The hobby is dead; long live the hobby!

A recent CBS News report about the decline of baseball cards has, predictably, received a bit of criticism from the sports card industry. Beckett and Panini have weighed in, please start there to see where this controversy is coming from. Are the days of baseball cards numbered? Is this hobby dying a slow but certain death? Can the hobby survive without massive popularity among kids? Was this piece produced 15 years ago? The answers to all of these are a bit murky and require digging deep into the history of the hobby (well, the last one is a definite “it might as well have been”). In Part 1, I’ll take a stab at why the hobby could be in trouble. In Part 2, I’ll take a look at what CBS thinks and see where we can go from there.

There are two distinct points in time when I would have emphatically agreed that baseball cards could be headed for oblivion. The first was in late 2005, when Fleer went under and Donruss let the door hit its ass on its way out of the licensed baseball card business. Fleer’s demise was really not all that surprising (its reign as the longest-running non-Topps licensed baseball card manufacturer is the surprising part). The loss of Donruss, after five years of driving the industry to deliver more variety to collectors, was like the MLB Players Association giving fans the finger.

More than anything else, the move was made to ensure that cards were all about advertising the on-field product; the simplification of the product line, reduced emphasis on retired players, and MLBPA-mandated definition of Rookie Card (which now is the most meaningless designation in the sport, several rungs below Game Winning RBIs and ceremonial first-pitch throwers) all showed that the MLBPA was not happy with the baseball card industry catering to collectors and not impressionable children who could be counted on to buy lots of MLB-licensed merchandise if only baseball cards could be made simpler.

The second major blow was delivered by MLB Properties when they reinstated the Topps monopoly in 2009. While Topps wasn’t the only player in the baseball card market from 1956 to 1980, it did everything it could to keep competitors out of the market. In this time, about the only thing Topps didn’t try was innovation; the product in 1980 differed from the product of 20 years earlier mainly in photography. Card quality, design, and subject matter remained virtually unchanged for decades.

Things changed in 1981 when Fleer and Donruss finally entered the market with the intention of sticking around. For the rest of the decade, the three fought to get cards of the hottest new rookies into their products, making update sets standard (and creating the XRC confusion). Fleer and Donruss, forced to abandon gum after the court ruling that let them into the market was overturned, moved to slightly better card stock, with Score and then Upper Deck taking things further in 1988 and 1989, respectively. By the time Topps countered with a largely irrelevant late-season Bowman set, it was clear that change was necessary to keep up in the booming card market.

That’s what happens when you have competition. Sure, people complain about how it’s not like it was in the “old days,” but chances are that the real old days weren’t what they think they were. Things are always changing, whether it’s the price of a pack of cards, the number of cards in the pack, or the mix of cards from month-to-month (well, that stopped changing in 1974); the quality of the gum is the only true constant (kudos to Topps for getting the 2001 Heritage gum formulation so perfectly putrid). Monopolies slow the pace of change and put the industry at risk of irrelevance.

This is what makes the 2009 exclusive trading card deal between MLB Properties and Topps so troubling. Worse, when Upper Deck snubbed its nose at MLBP and produced a 2010 baseball card product with visible team names and logos, the resulting court battle ended in a settlement that all but guaranteed that Upper Deck would not be returning to the baseball card market; in addition to agreeing not to use MLB team names and logos, Upper Deck agreed not to use photos that had been altered to remove offending logos, leaving only artwork and non-baseball imagery as fair game should UD wish to produce an unlicensed set.

Things took a turn for the better in 2011 when Panini, the current owner of Donruss and Playoff (but not Leaf), secured a license from the MLB Players Association. While this is certainly a positive development, Panini has a long way to go to bring its cards up to the current industry standard (the lack of team logos and names and the continued release of 2011 products well into 2012 aren’t helping matters any either). Even Leaf (formerly Razor, not to be confused with the Donruss incarnation of Leaf) has managed to produce high-quality cards with no official licenses, so Panini’s initial efforts under their MLBPA license are disappointing to say the least.

So what does this say about the health of the hobby? Not a heck of a lot. You can talk financials (Upper Deck was near-ruin in the mid-90s and Topps was in the middle of several takeover/merger attempts in 2007), but that’s too far removed from the average collector to be relatable. The booms of the mid-to-late-80s and early-to-mid-00s can teach us a few lessons. Mainly, interest in the sport is a big factor in the success of baseball cards; unlike what the MLBPA would like to believe, the sport is an advertisement for the hobby, not the other way around. The strikes in 1981 and 1994 corresponded to down years for the baseball card industry, while renewed interest in the sport in the following years corresponds to the previously mentioned booms. Today, we’re coming off another downturn caused by the revelation of the Steroid Era and should be looking at an upswing in the near future (particularly if perennial losers Royals and Pirates and big-market busts Mets and Dodgers can get competitive again). This should result in a stronger baseball card market, all things being equal, but are they?

Check back tomorrow for Part 2: Baseball cards and traditional media, pot and kettle?