Price Guides
When The Hobby became serious
Price Guides
When I grew up, I was fascinated with baseball card price guides.
Not just the cards themselves, mind you. The price guide was as much a part of the experience as holding the cards themselves.
I spent hours pouring through the listings in books like this:
I’m pretty sure that my parents gave me a collector’s kit like this at some point in time:
I suppose that means I can blame them.
The thing, though, is that the price guide world completely changed the way that kids collected and thought about cards.
It wasn’t about what the cards looked like, the strange stories on the back, or the stats. In fact, when I was a kid there were card sets with backs that were utterly illegible, such as the awful 1990 Bowman:
The days of flipping cards, sticking them together with rubber bands, putting them in bike spokes, and trading them as if you were a general manager were long gone. Everybody was interested in card sleeves and price guides, and the purpose of the Hobby seemed to be holding on to cards and watching them magically increase in value.
In hindsight, I can say that we were absolutely missing out. And I think the death of “collecting” — not as an investment, but for the joy of the cards themselves — is largely missing in the industry.
As for the card backs? If I were buying packs of 1955 Topps as a kid, I’d probably pay more attention to the backs than the fronts:
The Washington team was called the Nationals in 1955? Baseball Ref lists them as the Nationals but everywhere else I look called them the Senators. I remember them being called Nats in headlines and such as a shortened nickname.
AT age six in 1949 I began collecting baseball Bowman cards and Topps in 1951. What great fun, match flipping, leaners, off the wall…living on Bedford Avenue in Sheepshead Bay just a half hour ride from Ebbets Field where my brother and I would be driven to by our dad on his 1937 Dodge auto. 65 cents Bleacher seats.
In 1978 just prior to the first Price Guide Baseball publication I sold my collection of cards (1948- 1957) totaling over 4,300 to a dealer for $1,500. Mantle, Mays, Robinson so many cards that still did not acquire super values at that time. But did BOOM in value only a few years later.
So grateful to have experienced the thrill as a Kid purchasing for a penny one card with bubble gum in one wrapper or a pack of five cards with gum for a nickel in its own wrapper and thinking which player would I be owning and about to trade with.
Those were the days my friend I thought they’d never end but linger in my mind all these scores of years later.