What would it take to collect modern cards again?

[geor952]

My main complaint with modern sets is the fact that you pay $4.00 for a pack and the cards inside, stars or commons, or worth $0.10 each. I could do without the inserts. I don't want to spend $100.00 a box and only have $20.00 worth of cards once they are opened. I don't see the appeal at all! I love the idea of Heritage, but don't know why they need inserts, autos, and relics. The packs are way too expensive due the extras.

I want Topps Heritage for a buck a pack, with 10 base cards per pack!!!!!

[drc]

I buy a pack or two at the drug store once in a while and think the cards are okay, but haven't gotten into collecting them. The Topps Heritage cards are nice, the common cards are well done. Topps Chrome is nice too and you have a very good chance of pulling a shiny refractor.

I'm all for gum, and some of the older Heritage packs did have gum.

It's true you usually don't get close to your money's worth, and 95 percent of the cards are worth pennies.

[MacDice]

I will start collecting more modern cards when the card companies produce more cards of guys that I have coached.

[7nohitter]

Originally Posted by geor952

i want topps heritage for a buck a pack, with 10 base cards per pack!!!!!

exactly!

[abothebear]

I just found out that a girl at my church has a summer job for the printing company that prints for Topps. When she realized I knew something about the hobby she asked me in a very perplexed manner, "I don't get it, we print SO many, how can they be worth anything?"

I was saddened by how easy it was to answer her. I said, "they aren't worth anything. They are worthless filler cards that come with the gamblers' chance of finding a slightly less worthless "special" insert card."

I didn't get a chance to tell her that I collect cards from a different era so I bet she left the conversation wondering why I opened with, "I was trying to get to Chicago this week to go to the national card show..."

[the Rock]

I agree with much that has been said here. It's not just the cards, their value, or lack of, cardboard type, or distribution. Unless I could look at the cards somewhat like I did as a child, the pursuit is worthless. Sports is so overexposed now that you almost can't get away from it. Nothing is left to the imagination. Now you know everything and too much about every player. I miss things like " Ned runs a Standard Oil station in the off season too" or "Al also spends part of his year doing TV repair". Real people that you could relate to.
In other words, we know too much to make modern player collecting fun again.

[DixieBaseball]

As Frank mentioned if a company would make a collectible that I could snag in a box of cereal or on the back of a Hostess Cake box, etc. then that would peak my interest. I have fond memories of collecting Kelloggs 3-D's in the 70's. I also remember going down to my local Kwik Sak and snagging a wax box for about $6-$8 as well. What a treat... When cards were .35cents to .50cents it was fun.... Bottom line for me, Kelloggs needs to get back into baseball and do a 75 player 3-D set and only offer them in boxes of cereal. Make it a collectible again...

[Brendan]

Originally Posted by the Rock

I agree with much that has been said here. It's not just the cards, their value, or lack of, cardboard type, or distribution. Unless I could look at the cards somewhat like I did as a child, the pursuit is worthless. Sports is so overexposed now that you almost can't get away from it. Nothing is left to the imagination. Now you know everything and too much about every player. I miss things like " Ned runs a Standard Oil station in the off season too" or "Al also spends part of his year doing TV repair". Real people that you could relate to.
In other words, we know too much to make modern player collecting fun again.

There is definitely a point to this. When asking people who collected 50's and 60's Topps cards as a kid why they collected them, the answer was often for the stats and the rest of the info. Nowadays we can find just about anything we want about a player.

Inserting cards into products like in the past would work fine, though now there are licensing issues that didn't exist back then. When the baseball card companies took the gum out of the packs, they took the fun out of collecting and turned it into a serious business. Good for them, but not for the collector.

[ls7plus]

It would be an extremely difficult feat to accomplish, for me. I like rarer cards of stars and HOF'ers to be, and therefore am inclined to at least take a look at such cards as Joe Mauer's Chrome Gold Refractor rookie, for example, with only 50 printed. But with that limited production comes rampant speculation, along with a lot of purely transient demand (ie., making itself felt only while the player is still not only active, but on the upside, rather than the downhill slide of his career), artificially raising the prices to rather ridiculous levels. The last time I checked, such a Mauer "rookie" was booking at around $1500 or so, which, considering the fact that he probably has around 100+ other rookie cards and that one form of disaster or another can still derail his career, seems patently absurd. Compare this price to a '68 Topps Bench, in PSA 9, at around $900, and of which there were about 90 the last time I checked the pop report. So, while I would like to keep the rarer cards, the prevailing hobby economics in this sector pretty much preclude their purchase until many years after they are initially printed, after the player has established himself as a near-certain HOF'er, and the speculative and transient demand has long since departed in favor of newer stars on the rise.

Foregoing such rarer inserts and merely printing to meet expected demand, on the other hand, pretty much insures low values in the near and distant future, which is an important factor to me, though perhaps not to others.

When I want a card of a favorite current player or players, such as one of our Tigers who are currently overperforming, I tend to go with regional cards, such as the Detroit News/Free Press issues of 2006, or the Fatheads of
2010.

I think it can be done, but it would take a very delicate balance that's not yet on the horizon. At a minimum, I think there would have to be only one or at most two licensed sets per year.

Great, thought provoking post, and one for which I certainly have no answer.

Larry

[Rich Klein]

is that we are all dinosaurs to some extent and the world has changed.

For many reasons, some of which should be self-evident such as the tecnology explosion of recent years, the ability to watch baseball on a cable baseball network and some economic reasons, the dream of having a simple base set will no longer come true.

I ran into a fomrer compatroit of mine from Beckett at Walmart yesterday and during the course of our conversation he explained to me the simple exonomic reality of the sets we all want are economic losers and the only winners for the companies are the expensive sets built around the collector/investor (My term ther) getting "Hits" from the box

We can talk all we want, but as James said earlier, unless WE actively support the products of the world such as Topps Total (I loved that product for everyone was in that product) and Upper Deck tried with something titled like Upper Deck 40 which featured every player on the 40 man rosters. They both sat on shelves and did not sell as well as we would have hoped.

Regards
Rich

[Brendan]

Originally Posted by ls7plus

It would be an extremely difficult feat to accomplish, for me. I like rarer cards of stars and HOF'ers to be, and therefore am inclined to at least take a look at such cards as Joe Mauer's Chrome Gold Refractor rookie, for example, with only 50 printed. But with that limited production comes rampant speculation, along with a lot of purely transient demand (ie., making itself felt only while the player is still not only active, but on the upside, rather than the downhill slide of his career), artificially raising the prices to rather ridiculous levels. Larry

Here's my opinion on this matter.

Let's take some anonymous player and let's see the number autographs of him in a given set. (note: I don't actually know any of these counts and I'm sure the corresponding refractors to numbering is off)

Base auto: 800
Refractor auto: 500 (numbered to 500)
xfractor auto: 250
green refactor auto: 100
blue refractor auto: 50
orange refractor auto: 25
gold refractor auto: 10
red refractor auto: 5
superfractor auto: 1

So it may seem rare when it's numbered to ten, but it's just the same as the rest of the 1,741 autographs except the border is a different color or it's shinier. I can understand why people like modern cards, as autographs and game used pieces can be interesting. However, the pull towards an artificially scarce card makes it easy to shy away.