I don’t think you can talk about baseball cards in aggregate. We have seen a price spike over the last six months, but most of that is concentrated in certain big name stars. Major portions of the collecting market have showed minimal if any gains (read 19th century). I don’t think the spike was attributed to people working from home during the pandemic, or government stimulus checks. I think it was a result of a growing belief amongst some well healed parties that sports cards are an asset class that they need to add to their portfolios. These people obviously have deep pockets so even if the market turns down some there will be no reason for them to dump anything. On the contrary, as long as they believe that their initial premise was correct, they will be adding to their portfolios during any pullbacks effectively placing a floor under the market.
As for inflation, it’s been a long time since we have had any significant inflation. I think there is a lot of noise in month to month numbers and I wouldn’t jump to annualizing them. If we are in fact coming out of a pandemic (hard to believe that we are out of the woods yet with what is going on in India and Brazil and the potential for significant viral mutations there, and the non-trivial percentage of idiots in this country who refuse to be vaccinated) then I would expect a few months of higher CPI readings dropping off later in the year, basically what a lot of economists are now predicting.
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