I believe the future of the hobby depends on what you're in it for. If you're looking for your own personal collection to keep and enjoy, you're probably going to be looking to purchase from the well known dealers (Stinson, Simon, Corcoran, Keating, etc etc) and you'll be happy knowing that you have a high probability of having authentic autographs that you didn't have to see signed. If, however, you're looking to be able to flip an autograph and want the average Joe to feel comfortable buying your "product" at a higher price, then you'll probably look for the alphabet authenticators and you'll be less likely to have an authentic autograph (not all, but more will fall through the cracks due to high volume, lack of knowledge/exemplars and negligence).
For me, the future is going back to the beginning. I started out collecting hof balls and having hof'ers signed my hof book. I branched out to famous teams and famous players and deceased hof'ers, but I'm finishing up a lot of those projects and feel with the state of the hobby that I'll be going back to getting signed balls of living hof'ers. I have a backlog of players to get over the last few years and of course there's always new ones each year, so it will still be fun.
While a lot of these threads have been going on the last several days, I was reminded how much fun this hobby is by two events. The first was that I started working on getting a lot of my stuff matted and framed (about 12 new ones done so far and another 10 or so in que for the next week or so...by the way, get yourself a good frame shop that can do your matting and then wait for some good sales at any chain frame shop and you can get a lot of your stuff up on the walls, looking good, for pretty cheap). The actual process of getting your stuff matted/framed and deciding what would look good together as displayed is so enjoyable, and of course sitting back and looking at the result is priceless.
The second thing was an unsilicited copy of the SCD that showed up in the mail (3 years after discontinuing my subscription, I guess they want me back). Anyway, the magazine is smaller in size but thicker than in recent years which reminded me of the 80's when it was the size of the old Sporting News and about an inch think. Man those days were fun...getting the new issue on a Thursday and spending the next several hours looking for things for your collection. A lot of old hof'ers that would sign at shows that you could mail order (some didn't seem to come out to the West Coast so that was really cool). Fun days indeed.
Anyway, I've blathered long enough, but before I go, I have a Babe Ruth for sale...
