rarity, which we'll
talk about, and condition, because you know, like I said,
kids actually played with the cards and things like that
and traded them and touched them, so a lot of
these cards were not as valuable because they were mucked up.
Sometimes these little cards were designed to be folded as
(39:02):
little stand up things, and like, this is one of
the things that can drive a rarity. So if you
have a card that was supposed to be folded in
half as a little stand up tent or something like
a little pop up, but you never did that, it's
like the grido that you never opened and played with
as a kid or whatever. That means. It's a low supply.
It's just very simple supply and demand kind of thing.
(39:25):
And Ed very stutey points out it's not exclusively but
a lot of baby baby boomers and their kids are
the ones that are really into this community, and they
created a very big demand in those two decades in
the seventies and eighties, and manufacturers were like, hey, we
can make more money here, so then they ruined it
(39:47):
by over producing. In the nineties, Upper Deck came along
and did a really good job of debuting like next
level cards that just looked awesome. The photos were better,
they were on higher qualit card stock as opposed to
just like junkie cardboard. Sometimes they were hand autographs. Those
are the really really expensive ones now, and they would
(40:10):
include little bits of like a shard of a baseball,
a splinter of a baseball bat that was used by
a player, or a little tiny little thing of a
baseball jersey. So these little extras started popping up, and
it was really cool, but they not upper deck, but
just the market was flooded overall, and there were just
too many baseball cards. Yeah, there's one with like a
(40:30):
lock of Jose Canseco's hair. Just oh, really, is that
one you do? That would not surprise you. It wouldn't
me either, man, after reading this, I had no idea
that this was the state that baseball cards were in.
But they just embed the weirdest stuff into cards now
and it makes them just incredibly valuable. So what's happened
is the companies that make cards have they used to
(40:54):
just make cards? They said, oh, there's X number of
Major League Baseball players, we're gonna make x number of cards.
And then for some of the ones that are stars,
well we'll put them in a different outfit. We'll say, here,
hold this feather duster like a bat for this one.
We'll use like slightly different colors and things like that
for a few of them. So and those will be
produced in you know, a little lower quantities, but they
(41:18):
it's just been so juiced now that they're like, yeah,
give me a little bit of Brett Farve's game Jersey
and we're gonna embed it in a card and there's um,
you know, we're gonna make two of them. And what's
interesting is they put them in packs. Still, it's not
like you can only you have to walk on foot
to the company's factory and buy this thing with gold bullion.
(41:40):
They put them in packs, but then they automatically become
incredibly valuable on the secondary market, and so people buy
packs in the hopes of like they're about to like
strike it rich because there's a million dollar cards stuck
in there. Yeah, it's I mean, it's hard not to
be a little cynical as a as a non enthusiast
and be like they they kind of ruined it in
(42:00):
a way in my opinion, because it's you know, the
old days, it was like you you would open a
card or open a pack or whatever, and it was that, um,
what you wanted to find was a player that ended
up being really good and you're like, wow, I've got
this thing now of this Ken Griffey Junior rookie card,
while they kind of knew he was going to be
because of his dad and his legacy or whatever. But
(42:21):
you know what I mean, like Mark the player that
kind of yeah, sure, why not Mark Grace? Is that
the only baseball player you can think of? No, No,
Mark Grace's I think eighty eight rookie card was just yeah,
and I interest it was very sought after at the time. Okay,
I thought you just like pulled that out of your
back end. I thought that was pretty good. Oh thanks, um.
(42:41):
But anyway, now it's become like almost like gambling, like
buying a like looking for a lottery ticket or something
that's a winner. And because of that, there have been
rico anti trafficking laws and like lawsuits brought up saying
the same thing, which is like you're kind of running
a gambling business these days. And all those lawsuits have failed.
(43:02):
But Ed pointed out there was one against Panini just
like a few months ago this year. So people are
still trying to to paint them as you know, gamblers
or not gamblers, but whatever. It's called casinos, no lottery
ticket printers, card sharks. No, that's not it either. You
(43:25):
know what I mean, everyone knows what I mean. I
think the card sharks so one of the things that's
lost though, chuck it. I don't mean to get cynical about,
you know, the present or the future in favor of
the past either, but it's hard not to because as
a kid, you could go to the grocery store on
your bike and buy some packs of baseball cards and
(43:46):
go have fun opening them. Good luck finding baseball cards
in the store these days. No, really, you, yes, you
go to a really well outfitted hobby shop, or you're
just buying it online basically immediately from the secondary market.
And yes, you can still have the thrill of like
buying an unopened pack or whatever, but you have to
buy it online and wait for it to arrive in
(44:07):
the mail. And it's just it's just a different thing
to me. I guess it's not necessarily worse, it's just
the reality now, but I just feel like kids in particular,
and then also like people who just don't have nearly
as much income are having trouble keeping up. You can't
buy baseball cards unless you're fairly well off these days,
(44:28):
because the possibility of buying a really valuable one is
very high, or getting a really valuable one, and then
you can just buy valuable ones right out of the
gate too, off of the internet, So it just seems
different to me. Well, it's it's less magical, for sure,
and it is hard not to say that it's worse. Yeah,
(44:51):
go ahead and say it. Sorry, everybody. We try not
to be terribly opinionated, but this one, this one really
was pretty opinionated if you think about it. Yeah, you know,
we talked about rookie cards. They're usually the most valuable
and sought after, and one of the reasons is because,
like I was mentioning earlier, you don't know necessarily you
(45:11):
might get a King Griffey Jr. That you have a
pretty good idea that he's going to be a great
player because of his family, but usually it's like, well,
you know, baseball is a hard sport and a lot
of really good prospects don't pan out, so you don't
know for sure if a player is gonna pan out
and be a hot commodity as a baseball card. So
that's why rookie cards are worth more. And then also
(45:31):
Ed points out too, there's just it's sort of the tradition,
like the rookie card is more valuable because we say
it's more valuable. It's not necessarily because it's the rarest
thing out there, right, it's just very collectible. Yeah, and
then Chuck, we talked a little bit or I mentioned
counterfeit cards. Yeah, being a thing. I mean, they were
a thing back in the day when you know, the
(45:53):
first convention started. Now that cards have gotten like ultra valuable,
the counterfeit are becoming even more difficult to detect, in
part because it's just worth the effort now because of
the payoff. And then secondly because the technology to make
really good fake cards is becoming more widespread and cheaper,
(46:16):
so there's more people putting more time into counterfeit cards.
So as a result, there's um in a cottage industry
of basically valuators and what's the word where you verify indicators. Yes,
authenticators has grown up as well, and there's one company
(46:37):
called Professional Sports Authenticator. They're not the only ones. I
think Beckett who used to make my I think still
do make my beloved Beckett price guides they also authenticate too,
But these there's a need has developed for professionals who
employ experts to look at these things say yes, this
thing is for real and all the and by the way,
(46:58):
it's also a nine in mint condition. Basically, I'm surprised
they haven't started putting like a you know, a chip
or a little stripe that the money has the little
when you hold it up to the light, you know,
stuff like that to legitimize it. Because it's such a
big money industry. I guess maybe the Professional Sports Authenticator
(47:22):
company that's a great interest in that not happening because
it would well, I wouldn't drive him out of business
because of all the previous cards, I guess, but I'm
surprised there isn't something like that embedded in the card
these days. I think that they're the really high value
ones do have some sort of security measures. I know
they have things like holograms and foil like printing and
(47:44):
stuff like that to duplicate. It is hard to duplicate,
but it is possible too, especially if you're not a
professional authenticator. There are it's probably harder to detect. But
I think if you are a professional, it's probably not
that hard. Like I said, for example, um on, I
think a PSA slab so if you if you have
(48:05):
a card that the PSA is authenticating, they encase it
in plastic and basically say like this is forever more verified.
This card is verified. They call them slabs that you
can buy um on PSA slabs. It has like their
patent number for the case that they use, and there's
there's a counterfeiter out there who uses the same patent number,
(48:29):
same thought and everything embossed on that plastic case, but
they forgot the period after pat And that's the way
that you tell that it's a counterfeit. Everything else is
like that, amazingly well done. And instead of spending so
much time trying to rip people off, yeah, it seems
like you have enough ingenuity to make money, you know,
(48:51):
doing something else. Yeah, you're good enough to be a counterfeit.
Or maybe it's the thrill of yeah crime or something.
I don't know. I think for some people, crime is
very romantic, especially baseball counterfeiting very romantic. The last thing
I have is just a kind of cool little footnote
that Ed points out, which is in a lot of
trading markets, the or collectible trading markets, the rarity and
(49:14):
value comes sometimes for mistakes and errors, like the stamp
that is misprinted, or the java that looks like it
had an erection that they quickly like stopped on the
assembly line. Not always the case with baseball, and there
are exceptions, but generally baseball card errors are not so valuable.
(49:37):
There is at least one exception that I came across,
um Billy Ripken, Cal Ripken's brother, his nineteen eighty nine
Flear card. He's holding a bat and on the bottom
of the bat written it looked like a sharpie it
said F face, but it was all spelled out. It
was not And he basically just trolled the Fleer company
(50:00):
and they printed it. No one noticed it for a while,
and they finally I think, I'm not sure what they
did with it, but that's a very highly sought after
card too. The face. Yeah, they call it the Billy
Ripken F eighty nine Fleer or something like that. Oh wow,
I love that. The triple F. Yeah, yeah it is.
I didn't notice that third F. You got anything else?
(50:21):
I got nothing else. This was fun. I hope we
got it mostly right. Yeah, and don't forget. I mean, like,
there's podcasts out there dedicated to baseball card collecting. We're
just doing a general view of it. So if you
like it, go seek out some of those baseball card
podcasts and enjoy those as well. And since I just
said that, of course it's time for a listener mayl.
(50:41):
I'm gonna call this a follow up on them the
Catherine the first lineage. Remember I couldn't quite remember all
that stuff from the Amber Room. Yeah, from the Amber Room.
And I'm a big huge fan of the TV show
The Great and it comes back first season three, I
believe in May Okay, So it's also a good way
(51:02):
to plug that show because this will come out kind
of closest to them. This from Rebecca. Hey, guys, been
listening for quite a few years now. Very informative and
I'm not generally one to write in with corrections, but
the Russian succession in the Amber Room areas such a
good story could be an entire episode. Peter the Great
imprisoned his son an heir, after a failed revolt, and
(51:22):
he died after torture. After Peter died, the crown bounced
around various family members, including the wife that survived him,
the Peasant, to born Catherine, the First, for whom the
Katherine Palace is named for. Finally, Elizabeth secured the throne,
ruled for many years. She apparently lived extravagantly with something
like two hundred shoes or I guess one hundred pairs,
(51:46):
never wearing the same dress twice. But she never married,
so to ensure the succession, she named her nephew her heir,
and also arranged his marriage to a German prince's named Sophia,
who converted to Russian Orthodox and took the name Katherine. Wow. So,
after Elizabeth died, her nephew was so unpopular that only
(52:07):
a few months later he was thrown overthrown by his wife,
who ruled is Katherine the Second aka the Great? And
that is wherein the TV show takes place. Had a
chance to visit the Catherine Palace a few years ago.
See the recreation of the amber room. It's smaller than
I imagine, but still beautiful. Picture frames and tables are
also made with amber mosaic. Thanks for the podcast. P S.
(52:31):
If you're not ps, you're not supposed to take pictures
in the room, but I attempted to sneak a pick
before I was called in sculpted. Oh wow, lucky, just
scolded and not thrown into the good Rebecca. I'm pretty
good about rule following in those cases because I like
to I'm a rule follower generally, but I snuck one
photo in of one of the Elvis's jumpsuits in Graceland.
(52:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, you know. I was like, I did
a quickie and that was it. I wasn't trying to
get too greedy, but I had. And you took a
photo too, you may said on his bed. I think
I told you on the seven forty seven and set
the alarment. Oh I don't think I remember that story.
Did you get off that plane pretty quick? That's so
(53:15):
just one thing that we're talking about Russia. I want
to make a correction from way back in the past.
I think in our Louisiana purchase episode, I mentioned that
NATO is fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine. Right,
I grossly misused the term proxy war. I did not
(53:36):
know that proxy war in every case means that the
person fighting the proxy war started it. I do not
think that NATO started this war at all. I think
Russia was the aggressor, and I am definitely not pro
Russia in any way, shape or form. As a matter
of fact, I have a tremendous amount of admiration for
the Ukraine, and I hope that dumb American politics don't
(53:58):
get in our way of continuing to support Ukraine. F YI,
yeah you were. You were very misunderstood, and I felt
terrible for you because we got quite a few letters
and that is is not what you meant. But also
I learned my lesson too. I should probably double check
um big words before I used them. So yeah, apologies
to all um Ukrainian Canadian listeners. Apparently there's a bunch
(54:20):
of you um for any offense I caused. Yeah, uh,
good stuff, Yeah, good stuff. Indeed, if you want to
get in touch with us, like any of our Ukrainian
Canadian listeners or Rebecca, you can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should
(54:40):
Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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