LAS VEGAS — Fifty years ago, as kids, my brother and I saved nickels and dimes to buy baseball cards, a 10-pack for 15 cents or 18 cards for a quarter, each with a stick of gum whose half-life rivaled Plutonium-239.
Today, those same packs, unsealed, can fetch up to $850.
The hobby is berserk, fueled by rookie cards, parallels, refractors and autographs, many variations of one photo that shame the 1975 Topps series that featured single editions of each player. The prizes were rookies Robin Yount and George Brett.
Millions of cards now flood the market annually. On a recent eye-opening trip to The Awesome Card Shop on West Sahara, a box of six Panini cards went for $1,144.75. A Topps gilded collection containing five cards cost $1,399.75.
A 2018 Allen & Ginter box of 18 packs, eight cards per pack, was on sale for $13,500.
“At one point,” shop manager James Mize said, “we had that at $18,000.”
That, of course, was Shohei Ohtani’s rookie season. A signed one-of-one rookie Shohei will cost at least $500,000, according to Mize.
“There are all those variations, too,” he said. “One-of-10s, one-of-25s, one-of-50s, and autograph opportunities with them. Just a straight autographed card will probably go for six figures.”
Five cards, for $1,400?
“A carton of those is six boxes,” Mize said, “and we have people come in to buy a carton once a week.”
“People try to buy ’em low and sell ’em high,” shop co-owner Stephen Boggioni said. “This is just a different form of gambling.”
The rabbit hole
Inside The Awesome Card Shop, Marcel Bilak pointed to a box of trading cards behind him on a shelf and said, “When people buy those, it’s like they’re pulling the handle of a slot machine.”
He elaborated.
“People come in here and say, ‘Do I bet $200 on the Rangers tonight or buy this box of cards?’ Happens all the time.”
Bilak, in his early 50s, has been in the business for more than 30 years. Boggioni has been Bilak’s business partner for five years.
“Gamblers spend what they want to spend, rip open god knows how many boxes and pray they get their money back,” Boggioni said. “Others buy boxes and keep them sealed; nine times out of 10, they go up in value. I can go down a whole rabbit hole for you.”
A 2020 sealed football box is hot, he said, due to rookie cards of stars Joe Burrow, Jalen Hurts, Justin Jefferson or Justin Herbert.
A California client buys such boxes and stashes them for up to 20 years. He recently released two 2017 Prism boxes, eight cards per pack, 12 packs in a box, rookie Patrick Mahomes as the target.
Each box cost $12,000. A customer bought both, opening every pack in Boggioni’s presence. One card, Boggioni recalled, might have been worth $400.
Sneaky
The business soared during the pandemic as home-bound people found entertainment by opening card packs. In 2022, Fanatics acquired Topps, triggering an antitrust lawsuit by Panini.
In March, a federal judge ruled that case could proceed while another class-action lawsuit, charging monopolistic behavior, was filed against Fanatics.
“Legalized for kids, too; the sneaky part,” Mize said. “It’s amazing how many come in and spend $500 to $600. They can’t see over the counter, and they buy a box. Incredible. The hobby is just insane that way.”
The jewels are rookie cards, and Boggioni mentioned quarterback Tom Brady’s rookie New England beauties from 2000.
“When he was almost the last pick in the draft,” Boggioni said, “you could have gotten his rookie card for a couple of bucks. He won seven Super Bowls, and now those cards are going for millions of dollars.”
Mize said Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant rule hoops.
Chicagoland becomes that world’s epicenter July 30 through Aug. 3, when the National Sports Collectors Convention takes over the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont.
Mize expects more than 50,000 visitors per day, and Bilak’s crew will be among more than 100 vendors conducting business.
Foils, refractors, parallels …
On Sunday afternoon, I drove to the nearby Walgreens, the major purveyor of Topps cards. For $27.99, I bought a “blaster box,” seven packs, 12 cards per pack; and a “hanger,” one cellophane pack containing 59 cards, for $14.99.
Both were Series One. Boggioni and Mize told me these were the bottom of the baseball trading-card barrel, nearly impossible to excavate anything of extraordinary value.
First, the hanger. A Pete Crow-Armstrong “Future Stars” card was deemed worth $2.19 on the grading site SportsCardsPro (SCP), while the best of that 59-card lot was an Aaron Judge, framed by “diamante foil,” worth $4.94.
In the box, there was another basic PCA “Future Stars” deal, but also one bearing a silvery border with cacti, a “Spring Training” iteration valued at $2.90.
(Anyone interested in the PCA cards, zip me a note with your address at the above email; the first respondent gets the cacti card, the next two will get the basic versions.)
“Some are in it,” Mize said, “just for the endorphins of the gambling.”
The feel of opening packs did somewhat simulate watching the white ball roll around a roulette wheel.
The grand winner hailed from the box, a Corbin Carroll Cactus League “Blue Foil,” with mirrored orange lettering in the upper left and bottom right corners, worth $7.20.
Those were “ungraded” prices.
I did pull the very basic Shohei Ohtani No. 1 card, worth $1.99; a 9 is valued at $25, a 10 worth $82. An ungraded Ohtani “Foilfractor,” one of one, is $3,154, $4,956.77 as a 9, $14,269.34 for a 10. (Grading costs around $20 per card.)
Variations called Umbrella, Dancing, Black Rainbow, Bicentennial, Superfractor, Aqua Sparkle, Silver Cracked Foilboard, and on and on, seem utterly ridiculous.
These are not my mother’s trading cards.
Those Braves
Ask Rebecca Johnson. She started collecting when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953. She’d listen to games with an earplug connected to a tiny transistor radio so as to not awaken her little sisters.
Her father bought season tickets. Cards of Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette were special, and they beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series. The nugget, though, is Hank Aaron’s 1954 rookie card, a single piece of cardboard, no other diamond-spangled-folio-parallel variation.
She met Al Miech at a fraternity party, and angels sang. Some of their dates were at County Stadium to watch baseball. When they married, she gifted those cards to her siblings. They disappeared. My 85-year-old ma doesn’t specifically recall owning a Hammerin’ Hank rookie card, but she gasped at its value today.
SCP says such an ungraded Hank is worth $2,214.54, a Grade 9 at $379,327.38, $486,780.08 for a 10.
“The pure joy of collecting is gone,” she said. “They’ve taken the fun out of it and turned it into gambling. Everything is money. That’s sad.”