The wife and kids decided to stay back in Louisiana for a couple of extra days, so with the house to myself I decided to work on the transition of my old office into a bedroom for the kids. As part of the project I had to move everything out of the room (now so I could steam clean the carpet, but later so the kids don’t destroy my stuff), and in the process I came across my old baseball card collection. Oh the memories!

I spent a good five years or so of my youth and unknown sums of my parents’ money collecting cards. Whenever I would go with my mother to Sams Club I would buy a wax box of packs of cards and spend the rest of the evening opening up the packs to see what treasures I could find. Often when I would visit with my dad on alternate weekends he’d take me to a baseball card show. And of course my old friend Ron and I loved it when my mother would drive us to Houston for the huge card show at the AstroArena followed by a baseball game in the AstroDome.

I was really into baseball cards, even to the point my friend Ron and I tried to sell our wares at card shows in Baton Rouge on a couple of occasions. It was a great hobby, and taught me lots of great lessons about money:

1. Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay you for it. I remember opening up packs of baseball cards as a kid and finding the hot rookie card at the time and being giddy at how much the card was worth. “That Craig Biggio rookie card is worth $0.50, and Beckett says all these commons are worth a nickel each,” I would think to myself. What I didn’t realize at the time is that no one would really be willing to give me a nickel for those commons, mainly because they could go and buy the same pack of cards I did and get those commons for a lot less than a nickel each.
2. Today’s hot item is not necessarily a good long-term investment. Think of this as a small baseball card version of the dot-com bust. I remember from my youth that everyone would go nuts over cards for certain first round draft picks, certain they would be a hall of famer before ever stepping on a big league field. Two fun examples: the Phillies’ first round pick of Jeff Jackson, who would never play a major league game but was touted highly enough to be pictured on the box for Score’s 1990 factory set, and #1 overall pick Ben McDonald (LSU alum, and even went to my high school) who played several seasons for the Orioles but for the most part had a very lackluster professional career over 8 seasons. Both players’ cards went for several bucks each back in 1990, and now can probably be had for less than a quarter each.
3. Just because something is cheap doesn’t mean it is a good buy. I thought of this one last night as I found a wax box of 1990 Pro Set football cards. When we were getting ready for our first card show, we saw a vendor selling these wax boxes for about $9 each, so we ordered a couple of boxes thinking we could get $0.50 a pack for them (each box has 36 packs if I remember correctly). Well, there was a reason we could buy them for so cheap: it was because no one else wanted them. I think we only sold a few packs in two shows and opened up the rest of the packs in that one incomplete box. The other box is sitting in my house right now, complete with the handwritten “Good Buy!” sales pitch and the $0.50 price crossed out for a lowered $0.45 price.  
4. Trust your instincts. By 1993 I had pretty much stopped actively collecting cards. Why? Because in the short time I had been a collector I saw where almost all cards went for $0.50 a pack to where the cheapest cards were at least $1 a pack and many of the popular issues were anywhere from $3-5 a pack. Lots of cards weren’t even sold in packs but in fancy packaged sets with price tags well beyond the budget of the average kid. I decided I couldn’t afford card collecting anymore and that there was no way new cards would be worth as much as they were selling for and just stopped buying. Of course not too long after that the sports card market went into the toilet and I could now go buy most of those formally hot sets on eBay for a fraction of what they sold for then. Unfortunately most of the cards I already had also plummetted in value, which brings me to my last point:
5. Hobbies are for your enjoyment, not necessarily for making money. Yes, you can make money with a hobby (writing and photography are two hobbies that come to mind), but the primary motivation should be to do something you enjoy, not to do something that will make you money.

So what is to become of my baseball card collection? For now it will sit in my new office until I have time to sort through it. Eventually I would like to organize and catalog my collection, trading to complete sets of cards with only a few holes and get rid of cards from issues I only have a few off. I might eventually complete my Ryne Sandberg card collection, since the last I checked I can get the rookie cards from Donruss and Fleer I am missing for about $12 each (they were about $40 at their peek). I may eventually put my completed sets in binders for easier viewing with my boys when they get older, but that is a long ways off.