The Birth Of The Bubble

How the baseball card bubble came to be

The Birth Of The Bubble

Ever wonder why baseball cards exploded in the 1980s?

I have. And the answers aren’t easy to come by.

As you recall, we took a quick look at this period a few days ago:

It’s time, though, to jump into the deeper end of the pool.

There’s a reason why advertisements like this didn’t last long:

From Asbury Park Press (New Jersey), March 30, 1980 page D17

In fact, as unfortunate as it was for this company, the price they offered for the 1952 Mantle in this late March 1980 advertisement had been overcome by events only weeks earlier.

It apparently all goes back to the March 1980 Philadelphia Card and Sports Memorabilia Show. At least, this is what Card Sharks, a 1994 journalistic inquiry into the muddy origins of Upper Deck, pinpoints as the beginning of the crazy period of baseball card speculation. This is how Pete Williams described the sale of a number of 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle cards at that show:

From Card Sharks, pages 47-48. Apologies for the low quality pictures.

Now, Card Sharks, like The Card and a number of other inquiries into the hobby, is a pretty controversial book. I should also note that I haven’t been able to find precisely the newspaper articles Williams alludes to. However, I did find a few interesting ones from that month.

The A&M Trading Card Shop in Allentown, Pennsylvania advertised that it would pay up to $2,000 for a (presumably prestine) version of the card:

From The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), March 6, 1980, page C18

Note that this is quite a bit more than the $700 cited above — and we’re talking about a cash payment here, too.

This short article from Missouri indicates that it sold for as much as $1,500 at the time:

And, just in case you were under the impression that this was a fad, there was an article for a local baseball card shop right underneath this article:

I get the feeling that there were more regional baseball card shops in 1980 than there are today.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a feature piece on baseball cards shortly before the convention took place:

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 9, 1980, pages 1-B and 4-B

But we’ve got a problem here.

The Philadelphia Inquirer claims the 1952 Topps card sold for $170 or so. And yet, that Allentown, PA advertisement from three days earlier was offering $2,000.

After the convention took place, hopeful collectors were still sending in classified ads like this:

From Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 29, 1980, page 20

You’d have to be completely oblivious to what was happening in the Hobby to fall for this one. This guy was offering only $500 for a mint copy of a card that had just sold for $3,000 in an open auction.

The truth is that the card show might have just been a sign of what was really happening in the industry. Information was at a premium, and price discrepancies were absolutely huge. It’s possible that the demand was there all along, but that communication issues were leading to pricing uncertainty.

Of course, $3,000 in 1980 dollars still looks like a bargin today.