Category Archives: News - Page 2

Stranger Things Than Baseball Have Happened at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Part 1

Posted by on 19 March 2014 Comments Off on Stranger Things Than Baseball Have Happened at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Part 1

A slow and sober look around the field

Some sort of cricket-type activity

This weekend, Major League Baseball opens the 2014 season half a world away in Sydney, Australia.  The venue will be the Sydney Cricket Ground, a place that, as the name implies, is commonly used to host cricket matches.  If you thought this was the first time an American tradition made an appearance here though, you would be wrong.  In fact, nothing that could happen this weekend would have a chance of being the strangest thing a foreigner had done on this field.  But before we get to that, let’s take a look around.

The Sydney Cricket Ground has been around in one form or another since the late 19th century.  Instead of a single stadium structure around the field, the Sydney Cricket Ground has a set of separate stands.  The oldest of these stands date to the late 19th century.  The Members’ Pavilion, shown above, was originally built in 1878 and then rebuilt in 1886.  The Ladies’ Stand (not shown), is located just to the left of the Members’ Pavilion and opened in 1896.

The rest of the stands, despite being separate structures, essentially form a modern stadium.  Continuing around counterclockwise are, from right to left above, Brewongle Stand (1980), Clive Churchill Stand (1986), and Victor Trumper Stand (2008).

Next up is the Bill O’Reilly Stand (1984), which, despite having the Fox Studios Australia tower looming overhead, is not named for that Bill O’Reilly.

And that brings us around to the M.A. Noble, Bradman, and Messenger stands, which are behind what is now home plate and have just been rebuilt.  And since my photos are from 2010, this will be the end of the structural tour.

Of course, you’ll see most of this during the games anyway.  What you won’t see are the Aussie-flavour ads that have been removed from the stands.  Back in 2010, these were largely encouraging people to drive slower by equating fast driving with diminished manhood.  Meanwhile, the bathrooms were encouraging responsible drinking via the threat of violence delivered by a bouncer who your drinking causes you to pick a fight with while the buddy who was kind enough to walk you home just stands there and watches you get your face smashed in instead of dragging your sorry ass out of harm’s way.  Or maybe just getting you into a car and driving away really fast.

Luckily, the ads also propose a solution to both of these problems.  Put a pub in your backyard!  You won’t need to drive anywhere or get into drunken arguments with bouncers when you do your binge drinking at home.  That’s Aussie ingenuity for you, second only to Scottish ingenuity as we’ll see later.

Part 2: A different American tradition takes the field down under

Inside the 2014 Queens Baseball Convention

Posted by on 21 January 2014 Comments Off on Inside the 2014 Queens Baseball Convention

No Mets fan fest? No problem.

It’s the time of year when the last pitch of the World Series and the first pitch of spring training both seem like an eternity away. That’s why many teams use this time to connect with their fans. When they aren’t signing washed up players to minor league deals that is. If you’re a Mets fan though, there is no mid-winter celebration to fill this void. Or at least there wasn’t until the fans took matters into their own hands and put together the first Queens Baseball Convention on January 18.

For me, the journey started in Massachusetts. And then went up into New Hampshire because I needed to get gas. From there, I crossed Massachusetts and Connecticut before stopping in New York to prepare for the event the next day. It may not sound like an epic journey, but it sure looked like one from the train along the Hudson on Saturday morning. Ice and snow gave way to cold rain as Citi Field drew near.

The home run apple was not welcoming fans to a game on this dreary day. The gates to the Jackie Robinson Rotunda were closed and locked. What few fans approached the stadium made the long walk around to the back where McFadden’s Citi Field and the Queens Baseball Convention welcomed them in from the cold.

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The Curious Case of Branden Kaupe

Posted by on 10 February 2013 Comments Off on The Curious Case of Branden Kaupe

Making a mockery of the hobby

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working on getting many of the various Mets prospect autographs in 2012 Panini Elite Extra Edition in preparation for an upcoming review.  Unlike Topps, which rarely features signatures from players outside the first round, Panini goes deeper into the draft with half a dozen or so players from each team.  This year’s product featured Mets top picks Gavin Cecchini and Kevin Plawecki plus four lower picks: Matt Reynolds (2nd round), Matt Koch (3rd round), Branden Kaupe (4th round), and Logan Taylor (11th round).  Most of the autographs from this bunch were fairly easy to obtain on eBay for under $10, but there was one problem.  Branden Kaupe autographs were impossible to buy at any reasonable price.

Did Kaupe impress enough at Kingsport to warrant a run on his first autograph cards?  No.  Not at all.  Mets Minors Review ranked Kaupe the Mets’ 38th top prospect after a disappointing season.  Few others are even discussing Kaupe’s prospect potential.  As much as Mets fans have a soft spot for Hawaiian players, it’s hard to call Kaupe a top prospect.  So why the surge in prices?

Looking at the auctions, the common thread is the user 808kaupe.  Since January 26, 808kaupe (shown below as 0***8) has purchased nothing but Branden Kaupe cards.  The selling prices started at a dollar or two, but they soon escalated.  $10.  $20.  No matter how much you bid, you could be guaranteed that 808kaupe would bid more.  Here’s an example from a basic Kaupe autograph numbered to 347 that ended on February 1:

Things only got crazier from there.  Apparent shill bidders revealed 808kaupe’s top bid on an autograph numbered to 25 on February 5 to be $50, well above what even an equivalent Gavin Cecchini would sell for.

Four days later, another apparent shill revealed 808kaupe’s maximum bid on an autograph numbered to 347 to be a whopping $100.  With bids like that on a card realistically valued at a few dollars, the cards might as well not exist.  Someone clearly wanted these cards at any cost.  All of them.
So who is 808kaupe?  The username offers some obvious clues.  808 is the area code for Hawaii and kaupe, well, you get the picture.  This all seems to tie back to Branden Kaupe somehow.  A search for the username brings up plenty of web site accounts, but none with listed names.  One is for a 16 year old female.  Another is for a 24 year old male.  Kaupe’s siblings perhaps?  The 808kaupe on eBay could be one of these, another relative, an unrelated Kaupe in Hawaii, or even Branden Kaupe himself.

If any of this sounds familiar, you may be thinking of Rick Asadoorian.  Asadoorian, the Red Sox 1st round draft pick in 1999, had his first rookie cards released in 2000.  For a while, they were some of the hottest rookie cards on the market, right up there with the likes of Ben Sheets and Barry Zito.  The problem was that Asadoorian wasn’t the prospect that his rookie card peers were.  Not even close.  Eventually it was revealed that his family had been buying up large quantities of his rookie cards, causing prices to spike.  When they stopped, his cards became worthless.  While Zito and Sheets never quite lived up to their high expectations, Asadoorian never played so much as a single game in the majors.

Thirteen years later, it looks like we’re seeing the same thing with Branden Kaupe.  Unlike the Asadoorian case though, it is unlikely that the bidding of the last two weeks will have any noticeable impact on Kaupe’s hobby status.  Asadoorian had the first round pedigree to trick buyers into overvaluing his cards back in the days of the dot com bubble.  Kaupe doesn’t and buyers simply have too much information at their fingertips to think that a guy who hit .173 in A ball is a solid buy.  Most, like me, just want the card to finish out a set of some kind and will likely never see Branden Kaupe in their collections again.  When 808kaupe stops placing outrageous bids, Kaupe’s autograph cards will go quickly back to being $1 commons and many of us will be left with a bad impression of a guy trying to live out his dream.

The Hall of Fame and Al Capone’s Vault

Posted by on 9 January 2013 Comments Off on The Hall of Fame and Al Capone’s Vault

Maybe it’s what we want to be in it that matters more

I was going to do one of those I-don’t-have-a-vote-but-here’s-who-I-would-vote-for articles that are all the rage these days, but I would just end up with a ballot that looks like what Joe Posnanski and Jay Jaffe ended up with (though I’m only starting to warm up to Curt Schilling and I’m not quite sold on Larry Walker).  Since those guys did a better job than I ever could, there’s really no point in that exercise.  Instead, let’s look at the voting itself, which is likely to be all there is to discuss once the results are in.

To have a vote on who gets a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame within the first 20 years following their retirement, you need to spend 10 years as a member of the BBWAA.  Put in another 10 and your voting privileges won’t expire until you do.  If you’ve been wondering why some of the voters seem like senile old coots, well, they are.  To be included on the ballot, you need to have appeared in the majors in at least 10 different seasons and get through a rigorous nomination phase that apparently everyone except Edgardo Alfonzo gets through.  Seriously, the list of “Guys on a Hall of Fame ballot who weren’t half the player Edgardo Alfonzo was” has got to be in the hundreds (Tony Womack?  Are you kidding me?).  Any player who receives votes on at least 75% of the submitted ballots gets a Hall of Fame plaque, any player with less than 5% is removed from consideration, and everyone in the middle has 15 years to do one or the other before getting the axe.  This ensures that guys like Darryl Strawberry don’t clutter up the ballot while virtually identical players like Dave Parker remain in the discussion for 15 years.  Or that we spend 12+ years wondering how Alan Trammell can be considered Hall worthy when his superior teammate Lou Whitaker never made it past his first ballot.  Yes, the process that passed on Keith Hernandez and settled for Jim Rice in his final year of eligibility is completely not broken.  Well, at least it isn’t the Veterans Committee.

So with such a flawless process already in place, now we get to pass judgment on the Steroids Era for the first time.  Except for when Jeff Bagwell was denied because he had big muscles, and you know what they say about guys with big muscles…  And all the years that Mark McGwire has received minimal support (at least he came clean, though he downplays the impact of his steroids).  But now, for the first time ever, we have legitimate superstars, inner circle guys, who have been connected to performance enhancing drugs.  PEDs.  The greatest evil ever to stain the reputation of Major League Baseball.  This time it counts.

Business as usual

So what did the writers do?  Some, like the ones I most agree with, weighed each player’s performance without giving them major penalties for admitted, suspected, or wildly speculated PED use.  Since knowing for certain who used and who didn’t or who benefitted and who suffered is an absolute impossibility, you can’t really do much to negate the effect of steroids when weighing a Hall of Fame case.  While this is the approach I would choose, it isn’t the only one out there.

Everybody’s dirty

Other writers decided that the entire era is tainted and refused to vote for any of them.  Some even refused to turn in their ballots, which means that they won’t count against anyone when the votes are tallied (the blank ballots however will add to the total ballots cast).  This doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, but it could send a message that better guidance is needed.  I would argue that saying “Hey, we need better guidance!” would send a clearer message, but I’m not the one getting paid to figure these things out.

Everybody’s dirty (except for my guy)

While I can (kind of) admire taking a stand by using your ballot to vote against the system, I just don’t get the guys who turn a ballot with a single name because everyone else who was worthy was dirty.  Jack Morris is usually the lone name (probably because he had a lot of votes last year) and the assumption is that, because of the years he played in, he is free from PED suspicion.  Everyone else must have been on something, but my guy’s clean!  Never mind that steroids have been a part of baseball at least back into the ’60s or that amphetamines have been used (illegally) as performance enhancers for longer than that (but that’s OK because the teams were giving them out like candy).  Dale Murphy is another name that comes up in this category because he’s just a swell guy.  The best defense of a Murphy-only ballot I’ve seen is that, if the character clause can be used to disqualify some of the best players in history, it should also be used to boost a good guy whose numbers weren’t quite there.  The logic is flawless, but I’m not buying the premise.  In any case, declaring that only one person on this ballot is worthy is highly questionable at best.

I am the law!

We don’t know who did what when, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pass judgment!  The most frustrating ballots are the ones that combine all of the above logic to generate a standard 5 or 6 player ballot with “clean” players.  This gets murky because PEDs not only inflated the stats of the users, but they also reduced the stats of the non-users.  This exercise requires banishing all players with tarnished reputations and lowering the standard for the Hall.  In a perfect world, I could see this working.  In a world where today’s saints are tomorrow’s disgraces and Murray Chass has waged a one-man smear campaign against Mike Piazza for the better part of a decade based only on a bad case of acne, you might as well make your picks by dartboard.  I understand the pressure from readers who rant about how anyone who votes for a “cheater” will burn in hell, but the writers should have learned by now to ignore their less eloquent critics.  And, while I agree that Tim Raines should be in the Hall, how can anyone ever call him “clean?”

Sorry, ran out of room

The 10-player limit on the Hall of Fame Ballot gives writers an interesting out when it comes to controversial cases.  While voters only list 5 or 6 names on average, a few do max it out, especially in years with this many qualified players.  If you want to steer clear of the McGwire/Sosa/Palmeiro controversy or the Bagwell/Piazza witch hunt, just load up your ballot with borderline guys and then lament that you had but ten slots with which to vote.  You can placate their supporters without attracting the ire of their opponents.  Genius!  Bonus points for using a convoluted nonsensical mathematical system for justifying that there were ten players more deserving than Piazza on this year’s ballot.

No first ballot for you!

I understand that people always want a way to distinguish the great great players from the good great players, but maybe the number of times on the ballot isn’t the way to do it.  Some great players fall off the ballot in their first year of eligibility, while some get in quickly and others wait far too long.  Recently, voters have been assigning special meaning to a “first ballot” Hall of Famer, using this honor as an excuse to delay entry for anyone not deemed worthy (and don’t get me started on the ones who just want to make sure nobody gets in unanimously).  Just look at Roberto Alomar, who got 73.7% of the vote in his first year (meh, borderline) and 90% in his second (duh, superstar).  The same logic is coming up in the PED discussion, with many voters putting off a decision until next year.  Stalling isn’t a particularly effective voting strategy, especially with a loaded ballot that won’t be getting any smaller.

And inside the vault…

With the combination of these voters, there’s very little chance of anyone getting in this year.  Maybe Biggio, who seems to be more “clean” than his teammate Bagwell for reasons that defy logic.  Maybe Morris, whose case now seems to rest on his number of opening day starts and the number of innings he pitched, plus the fact that his career ended before everyone was doing steroids (which somehow proves that he’s clean).  Piazza?  Probably not, which is a shame.  Trammell and Raines should be getting more support as the writers shun the more recent players, but that’s not happening.  And Dale Murphy, nice guy, isn’t getting in.  Sorry.

Is there any hope?

There seem to be some problems here with no clear solutions.  However, this would all be a waste of space if I didn’t propose any solutions, so here goes.

1. Expand the ballot to 15 names

Most voters don’t even use up the ten they have, but that limit predates the expansion era.  With more teams and more players, it stands to reason that there should be more players each year who are worthy of the Hall.  The problem is only going to get worse over the next few years, so the time to act is now.  It won’t fix everything, but it is a reasonable measure that should be easy to pass.  At least it would look like someone is trying.

2. Have the Hall take an official position on PEDs

When writers are throwing up their hands in confusion, something needs to be done.  I suppose you could just stop sending them ballots, but the more constructive solution is to put together a press release telling them exactly how to feel about PEDs.  This seems to be what they’re after.  One possible statement is this:

Drugs are bad, mmmkay?  You shouldn’t do drugs, mmmkay?  Steroids are bad, players shouldn’t do steroids, mmmkay?  Doing steroids will get you suspended but doesn’t make you ineligible for the Hall of Fame, unless you get caught three times, mmmkay?

What, don’t think that will fix everything?  If the Hall comes out and says “Steroids happened and we expect that there are players enshrined here who used steroids and other PEDs and that there will be more PED users enshrined in the future,” then the “NO ROIdZ IN TEH HALL EVAR!!!~!” crowd would lose some footing from their untenable position.  Voters are still free to withhold their vote for anyone who ever came into contact with PEDs, but they won’t be able to hide behind the claim that they’re defending the purity of the Hall of Fame.  That cherry was popped long ago.

3. Make all Hall of Fame ballots public

This one probably won’t help anything, but it’s an overdue measure in an age where every scrap of data is overanalyzed.  Public ballot reveals started last year with major award voting and it made it perfectly clear who the idiots are.  Now, some of the senile old coots out there are proud of their idiocy, but the writers shouldn’t be able to hide behind a veil of secrecy when they’re making decisions based on rumors, accusations, and baseless speculation.  If you can’t disclose your vote and the justification behind it, you shouldn’t have a vote in the Hall of Fame.

4. Form a Steroid Era Committee and give the writers 20 years off

Can’t handle the responsibility of judging the players in an era when you kind of dropped the ball on their steroid use?  Why not call in a special committee to take over and take the blame for letting in cheaters and/or the underqualified?  Just like we write off most of the Hall’s lesser inhabitants because of the various flavors of Veterans Committees, a Steroid Committee could shoulder the blame for the entire era.  Because we know that the ones who vote for the PED users are the real villains.

5. Have the writers start the discussion before the ballots are sent out

We’ve been through a month of hand-wringing over the steroid issue, and now it will be forgotten for another 11 months until next year’s ballots come out.  Maybe we could get some more reasonable positions on these issues if people started talking about them before they fill out their ballots.  In fact, the only way any of this will start to make any sense is if the writers can begin to agree on how to approach Hall of Fame voting.  Obviously, every voter approaches their decision differently, but right now they’re so far apart that the entire process is a waste of time.  With that in mind, let’s lay out just what we’re dealing with.  After all, I’m an engineer, not a sanctimonious arbiter of good and evil.

The Saints

Nobody.  Seriously, nobody.  Even if someone performs miracles, PED use will be suspected.

The Suspected PED Users

Everyone who played prior to the institution of testing.  That includes Bagwell and Piazza plus Morris and Murphy.  Everyone.  You can’t prove that someone didn’t use PEDs, so I’ll raise your wild unfounded speculation about player X with wild unfounded speculation about player Y.  It seems like people only want to put home run hitters in this category, but that’s absurd.  How about the guy who threw a 10-inning shutout in game 7 of the World Series and pitched 240 or more innings in 10 seasons?  Sounds suspicious to me.

The Assumed PED Users

Here’s your Bonds and Clemens tier.  They’ve been linked to PEDs so strongly that they’ve been taken to court.  Not necessarily successfully, but we’ve declared them guilty in the court of public opinion based on something more than big muscles or acne.

The Admitted PED Users

Mark McGwire on this year’s ballot, with honorable mentions to Jose Canseco, Ken Caminiti, and future conundrums Andy Pettitte and Alex Rodriguez.  At least they came clean, right?  Or maybe they only admitted to what they were accused of to save face.  How do we know that they’re telling the whole story?

The Exposed PED Users

These guys failed tests of some sort, so this is where Sosa, Palmeiro, and eventually Melky Cabrera and Ryan Braun will go.  Maybe it was just a one-time mistake, maybe they were just good at hiding it.  We know they were taking something though, at that one specific point in time.  For the rest of their careers though, see above.

The Repeat Offenders

Manny Ramirez, founding member.

The Permanently Ineligible

Three strikes and you’re out.  That’s MLB’s position at least, some of the writers stopped reading at the top of the list.  At least we can all agree on this one.

So how do we treat these guys?  Are they all the same?  Are some worse than others?  Do we need different standards for players in different categories?  (Hint: Bonds and Clemens probably still get in even if you raise the Hall of Fame standard to the ceiling.)  Should we pull a Tour de France and wipe the entirety of the Steroid Era from the history books?  Who do we really want to see get a plaque on a wall in the most boring room of the Baseball Hall of Fame?  Because that’s really what this comes down to.  It’s not about integrity or honor or the message it sends.  It’s not about the sport’s history, righting wrongs, or deciding the fate of the world.  This is about who gets a plaque and who has to settle for a cardboard cutout and some memorabilia.  Or whatever the heck they have for displays in there these days, it’s been almost 20 years since I’ve been there.  It would be nice to see it again, but I think I’ll wait until there’s a Mike Piazza plaque on the wall.  Until then, the vault is empty for me.

Straight to the Nuts: The $63 Question

Posted by on 20 November 2012 Comments Off on Straight to the Nuts: The $63 Question

In which I once more impersonate a journalist but fail to dumb things down enough

As soon as the regular season wrapped up for the Mets (sometime back in July), all anyone could look forward to was Opening Day 2013 (and Dickey’s 20th win and subsequent Cy Young award, but those don’t fit the narrative).  It was another lost season and the fans were left without a reason to cheer on their favorite team at Citi Field (other than the whole “favorite team” thing).  It would take some major moves by the Wilpons to convince the fans to turn out in 2013 (like, um, cough-selltheteam-cough).  With the team disappointing and no relief in sight, attendance projections were looking bleak.

And then the Mets released pricing information for Opening Day.

Few will forget where they were when they saw that the “cheap” seats were going for $63.  $63!  That’s like dinner for two at Bertucci’s!  Movie tickets and concessions for a family of four!  That $63 only gets you in the door, it doesn’t cover transportation/parking, food, souvenirs, or the 15 beers it takes some people to survive the Mets experience.  The horror.

You know, I can kind of see why people would be upset.  $63 for nosebleed seats for a game against the Padres when a good chunk of the lineup hasn’t been set and could be filled with prospects who aren’t ready or cheap free agents who would be better off retiring isn’t exactly a bargain.  Move up to better seats and things look even worse.  I remember a time when the team was good and upper deck seats were $5, so $63 sounds insane.  But we’re talking about Opening Day.

Opening Day is like a playoff game that every team gets to host.  It’s not just a game, it’s an event.  Growing up well outside the NYC metro area (but still inside the NYC media area), seeing an Opening Day game in person seemed about as likely as winning the lottery without buying a ticket.  The fact that we never even considered trying to go to an Opening Day game (or really any game) might have something to do with that.  Opening Day seemed to be the realm of the rich and famous, celebrities, trust fund kids, trophy wives/girlfriends, etc.  The upper deck is reserved for hedge fund interns, stock traders, classical musicians, and retired sports mascots.  Us normal folks have to settle for watching on television.  Or these days some stupid app on our smartphones.

$63 is still a lot of money for a baseball game, so I would probably pass even if I could walk to the stadium.  But I can’t walk to the stadium.  In fact, it costs me somewhere upwards of $100 just to get to the point where they scan your ticket, search your bag, and give you a pat-down just to be friendly.  Add $63 (or more) to that, plus concessions, and we’re talking Cirque du Soleil money.  (Note to self: work in more Las Vegas references next year.)  Now factor in travel time (8 hours by car and 4 by train if I go with the option that doesn’t cost me anything for lodging) and time taken off from work and we’re getting up there in cost.  At that point, it feels like the team owes me money for taking the trouble to get there.  So yeah, $63 ain’t happening.

But this isn’t about me.  Let’s face it, the Mets aren’t going to make money paying me to go to games (nice work if you can get it…) and I’m not the kind of customer they’re catering to, even if I do spend a ton of money in the team store on the rare (one) occasion that I’m there (mostly because they don’t bother putting pins up for sale on the web site, damn stingy corporate idiots).  The Mets need to put butts in seats, not just on Opening Day but on 80 other days as well.  They’re banking on people seeing the insane single-game ticket prices and opting to go with a multi-game package of some sort, which will inevitably result in the other tickets going unused because of poor planning or disinterest on the part of the customer (the only sure bet in the world of sales and marketing).  If the “Hey, it’s a much better deal if you buy tickets to a whole bunch of other games too!” approach doesn’t work, they’ll discount the remaining tickets at some point down the road, advertising incredibly discounted prices that are probably still higher than 2012’s prices (not that anyone can remember what they paid for something a few months ago).  If the plan works and they do sell a bunch of packages, then they’ve boosted attendance numbers for other games without really cutting prices.  Genius!

Except there’s a downside to this approach.  If you’re not interested in getting a ticket plan or package and just want to get a ticket to Opening Day without spending a fortune, your only option is to wait until March and hope for some discounts.  Now how many people will bother to check back in four months after the team essentially says “Sorry, but we aren’t interested in your business” to them?  By March, people will have moved on to something else and won’t be buying tickets to Opening Day or any other day.  The Mets may have a solid plan financially, but it fails on psychology.  You use the event atmosphere to get people’s attention and then sell them on making the games a regular part of their entertainment habits.  To do this, the cost and risk barriers need to be sufficiently low, otherwise something else will take priority and most of them will not give you a second look.  Multi-game packages are too much risk and $63 for nosebleed seats is too much cost.  You may drive people to check out some Cyclones games instead with this approach, but that’s not going to put butts in seats at Citi (unless they do something like Futures at Fenway there, which they really should if they aren’t because Futures at Fenway is awesome, especially when all the New York teams win).

As for me, I’m sure as hell not paying $63 for a ticket to any regular season game and I can’t justify buying a multi-game package, so that just leaves the group rate from a certain controversial t-shirt magnate, with pricing yet to be announced. Even if that price turns out to be reasonable, it’s a tossup as to whether I go and there’s not really anything the Mets can do to change that. [Update: Pricing was revealed to be $95 for outfield seats with a t-shirt included. 900 tickets sold out in 24 hours. Looks like there’s a market for higher prices if additional value is provided.]

Well look at this, I just got an e-mail from the New Hampshire Fisher Cats advertising a special with 10 ticket vouchers and a $25 gift card for $75.  Not only are the Fisher Cats local to me, but they also play the Binghamton Mets three times in 2013, all on weekends.  What was that about Opening Day tickets again?  Oh well, couldn’t have been that important, maybe next year.

Baseball card collecting: Hobby in crisis, Part 2

Posted by on 27 March 2012 Comments Off on Baseball card collecting: Hobby in crisis, Part 2

Baseball cards and traditional media, pot and kettle?

In Part 1, I looked at the factors that I saw playing a part in the success or failure of the baseball card industry. I wrote this without having seen the CBS News piece that has stirred up this discussion over at Beckett, Panini, Upper Deck, and Cardboard Connection. To me, the health of the hobby comes down to interest in the sport, innovation in the industry, and cost. Cost is the tricky one.

Today’s baseball card market looks nothing like it did 25 years ago. There are far more choices, a higher barrier to entry, a much wider spread between low-end and high-end, and a lot more baggage from years past. As I’ve lamented here, the small local card shows are largely a thing of the past. Even the regular mall shows are slowing down with eBay providing a much better option for buying and selling the kind of merchandise that pays the bills. Way back in 2000, I was at a mall show and saw a 2000 UD Legends Gary Carter Gold Autograph that would have been perfect for my then-fledgling Mets autograph collection. When I asked if the price was flexible, the dealer just asked if I was on eBay. Since I was, he said that we wouldn’t be able to make a deal. He just couldn’t compete with a global marketplace and wasn’t even going to try, instead opting to put his effort into selling to people who hadn’t yet gotten with the times. His market was dwindling and he knew it; it was just a matter of time before the old ways would no longer be viable.

The dealers I met during my third life as a card collector (2000-2003) were a much different breed from the ones back in the ’80s and ’90s. As with my local shop owner from the ’80s, these dealers had largely abandoned the storefront and now dealt in cards as a side business out of their homes, loading up their cars one weekend a month to set up a few tables in a mall and make deals with the ranks of the nostalgic and the faithful. They could cut you a deal on a complete 1978 Topps set or the Lenny Dykstra rookie that was inexplicably missing from your 1986 Topps set. They would gladly take any cards of local interest for trade or credit and would talk sports or cards with you when things slowed down. It was a support group for people trying to figure out how to cope with the changes in the hobby.

And that brings us to the CBS piece. The hobby is dying. A weekly local card show filled with ’70s Topps cards isn’t drawing in the kids. Cards are too expensive. Kids are only interested in video games and computers and girls. Times are tough for a celebrity card dealer who used to be rolling in cash. Give me a freaking break.

You know, we had video games, computers, and even girls (well, that one’s a bit of a stretch, for me at least) back in the ’80s. We didn’t have global networks and smartphones, but things haven’t changed that much on the “how kids spend their free time” front. The biggest change has been the social aspect – the Internet-connected game consoles and smartphones are bringing kids together like never before. Even the anime-inspired trading card games of the ’90s (and still going strong today) emphasize the social aspect of cards. What about baseball cards?

The appeal of baseball cards has been constantly changing since the mid ’80s. First popular for pictures of players and listings of stats, cards became seen as a viable investment as prices of older (and much scarcer) cards went through the roof. Baseball cards had gone from a novelty to a collectible, which can be a dangerous shift. When collectibles become self-aware, greed can bring about self-inflicted ruin. Overproduction made just about everything from this boom period worthless and created the unrealistic expectations that served as the point of comparison in the CBS report.

But who cares about what the market did ages ago? The rise of inserts and premium sets shifted the focus from sheer numbers to diversity. Upper Deck was premium from its start in 1989. Leaf went premium in 1990. Fleer and Topps launched premium lines in 1991. Bowman and Donruss went premium in 1992. Fleer, Topps, and Upper Deck launched super premium lines in 1993. Upper Deck went premium again in 1994. It was a never-ending escalation. Kids were priced out of the market.

The reality was that pack prices were always rising. The premium craze sped things up and undoubtedly pushed out the indifferent collector, but experiments in low-price alternatives like Triple Play and Collector’s Choice proved an important point – the market wanted a quality product. It wasn’t a market that catered exclusively to kids, and certainly the proportion of kids to adults had changed, but what could be done? Can you force a market to reduce profits just to match your nostalgic view of how things should be?

Maybe I just don’t get it because my nostalgia doesn’t fit the narrative. I knew very few card collectors when I was a kid and most of them were into higher-end products than I could afford. I was priced out of the market. And yet I still bought lots of cards until other obligations took over my time and attention, sampling most of the premium and super premium lines along the way (and now wishing that I had focused on quality over quantity). Have the demographics really changed all that much in 20 years?

And this is where I’m as lost as you are reading it. I’ve tried to touch on all of the factors that play into the success and failure of baseball cards. CBS showed how things are different now compared to an unrealistic bubble economy. I’ve painted a complex picture of an industry with many facets. CBS showed two very limited data points. I see uncertainty with signs pointing to at least modest success. CBS showed certain doom. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised though, CBS produced a 5 minute fluff piece while I tried to capture the history of an industry and my connection to it. Reality often fails to fit into a convenient narrative.

Why even bother running a piece on an industry just to say “it’s doomed” and not even bother to back it up? Why not look at the tragic end of Upper Deck as a fixture in the hobby or Panini’s clumsy revival of the Playoff/Donruss brand? Why not point out the inherent irony in MLB Properties granting Topps a monopoly to encourage innovation? Of all the signs of the hobby’s impending demise they could have chosen, CBS went to the local interest well for a bunch of guys who are about as out of touch with the hobby as the reporters themselves. That’s the sign of an industry on the brink of failure.

I really don’t know what the future holds for the baseball card industry. And I don’t know if that future even matters to collectors, whatever it might hold. Collectors will continue no matter what happens in the industry, changing their focus to keep the hobby interesting, taking a break when they need to, and eventually coming back if and when they see a future in the hobby. I’ve been in and out of this hobby so many times that I barely recognize what I was in my previous incarnations. I look at cards that have no place in my collection now but were centerpieces once upon a time; I see others that mean far more to me now than they did years ago. Most of all though, I see this hobby’s past as being something that is rich for mining, with every new set adding to the diversity of a mosaic that is too great to be seen in whole. The totality of the hobby is not in the current month’s or year’s offering, it is in all of the products and collectors that have come before. The hobby is bigger than any one product, manufacturer, collector, or card show. The hobby is bigger than eBay, Beckett, or even the entire Internet. The hobby will live on long after cards stop being produced or games stop being played.

Now about that stack of 1975 Topps in the CBS piece, could someone check it against my wantlist? I really need to get working on that set…