Sunday Existential Crisis: Gellman vs. Beckett

I'll start by saying I'm a big fan of Sports Cards Uncensored. I haven't looked at a Beckett in years. Now that I'm significantly older than when Beckett was required monthly reading, I'm glad that folks like Gellman are out there taking Beckett behind the woodshed at every opportunity. He does it better than I ever could, with more panache and more info than I could ever bring to the table. So I got good laugh out of this post in which Gellman talks about running into a college student writing about price guides, who shows him a Beckett where he writers refer to blogs as "cesspools of misinformation" and "full of 'uneducated ranting.'" Then I got really pissed off, and now I'm finally writing about it.

To begin, if academia has taken notice of you, you have officially jumped the shark. Based on that alone I'd say Beckett has about six or seven moths left. Get those resumes ready boys and girls!

Beyond that, and has been said many times before, the Beckett print model is WAY behind the times. Magazines in general are folding, and Ebay provides real-time sales figures for every card imaginable. Their fiercest competition is FREE and updated every second. I remember few posts over at Beckett (can't find them now, d'oh) where two people went back and forth over the value of the 1986 Donruss Canseco. If I remember correctly, one guy said said the card moves at $3 on ebay, but Beckett listed the price at $6. A Beckett editor responded something like "Ha! $3 is the low book value. $6 is the high, so we are still right." Fair enough, but if you have to say your prices are accurate to within +/- 100% people will rightly question the value of the info you provide.

I honestly think that BGS graded cards started out as a valuable service to the collecting community, especially insofar as it facilitates buying high-end condition cards on the internet. When you think about it, it's a savvy adaptation to a change in the market. I don't pay much attention to condition, so I don't mess with graded cards too much, but my own anecdotal experience shows that the grading system is either busted or was always a scam. I purchased a 9.5 2007 Bowman Chrome Draft Picks David Price for about $18. The card I got has imperfections that are clearly visible, specifically a rather rough looking right edge with two tiny splinters of cardboard hanging off. If that's "Gem Mint" I wonder what NM looks like? I got the population report on the card and found, unsurprisingly, that 9.5 Prices far outnumbered lower graded ones. Things that make you go "HMMMM." 

I could go on about this all day but I won't. I'll just end by saying the fact that Beckett would stoop to insulting blogs as opposed to showing how Beckett media doesn't do the things the blogs accuse them of (and in many cases blogs prove that they do) just shows that Beckett is on its last legs and its place in the hobby is slowly shrinking up to nothing. 

At least for me, Gellman taps into a kind of populist rage against the people who, when we were kids, enabled card shops to steal our lunch money during the junk wax era. It's pathetic their business model hasn't changed. Anyone who passes off my David Price as a 9.5 is clearly a "cesspool of misinformation," and what's worse is they aren't educated enough to fathom the economics of why they are in trouble. I'm glad Gellman, et. al., are out there, on issues like Beckett, grading, and fake autos so I can have a rather meaningless blog on rather meaningless cards. 

Sunday Existential Crisis: Why are we fans?

Friday on Minnesota NPR they spent an hour chatting about why people follow sports, being fans of one team in particular. The radio hosts were a little smug about the whole thing, and the callers were the typical assortment of armchair intellectualdom that calls in to shows on NPR. Don't get me wrong, plenty of sports fans called in, but most everyone who did so addressed the topic with a mixture of pity and disdain, the tone in their voices reflecting their sympathy for the poor uneducated rabble who do things like root for the Cubs or will spend 2 hours at a rain-delayed game eating hotdogs and drinking beer while knowing that the game will, in all likelihood, be called off.

I've thought about this question a lot over the past few days, particularly because I am a grown man who both checks off the highest level of education box on employment forms and collects pieces of cardboard with pictures of baseball players on them. These two facets of my life seemingly contradict each other as, objectively speaking, anyone with a basic understanding of economics could tell you that spending money on baseball cards is lower down on the investment hierarchy than buying lottery tickets, an act that one journalist once referred to as "a tax on the stupid." 

The baseball cards are meaningless without the game, and I am a fan of the game. So this, I guess, is the bigger question tapped into by NPR. Why is anyone a fan? I honestly have no idea and could only give, at best, incomplete and sentimental answers. 

I can say, however, that collecting and fandom have ebbed and flowed together throughout my life. From roughly 1985 until the spring of 1994 I lived and died with the Braves and had a passing affinity for the Mets (mostly Doc Gooden). The strike put my fandom on hiatus until the past few years when my spouse and I started attending Durham Bulls games with friends of ours. Shortly thereafter I started collecting again. Oh, I'd occasionally bought packs over the years, maybe even a box here and there, but "collect," no, I didn't do that and I was hardly a fan. But here I am, again, and I have no idea why.