"Vintage sports cards are becoming a smaller, but still valuable ’boutique’ segment"

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Interesting article from the Athletic:

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/662...-cards-market/

In July, Collectors Holdings executive Ryan Hoge said that its SGC grading division would become more of a “boutique grading brand” specializing in vintage cards — generally considered cards issued before 1974.

That raises the question, is the vintage market itself just a small, boutique corner of the ever expanding sports card universe?

Positing that would have been heresy 20 years ago, when the sports card market was ruled by vintage. The market then was rooted in memorabilia, experiencing the legends of the past by possessing the cardboard tokens that were printed during their heydays. Today’s sports card market is dominated by a term coined by the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s: Nostalgia futures. People seek to buy tomorrow’s legends today.

In July, nearly 70 percent of industry leader PSA’s (Professional Sports Authenticator) sports card grades were issued on cards from the 2020s. (Collectors Holdings is also the parent company of PSA.) Sports cards from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s combined for just 5.8 percent of PSA’s total sports grades. For SGC, the figure was 25.5 percent, but SGC’s share of the entire grading market in July was 6.7 percent, according to GemRate, which tracks grading trends in the card market. Other graders – Beckett and CGC – were each under 7 percent vintage sports.

Not only is vintage a small subset of the sports card market, but today the majority of all cards graded are TCG (trading card game) cards, such as Pokemon. According to GemRate’s data, 58 percent of the total 1.588 million cards graded in the most recent 30-day sample were TCG.

“Vintage is still the foundation of a hobby,” said Matt Clark, operations director at REA. “There’s obviously a lot of modern cards, a lot of ripping boxes and packs. Chasing big cards. To a lot of people, especially from the outside looking in, that can be a little more flashy and maybe a little more exciting.”

Clark said that while the quantity of modern and ultra-modern (active player) cards is enormous given the variations just for one player in one year, “the value ratio in vintage is a lot higher.” So the market share of vintage cards measured in dollars dramatically outpaces its share of total cards.

“I do think vintage is the boutique part of the hobby,” said Drew Hester, COO of Greg Morris Cards, which specializes in selling ungraded cards on consignment. “But this is great if you’re an investor and collector. It means that obviously the supply is going to decrease. But if you have the card, that’s good for you. No new one is coming out.”

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Hester added that there is still supply coming on the market due to the price increases, which entice people to sell. And cards also get passed on in estates to heirs who may not have a passion for the hobby and thus look to sell these collections. He added that, “Moms throw cards out still” (or sell them for a pittance at garage sales).

John Palomares, the vice president of New Jersey-based Just Collect, an online largely vintage auction house, said he worried about the sustainability of the vintage market when he first started working for the company nearly two decades ago in data entry.

“Well, 18 years later, I’m now the vice president of the company and just today a gentleman in his 60s dropped off a fresh collection of ungraded Mickey Mantle cards from the 1950s through 1960s.

“Not only are there still fresh collections out there, but a lot of vintage ungraded cards are still being cycled through card shows like The National, The Philly Show, The Dallas Show, etc. It doesn’t seem that this is going to slow down at all. The vintage card industry is on fire.”

Palomares adds a “high percentage” of people looking to sell their collections to Just Collect have cards that are technically vintage but not the more high-value vintage from the 1960s and earlier. So that Mantle find, which included cards of Ted Williams, Yogi Berra, Bob Gibson and the prized 1968 Topps Nolan Ryan rookie, is rare.

An exception in the 1970s are the 1971 black-bordered (and thus highly condition sensitive) Topps baseball cards. Even unheralded players like Montreal Expos pitcher Carl Morton sell for five figures in Gem Mint condition. Gem Mint cards of current star players are so plentiful that they’re often barely worth more than the cost of grading. (These are the players’ “base” cards, not other variations that are purposely printed in more limited numbers by the card companies.)

But while the vintage market dominates the hobby when it comes to value, finding cards to buy as a collector can be difficult outside of the biggest national and regional shows. The Athletic visited the Garden State Trading Card Show in Secaucus on Labor Day weekend. The show was jam packed with attendees and over 100 dealer tables that spilled from the main room into the hotel hallways. But there were just a handful of vintage dealers. And many were using their best cards as just window dressing to attract vintage buyers. These cards, including a prized Wilt Chamberlain rookie in a PSA 6 grade (Excellent-Mint) condition, had no prices and were not actually for sale. The reason? They’re expected to only go up in value.

On Saturday, The Athletic visited CardVault by Tom Brady at New Jersey’s American Dream mall. The store, which has six locations and counting, had its grand opening in New Jersey in the spring. Only one pre-1980 card was for sale on this day, a 1970 Thurman Munson rookie card in SGC 3 (Very Good) condition.

Store employee Josh Finkelstein said people regularly ask for vintage cards but they are hard to buy and easy to sell. So they don’t last long on the shelves. He said the vast majority of his inventory is “from 2020 on.”

REA’s Clark sees vintage as a port in the storm of highly volatile prices in the more populated parts of the market.

“Appreciation tends to be much more steady, incremental. You see bursts here and there. And do you see stuff drop in price here and there, too? Yes. But those down periods are few and far between.”