Back on August 24, Sports Illustrated put the fading baseball card industry on life support: “The sports trading card industry is dealing with an uncomfortable present and an uncertain future,” SI intoned. “The sales of cards peaked in 1991 at $1.2 billion, according to estimates by Sports Collector’s Digest, but slid to $400 million by the turn of the century and to $200 million last year.” Take it from me — SI is right; baseball cards, once priced at a nickel a pack, now appeal to a shrinking market of grey haired oldsters who are less interested in the game than in finding a good investment. The proof, they say, is in the pricing. The last great baseball card made by the industry (according to the SI report) was ”Ken Griffey Jr.’s 1989 Upper Deck Star Rookie” — the number 1 card in Upper Deck’s inaugural set, and it fetches a pretty fair price; it can bring as much as $150 on ebay, depending on the day and buyer. But it’s more than that: you can go into any store where kids hang out and look for baseball cards and they’re not there. And if they were the kids wouldn’t buy them: the cards are too expensive. The people who make baseball cards have made a terrible mistake — their cards aren’t for kids, they’re for collectors.

But the SI report tells only a part of the story. While the appeal of baseball cards has been shrinking, the market for older cards has not, according to those card dealers who specialize in sets from eras prior to 1980 — the date that is usually given for when the market began to be saturated by an increased number of manufacturers, specialty sets and over printing. It makes sense: when card production became unlimited, card values plummeted. But the very earliest baseball cards (and the cards of the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s — the classics) actually increased in “value.” See, there’s that word. Back when I began to collect baseball cards (and I date myself here, but what the hell) I had no sense of their “value.” I bought them because they were the sole means that I had of learning a players stats — his ERA or batting average and reading the little cartoons on the back that weren’t so much funny as dumb. I stacked ‘em up, kept them in a shoebox, looked at them, smelled them. They had value outside of the nickel I paid for them.

Then baseball card price guides came along. I was well out of baseball cards then, too busy making a living to pay attention, but the appearance of these guides puzzled me and I would stand at the supermarket magazine counter and page through them, noting the ups and downs of card values. It made no sense to me and it still doesn’t. Card grading, it still seems to me, is subjective and dependent on what a dealer views as being off center or faded or . . . whatever. Yeah, okay: a tattered and water-marked 1953 Satchell Paige is not worth as much as a mint condition Satchell Paige, but some of the differences between a grade “9″ and “10″ seems arbitrary and is not so much art as fraud; a way to create a specialty out of an opinion. All of this has generated a lot of controversy, and a mini-industry of its own, which can be found on a number of baseball blogs – of which there are plenty — and which we have linked to here at CFG. (You’ll find the links over there on the right — under the category “What Your Mother Threw Away.”)

It comes down to this: I recently bought a 1953 Topps Eddie Mathews card; it’s in pretty good but not great shape — and as pretty a card as you’ll find anywhere, with a picture of Eddie as a young third baseman. I sit at my desk, when I’m working and I look at it. I’m in the habit of collecting Eddie Mathews cards, not because I’m a Boston Braves or Milwaukee Braves or Atlanta Braves fan (I’m decidely not), but because I’m an Eddie Mathews fan. I saw him play about thirty times, maybe more, and I always rooted against the teams he played for: but always for him. He’s one of the best players I ever saw play the game. He could hit and field and he seemed to play his best when I was in the stands. So I started collecting his cards. And here’s the thing. I’m not collecting his cards in order to sell them, I’m collecting them in order to have them.