Has this happened to you?
You’re at a cardshow – one of those “new money” cardshows, the kind that’s popped up over the past few years where 95% of the dealers are selling nothing but slabbed cards, the aisles are packed with eleven-year olds with their oversized Zion cases (see my column from last month), and there’s hardly anything ten years old or greater for sale. You walk up to that one table with a box of cards that, judging by the yellowed top loaders and worn sides, might have something interesting. You go through the stacks carefully setting aside the cards you think you might need and notice that none of the cards are individually priced. That doesn’t seem to bother you. Not yet anyway.
You’ve gone through the stacks, double-checked your wantlist to see what cards you actually need, then hand your stack to the dealer so he can total-up a price and make you an offer.
But instead of giving you an offer, the dealer whips out his smartphone and starts checking prices on each individual card.
It kind of makes you want to scream at the top of your lungs … COMMMMMMMMMPS!!!
Yes, this happened to me at a cardshow over the summer in South Jersey. I gave the dealer – some zit-faced nineteen-year-old -- about two dozen cards that I picked out of his boxes, and comped each … and … every … one … of … them.
It took the kid fifteen minutes to comp on all my cards and make me an offer. I should note that I was wearing my William Shatner-inspired “Wrath of Comps” T-shirt that I picked up from Puck Junk at the 2023 NSCC – much to the amusement of neighboring dealers.
(You too can get your Wrath of Comps shirt directly from Sal from Puck Junk’s Etsy page. Only $30!)
MEMO to Dealers: PRICE YOUR DAMN CARDS. Give your customers an idea, when they start pulling from your stacks, just how much these cards might cost. If you don’t want to individually price every card, fine. An “ALL CARDS IN THIS BOX $X” sign will do. Please do not make us guess, and please do not waste our time looking up comps.
In most cases, I would have walked away after five or ten minutes, but the kid did have some cards that I really needed (including some early-90s Donruss Elites). And to be fair, he did make me a good offer. But let this be a warning to all dealers: price your cards.
Pete Rose died a couple of weeks ago. I was six when Pete led the Phillies to their first World Series in 1980 – even though Pete himself had a down year (.282/.352/.354/.706 slash line with a -0.4 bWAR) – so I’ve always had a soft spot for him. I came of age during The Junk Wax Era, when Pete Rose was the biggest star in The Hobby and his cards, especially his 1963 Topps rookie card, became a staple for collectors. And while Pete is still just as much a demigod in Philadelphia as he was in Cincinnati, I never got around to getting a Pete Rose rookie card. I could never afford one, and truth is, I never really wanted one.
(Although if I do come across one of those stamped counterfeit ’63 Rose’s, you bet I’m buying it.)
While I’m on the subject of Pete Rose, you may or may not have noticed that earlier this year Topps produced the first MLB-licensed Pete Rose card since his banishment from baseball in 1989. As part of their “RetroFractor” series of “First Bowman” cards that never were, 2024 Bowman Baseball had a card of Pete. You probably didn’t notice because, just like they did with the Tom Brady baseball card last year, Topps short-printed the shit out of it – because of course they did. When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.
The stated odds of finding either the Pete Rose or Bob Gibson RetroFractor were 1:26,447 Hobby packs. To put it another way, you’d have to open over 1100 2024 Bowman Hobby boxes to get either the Rose or the Gibson. Baseballcardpedia estimates that only 250 copies of the base Rose/Gibson exist to go along with Gold, Orange, Red and SuperFractor parallels, serial-numbered to 50, 25, five, and one, respectively. THANKS TOPPS!
By now you’ve heard that my friend Beau Thompson of @onemillioncubs fame, found in a random box of cards he bought from a Goodwill a 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft Picks & Prospects Mike Trout Autographed Blue Refractor. Easily a $12,000-$15,000 card – and yes, I looked up the COMMMMMMPS!
Good things happen to good people, and Beau is one of the “good people” in The Hobby – even if he is a Cubs fan. But this reminds me of the time earlier this year when Mike Trout himself found the base version of this card while he and his son were breaking a Hobby box of 2009 Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects.
Here’s the thing though. Unlike Mr. Thompson’s Goodwill find, Mike Trout lost money. Allow me to explain.
Let’s assume Trout paid current market value for his box. Both Steel City and BBCX have boxes for $3999. I’m sure Trout might have a “connection” willing to sell him a box at a discount, but let’s assume he paid the fair market value of $3500-$4000.
The 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft Picks & Prospects Mike Trout Autographed Prospect is one of the most significant baseball cards released in the 21st Century. But like most “tentpole” cards that increased in value during the pandemic, the 2009 BDP&P Trout has regressed back to pre-pandemic levels – around $2500-$3000. So, unless Trout pulled something else out of that box – like a low-numbered Derek Jeter parallel (and yes, Derek Jeter, along with Ichiro, Chipper Jones, and David Ortiz are on the checklist as part of a World Baseball Classic subset) -- he took a $1000-$1500 loss on his box. A small price to pay for some quality time with his son, I suppose.
Speaking of 2009 Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects, fifteen years on and the rest of the checklist didn’t exactly age well. To say this is a feast or famine product is an understatement. Bowman Draft was configured a little differently than it is now, so you only got one autograph as opposed to the three you get in a Hobby box today. And back then only 22 players signed for the product, and unlike today, those 22 did not have an unautographed card in the set. In other words, if you bought, as Mike Trout did, a sealed Hobby box of 2009 Bowman Draft, you’d have a 1:22 chance of hitting the Trout autograph. As for those other 21 boxes …
Of the 22 players who signed for 2009 Bowman Draft, eight never played in the Majors. Nine made it to the Bigs, and are either now retired, or were not on an MLB roster in the 2024 season – two of which have a negative career wins above replacement. That makes five current MLB players: A.J. Pollock, Steven Matz, Zack Wheeler, Tyler Maztek, and Trout. Of those four other non-Trout players, the only one who is remotely “Hobby relevant” has to be Wheeler, the ace of the Phillies pitching staff. I could not find a comp for Wheeler’s base autograph, but it’s probably nowhere near Trout’s – maybe a couple hundred bucks?
But, as I mentioned before, just because you got lucky, like Mike, and hit a base Trout autograph, doesn’t mean you’re in the money. You really have to pull one of the serial-numbered Refractor parallels to be in the black. The stated odds of finding a base autograph is 1:34 – or roughly two base autos for every three boxes. Which means that around every third box should yield a Refractor of some kind.
Again, I should stop here and explain how differently structured Bowman Draft was then compared to what it is now. In addition to the Autographed Refractor, which is serial-numbered to 500 copies, the rest of the 2009 Bowman Draft rainbow is as follows: X-Fractor (225 copies), Blue Refractor (150), Gold Refractor (50), Orange Refractor (25), Red Refractor (five), and SuperFractor (one-of-one). In addition, there was also a set of four Printing Plates for each card. Also, the Red, Super, Plates were Hobby only. Yes, there were retail packs, but the odds of hitting an Autographed Chrome Prospect were about one in four boxes.
With every 22nd box yielding a Trout, and every third a Refractor, you’d have to open 66 Hobby boxes to get one Trout Refractor – and more than likely, you’re getting the base Refractor.
66 boxes at four grand a pop (that’s over $250,000 worth of wax!) just to get one Trout Refractor that might be worth $5000-$10,000. If you do have any 2009 Bowman Draft boxes squirrelled away, you best not open them.
A few weeks ago, the much-ballyhooed 2024 Topps Chrome Update was released -- and yes, I will get to the one-of-one MLB Rookie Debut Patch Autographs in a moment. But allow me to bring to your attention the rest of the product and the way it was configured. We need to talk about the collectability of this product.
The base set is pretty standard: 200 cards, with the usual slew of Refractor parallels. The base set is easy enough to collect, and yes, there are an absurd number of Refractors. But I want to focus on the inserts, and not the autographs or parallels of the inserts, just the “base” inserts.
There are the Chrome versions of inserts that were in Topps Update: All-Stars, Future Stars, and the 1989 reprints which have been standard fare for this brand for years. There’s YouthQuake which is exclusive to the Breaker’s Delight packs – but at one-per-pack, are still easy for the rest of us to collect. All-Etch, All-Etch Rookies, and Stratospheric Stars provide a bit of a challenge, at 1:16, 1:145, and 1:73/packs, respectively. Even the 1:525/pack Radiating Rookies are tough, but with only ten of them, building a set is still attainable.
I want to talk about the rest of the insert line up. Here, I’m going to list each one along with their set sizes and the standard Hobby pack odds – if available.
Sizzle: ten cards, 1:3430/packs
MLB Illustrations: ten cards, Hobby only, 1:16,906/packs
Homefield Advantage Chrome (because, apparently, we needed these Donruss Downtown rip-offs in a Chrome version?): 40 (!) cards, 1:812/packs
Helix (speaking of Donruss rip-offs): ten cards, 1:4585/packs
Major League Minis: fifteen cards, 1:2448/packs
Diamond Dominance: 25 cards, retail Mega boxes only, 1:400/Mega packs
Crushed: 25 cards, Hobby only, 1:1002/packs
Celebracion: 20 cards, serial-numbered to 99 copies, 1:3468/packs
Let’s Go!: fifteen cards, limited (but not serial-numbered) to 50 copies, 1:9170/packs
Expose: 20 cards, serial-numbered to ten, 1:18,495/packs
Not to sound like Allen Iverson, but these are all base inserts. Not the parallels of the inserts – of which there are many. Not the autographs – of which there are some. We’re talking about base inserts.
Looking at all this, my question to you the reader (and to anyone at the Topps product development team responsible for Chrome Update who just happens to be reading this) is: Just how in the hell are you supposed to be able to collect all this? Or, more specifically, are you even supposed to be able to collect all this?
A standard Hobby case contains 144 packs (24 packs per box, six boxes per pack), so even if you went in on a case – and these cases have a current market value of $2100-$2250, more for Jumbos and Breaker boxes -- you’re not guaranteed to get even one card from any of these sets. There are 190 of these multi-case inserts from ten different sets.
But even if money were no object – if, for example you had “Elon Money” or “Michael Rubin Money” – again, I must ask, how does Topps expect us to collect all this? I mean, that is the point, right? Collecting?
Does Topps even want us to, you know, “collect” their products anymore? And if not, why should collectors even bother?
Speaking of 2024 Topps Chrome Update, by now you’ve heard all about the “bounty” the Pittsburgh Pirates have issued for the much-ballyhooed Paul Skenes one-of-one MLB Rookie Debut Patch Autograph card. For the one lucky individual that pulls this card they’ll get: Two Pirates season tickets behind home plate for the next 30 years, a softball game featuring former Pirate players for you and 30 of your friends at PNC Park, two autographed Skenes jerseys, and an all-expenses paid trip to Pirates Spring Training to meet the man himself. Mr. Skenes’s ladyfriend, Livvy Dunne, also chipped in by offering two tickets to her private suite. (As of this writing, nearly two weeks after the release of 2024 Topps Chrome Update, the Skenes “RDPA” has yet to be found.)
This is not the first bounty that’s been issued for a current-year one-of-one chase card. A group breaker offered $500,000 for a one-of-one Topps Now triple autograph of Steph Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant. Like the Skenes, as of this writing, this bounty has yet to be claimed (at least publicly).
How are all these bounties even legal?
If you look at an unopened pack or box of just about every Topps product issued within the last decade you’ll notice this disclaimer.
“Topps does not, in any manner, make any representation as to whether its cards will attain any future value.”
But with these bounties, someone – and in the case of the Pirates, someone with a direct business relationship with Topps as they are MLB’s exclusive trading card licensee – is putting a value on a card. The fact that Topps’ social media account has been constantly promoting this, and other, bounties leads me to believe that, maybe Topps is making a representation as to whether some cards will attain a future value after all.
That’s all I’ve got for you this month. if you have any questions, comments, trade offers, you can slip into my DMs, or shoot me an e-mail. All my want lists (separated be year) are up on my website.
Keep on rockin’ in the free world.
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