Unconventional Worlds: The Baseball Card Show
By Daniel Rigney
The doors of a large urban convention center are like doors leading into subcultural twilight zones. Each convention event – the gun show, the bridal extragavanza, the public assembly of astrologers or astronomers -- ushers us into a distinctive “world” of its own. Today I’ve walked into the world of Sports Collectibles.
My blogging notepad is at the ready as my eyes and ears scan the convention hall for amusing and telling details.
The world of sports memorabilia may be unfamiliar to you. If you don’t know it from the inside, you may not be aware that an elaborate code of rules and social conventions governs this cultural province* within the larger domain of Collectibles in General, whose provinces also include Doll World, Stamp World, and Wealth World, the latter harboring a shadowy sub-subculture better known to outsiders as Wall Street.
I myself am already fairly familiar with Baseball Card World, a subset of the larger set, Sports Collectibles World, which is in turn a subset of Collectibles in General. I am especially familiar with the baseball neighborhood as it existed between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, back in the days when sports card collecting was pure and simple, before commercializers came and ruined it, some would say, by turning baseball cards -- miniature works of art -- into mere investment commodities.
Not for nothing are collectibles called memorabilia. They remind us of a semi-imaginary past when things were so much better than they are now. Actually, there was never a time when baseball cards (and professional baseball itself) were not commercialized. The cards first appeared in the United States in the 19th century as promotions for tobacco and other products, and later, for chewing gum.
From the ages of about 10 to 18 I collected baseball cards with some earnestness. Sometimes my growing collection would absorb the smaller collections of generous others, like a blob that feeds on smaller blobs. Often I would augment my collection by buying more Topps bubble gum than one person could safely or reasonably hope to chew, just to have the cards that lay wrapped like miniature portraits inside the gum’s waxy packaging.
Then I lost track of baseball card world, and even baseball itself, for awhile as I spent the next several decades going on to college and pursuing an academic career.
Now that I’m semi-retired from a life of teaching and writing about serious things and administering serious programs, I can spend more time recreating (re-creating). I can reprioritize and reimagine and reinvent, and all those other re-words. I can reconnect to the magical world of baseball cards, and to a purer and simpler time, before the commercializers came and ruined it.
Did I mention that baseball cards are miniature works of art?
So here I am today at the Reliant Center, a large convention hall next door to what was once the Astrodome, Houston’s own ruined Roman Coliseum. When it was built in 1964, going on 50 years ago, the Astrodome was touted as the eighth wonder of the world. Now it’s a wonder the old barn hasn’t been torn down. I think it may still have a few tractor pulls left in it, myself, and as a general rule I do support historic preservation. But there are counter-arguments and counter-interests at stake as always. The fate of this monument to modernity will be a close call at home.
Baseball in the Twilight Zone
I step into the twilight zone that is the TriStar Collectibles Show. (TriStar is a major corporate “player” in the game of sports collectibles.) I’ve paid $10 to park in order to pay another $10 to get into the vast exhibit hall, about the size of a football field, for the privilege of spending even more money on little pieces of colored cardboard. I know that may sound nuts to some. You may not understand. It’s a baseball card thing.
As I enter, I survey the commercial landscape. On the right, I see baseball world. That’s what I’m mainly here for. Beyond that are football world and the autograph pavilion, about a hundred yards from the entrance. A long line of tables and booths is staffed by small business-owners or their employees, hawking sporty gear.
The Sports Collectibles show is a manly world, demographically – even more so than the gun show I attended as an inquiring blogger a few weeks ago. Maybe five percent of the light crowd today is female, including two stocky middle-aged women who are shopping together for pro football cards for their home collection. (I wonder whether we say that women “shop,” but that men “invest.”) Today’s crowd is mostly men, casually dressed in Houston’s standard summer weekend uniform of jeans or shorts and athletic shoes. I see no cowboy hats, but I do see quite a few baseball caps and shirts with team logos from around the country.
The only women’s athletic memorabilia I see all afternoon are two pin-up cards of photogenic Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova.
Lurking around, I accidentally overhear a sales guy advising a potential customer that he doesn’t have to tell his wife he’s buying a pricey piece of sports merchandise, because wives “don’t need to know, and it ain’t going to hurt ‘em” not to.
The accents in the room seem generally more drawly and Texan than usual for an increasingly diverse and urban place like Houston. Many of these guys are old-timers, and most (not all) are white Anglo, with just a sprinkling of ethnic diversity. This demographic is more Old Texas than New. But there is evidence of a new cosmopolitanism in the room as well. I see caps and shirts from places as far away as Boston, Chicago and California.
I chit-chat about the sports card business with several salespeople, including a woman from a little memorabilia company in Florida -- a kind of “nostalgia shop,” as the lead character in Woody Allen’s recent “Midnight in Paris” might call it.
I happen to own (or co-own) a small collection of “star” cards from the 1950s and 1960s, and I also have shoeboxes full of what I’m learning to call “commons” from that same era. I ask one used-card dealer (thank you) how he and other dealers evaluate the condition of the cards they buy and sell. He tells me that in this business they use a 1-10 scale (a 20-point scale if you count half-points) to rate a card’s condition. A “1” means the dog chewed the card, while a “10” is mint, and preferably never touched.
The more valuable cards are sheathed in clear plastic covers for protected display, so that a fingerprint won’t suddenly cause a card’s condition to plummet from, say, an 8 to a 6. The difference in these two ratings could be hundreds of dollars or more in some instances. That’s an expensive fingerprint.
I explain that I have several cards in my own family’s collection from the Mays-Mantle-Berra era. Some of these may be pretty valuable. The family treasures include not just Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, but also Roger Maris, Don Drysdale, Stan Musial, Warren Spahn, Roberto Clemente, Ernie Banks, Sandy Koufax, Hank Aaron, Brooks Robinson near the start of his marathon playing career, Willie McCovey, and the old professor Casey Stengel, who once sagely observed that in simpler factual disputes “you can look it up.”
Our personal collection also features a couple of rookie Carl Yastrzemski’s, and a couple of Babe Ruth commemoratives. As novelties, I’ve safekept the cards of broadcasters Bob Uecker and Joe Garagiola, and of my probable distant relative, manager Bill Rigney of the Giants. And from the worlds of football and politics, Jack Kemp.
If you have any idea who most of these people are, you must be a real baseball fan, and pretty old.
If we ever decide to sell these cards, which I doubt, I now have several business cards to add to the collection. I also have insider information on the sports memorabilia market which, like markets in general, is pretty anemic these days according to several I talked with. “We’re not buying anything right now," said one discouraged used-card dealer. "We have too much present inventory.”
As I stroll around, I scout not just baseball cards, but also replica uniforms (never call them “baseball outfits”), including a fine-looking retro-replica Grays uniform from the old pre-Jackie-Robinson Negro League days, selling for only $190, as well as autographed baseballs and -- a discovery worth the price of admission -- an unopened box of Honey Nuts Cheerios celebrating the Florida Marlins’ World Series victory of 1997. The box is in near-mint condition, and the picture on the front, a photo of a victorious and manly team hug at home plate, is signed by two members of that year’s team. This is what some might call a "heritage" box of cereal.
$15? Let me think about it. Time for a snack. I'll have the overpriced Ken's Pecan-Smoked Turkey Jerky, please. I hope it isn't heritage jerky.
King Football
But why am I talking so much about baseball? Everyone knows that in Texas football is king.
I don’t care much for football myself. As a game and an entertainment, should it remind me so much of grim warfare, with helmeted soldiers clashing violently in strategically coordinated ground and air attacks for the control of territory? I prefer baseball. In baseball, as George Carlin observed, the object is to be “safe at home.” Let’s not get into the old “football players fight so that baseball players may live in safety” argument. That old line is such an unexamined cliché.
But since I’m now in the gigantic football section of the show, just past the modest basketball, hockey and tennis exhibits, I may as well give you the football highlights.
A replica of a Joe Namath’s green #12 heritage Jets jersey, autographed and authenticated, is available at a special price today, but you must buy now. The heritage Tom Brady model (also #12) is $1,650, or $1795 with the Beautiful Custom Shadow Box Frame. Nearly-antique heritage issues of Sports Illustrated and the Street and Smith 1967 College Football Preview are also available if you’re a little behind on your football news as I am.
Bart Starr is worth more than Terry Bradshaw. How do I know? Starr’s autographed replica Green Bay Packers helmet can be yours for $350. Terry Bradshaw’s signature on a Steelers helmet is going for just $250. The helmets are handsome, but where would you wear them? Footballs in various sizes and team colors are also available, though they come in only one shape.
Bargain alert: Next to the footballs, a white Oklahoma State Cowboys basketball is yours for the special price of only $8. Not a bad deal if I needed a white basketball.
I head to the back of the cavernous hall to get a look at the TriStar Autograph Pavilion. There are nine signing stalls in all, but only two are operating this afternoon. Autograph seekers wait patiently in roped lines to get the signatures of former Texas A&M football coach R. C. Slocum and/or former Aggie Von Miller, a promising young rookie linebacker for the Denver Broncos. Miller’s line is at least twice as long as Slocum’s. Youth beats experience, 24-10.
As autograph hounds leave the area, they pass through a checkpoint, where the authenticity of the autographs freshly inscribed on their merchandise is entered into a computer data base on a check-out laptop. Welcome to 21st century sports, where it isn’t authentic if it isn’t authenticated online. Authentication is what we now look for in a sports investment or a sentimental personal effect.
As I start to leave the convention hall, I think fondly of that $15 mint-condition autographed box of heritage Honey Nut Cheerios commemorating the Florida Marlins’ 1997 World Series championship. I vaguely remember watching some of that series on television. It brings back a trickle of memories.
I go back to the rather surly guy behind the table I had visited earlier to talk cereal. I get him down to $10. The Cheerios box should be worth at least that much for its conversational value alone. At that price, I can’t afford NOT to have a box of 14-year-old toasted oats commemorating a group of grown men who hit balls with sticks for a living.
The surly guy seems glad to have made the sale. Business is slow. He warns me not to open the box and partake of its 14-year-old toasted oat contents. He’s not a doctor, he says, but he advises strongly against it on medical grounds. Point taken. When I get home, I’ll put it up on the shelf with the large books and leave it there, to be taken down and shown on special occasions.
You may think I'm nutty to pay $10 for a box of 14-year-old honey-nut cereal. But you may not understand. It’s a baseball thing. It's about heritage. It's about tradition. It''s about four o'clock, and the memorabilia show is closing in a few minutes.
I leave pondering this questions: Why are there no comedian trading cards? [Searching….Searching....]
Never mind. Comedy trading cards are already out there. I wonder if they come with jokers in the deck.
*This article links sociologically to Alfred Schutz’s The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), and especially to Schutz’s notion of “finite provinces of meaning.” It is to him, among others, that we owe the popular conception of subcultures as social and cultural “worlds” of meaning.
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
By Daniel Rigney
The doors of a large urban convention center are like doors leading into subcultural twilight zones. Each convention event – the gun show, the bridal extragavanza, the public assembly of astrologers or astronomers -- ushers us into a distinctive “world” of its own. Today I’ve walked into the world of Sports Collectibles.
My blogging notepad is at the ready as my eyes and ears scan the convention hall for amusing and telling details.
The world of sports memorabilia may be unfamiliar to you. If you don’t know it from the inside, you may not be aware that an elaborate code of rules and social conventions governs this cultural province* within the larger domain of Collectibles in General, whose provinces also include Doll World, Stamp World, and Wealth World, the latter harboring a shadowy sub-subculture better known to outsiders as Wall Street.
I myself am already fairly familiar with Baseball Card World, a subset of the larger set, Sports Collectibles World, which is in turn a subset of Collectibles in General. I am especially familiar with the baseball neighborhood as it existed between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, back in the days when sports card collecting was pure and simple, before commercializers came and ruined it, some would say, by turning baseball cards -- miniature works of art -- into mere investment commodities.
Not for nothing are collectibles called memorabilia. They remind us of a semi-imaginary past when things were so much better than they are now. Actually, there was never a time when baseball cards (and professional baseball itself) were not commercialized. The cards first appeared in the United States in the 19th century as promotions for tobacco and other products, and later, for chewing gum.
From the ages of about 10 to 18 I collected baseball cards with some earnestness. Sometimes my growing collection would absorb the smaller collections of generous others, like a blob that feeds on smaller blobs. Often I would augment my collection by buying more Topps bubble gum than one person could safely or reasonably hope to chew, just to have the cards that lay wrapped like miniature portraits inside the gum’s waxy packaging.
Then I lost track of baseball card world, and even baseball itself, for awhile as I spent the next several decades going on to college and pursuing an academic career.
Now that I’m semi-retired from a life of teaching and writing about serious things and administering serious programs, I can spend more time recreating (re-creating). I can reprioritize and reimagine and reinvent, and all those other re-words. I can reconnect to the magical world of baseball cards, and to a purer and simpler time, before the commercializers came and ruined it.
Did I mention that baseball cards are miniature works of art?
So here I am today at the Reliant Center, a large convention hall next door to what was once the Astrodome, Houston’s own ruined Roman Coliseum. When it was built in 1964, going on 50 years ago, the Astrodome was touted as the eighth wonder of the world. Now it’s a wonder the old barn hasn’t been torn down. I think it may still have a few tractor pulls left in it, myself, and as a general rule I do support historic preservation. But there are counter-arguments and counter-interests at stake as always. The fate of this monument to modernity will be a close call at home.
Baseball in the Twilight Zone
I step into the twilight zone that is the TriStar Collectibles Show. (TriStar is a major corporate “player” in the game of sports collectibles.) I’ve paid $10 to park in order to pay another $10 to get into the vast exhibit hall, about the size of a football field, for the privilege of spending even more money on little pieces of colored cardboard. I know that may sound nuts to some. You may not understand. It’s a baseball card thing.
As I enter, I survey the commercial landscape. On the right, I see baseball world. That’s what I’m mainly here for. Beyond that are football world and the autograph pavilion, about a hundred yards from the entrance. A long line of tables and booths is staffed by small business-owners or their employees, hawking sporty gear.
The Sports Collectibles show is a manly world, demographically – even more so than the gun show I attended as an inquiring blogger a few weeks ago. Maybe five percent of the light crowd today is female, including two stocky middle-aged women who are shopping together for pro football cards for their home collection. (I wonder whether we say that women “shop,” but that men “invest.”) Today’s crowd is mostly men, casually dressed in Houston’s standard summer weekend uniform of jeans or shorts and athletic shoes. I see no cowboy hats, but I do see quite a few baseball caps and shirts with team logos from around the country.
The only women’s athletic memorabilia I see all afternoon are two pin-up cards of photogenic Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova.
Lurking around, I accidentally overhear a sales guy advising a potential customer that he doesn’t have to tell his wife he’s buying a pricey piece of sports merchandise, because wives “don’t need to know, and it ain’t going to hurt ‘em” not to.
The accents in the room seem generally more drawly and Texan than usual for an increasingly diverse and urban place like Houston. Many of these guys are old-timers, and most (not all) are white Anglo, with just a sprinkling of ethnic diversity. This demographic is more Old Texas than New. But there is evidence of a new cosmopolitanism in the room as well. I see caps and shirts from places as far away as Boston, Chicago and California.
I chit-chat about the sports card business with several salespeople, including a woman from a little memorabilia company in Florida -- a kind of “nostalgia shop,” as the lead character in Woody Allen’s recent “Midnight in Paris” might call it.
I happen to own (or co-own) a small collection of “star” cards from the 1950s and 1960s, and I also have shoeboxes full of what I’m learning to call “commons” from that same era. I ask one used-card dealer (thank you) how he and other dealers evaluate the condition of the cards they buy and sell. He tells me that in this business they use a 1-10 scale (a 20-point scale if you count half-points) to rate a card’s condition. A “1” means the dog chewed the card, while a “10” is mint, and preferably never touched.
The more valuable cards are sheathed in clear plastic covers for protected display, so that a fingerprint won’t suddenly cause a card’s condition to plummet from, say, an 8 to a 6. The difference in these two ratings could be hundreds of dollars or more in some instances. That’s an expensive fingerprint.
I explain that I have several cards in my own family’s collection from the Mays-Mantle-Berra era. Some of these may be pretty valuable. The family treasures include not just Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, but also Roger Maris, Don Drysdale, Stan Musial, Warren Spahn, Roberto Clemente, Ernie Banks, Sandy Koufax, Hank Aaron, Brooks Robinson near the start of his marathon playing career, Willie McCovey, and the old professor Casey Stengel, who once sagely observed that in simpler factual disputes “you can look it up.”
Our personal collection also features a couple of rookie Carl Yastrzemski’s, and a couple of Babe Ruth commemoratives. As novelties, I’ve safekept the cards of broadcasters Bob Uecker and Joe Garagiola, and of my probable distant relative, manager Bill Rigney of the Giants. And from the worlds of football and politics, Jack Kemp.
If you have any idea who most of these people are, you must be a real baseball fan, and pretty old.
If we ever decide to sell these cards, which I doubt, I now have several business cards to add to the collection. I also have insider information on the sports memorabilia market which, like markets in general, is pretty anemic these days according to several I talked with. “We’re not buying anything right now," said one discouraged used-card dealer. "We have too much present inventory.”
As I stroll around, I scout not just baseball cards, but also replica uniforms (never call them “baseball outfits”), including a fine-looking retro-replica Grays uniform from the old pre-Jackie-Robinson Negro League days, selling for only $190, as well as autographed baseballs and -- a discovery worth the price of admission -- an unopened box of Honey Nuts Cheerios celebrating the Florida Marlins’ World Series victory of 1997. The box is in near-mint condition, and the picture on the front, a photo of a victorious and manly team hug at home plate, is signed by two members of that year’s team. This is what some might call a "heritage" box of cereal.
$15? Let me think about it. Time for a snack. I'll have the overpriced Ken's Pecan-Smoked Turkey Jerky, please. I hope it isn't heritage jerky.
King Football
But why am I talking so much about baseball? Everyone knows that in Texas football is king.
I don’t care much for football myself. As a game and an entertainment, should it remind me so much of grim warfare, with helmeted soldiers clashing violently in strategically coordinated ground and air attacks for the control of territory? I prefer baseball. In baseball, as George Carlin observed, the object is to be “safe at home.” Let’s not get into the old “football players fight so that baseball players may live in safety” argument. That old line is such an unexamined cliché.
But since I’m now in the gigantic football section of the show, just past the modest basketball, hockey and tennis exhibits, I may as well give you the football highlights.
A replica of a Joe Namath’s green #12 heritage Jets jersey, autographed and authenticated, is available at a special price today, but you must buy now. The heritage Tom Brady model (also #12) is $1,650, or $1795 with the Beautiful Custom Shadow Box Frame. Nearly-antique heritage issues of Sports Illustrated and the Street and Smith 1967 College Football Preview are also available if you’re a little behind on your football news as I am.
Bart Starr is worth more than Terry Bradshaw. How do I know? Starr’s autographed replica Green Bay Packers helmet can be yours for $350. Terry Bradshaw’s signature on a Steelers helmet is going for just $250. The helmets are handsome, but where would you wear them? Footballs in various sizes and team colors are also available, though they come in only one shape.
Bargain alert: Next to the footballs, a white Oklahoma State Cowboys basketball is yours for the special price of only $8. Not a bad deal if I needed a white basketball.
I head to the back of the cavernous hall to get a look at the TriStar Autograph Pavilion. There are nine signing stalls in all, but only two are operating this afternoon. Autograph seekers wait patiently in roped lines to get the signatures of former Texas A&M football coach R. C. Slocum and/or former Aggie Von Miller, a promising young rookie linebacker for the Denver Broncos. Miller’s line is at least twice as long as Slocum’s. Youth beats experience, 24-10.
As autograph hounds leave the area, they pass through a checkpoint, where the authenticity of the autographs freshly inscribed on their merchandise is entered into a computer data base on a check-out laptop. Welcome to 21st century sports, where it isn’t authentic if it isn’t authenticated online. Authentication is what we now look for in a sports investment or a sentimental personal effect.
As I start to leave the convention hall, I think fondly of that $15 mint-condition autographed box of heritage Honey Nut Cheerios commemorating the Florida Marlins’ 1997 World Series championship. I vaguely remember watching some of that series on television. It brings back a trickle of memories.
I go back to the rather surly guy behind the table I had visited earlier to talk cereal. I get him down to $10. The Cheerios box should be worth at least that much for its conversational value alone. At that price, I can’t afford NOT to have a box of 14-year-old toasted oats commemorating a group of grown men who hit balls with sticks for a living.
The surly guy seems glad to have made the sale. Business is slow. He warns me not to open the box and partake of its 14-year-old toasted oat contents. He’s not a doctor, he says, but he advises strongly against it on medical grounds. Point taken. When I get home, I’ll put it up on the shelf with the large books and leave it there, to be taken down and shown on special occasions.
You may think I'm nutty to pay $10 for a box of 14-year-old honey-nut cereal. But you may not understand. It’s a baseball thing. It's about heritage. It's about tradition. It''s about four o'clock, and the memorabilia show is closing in a few minutes.
I leave pondering this questions: Why are there no comedian trading cards? [Searching….Searching....]
Never mind. Comedy trading cards are already out there. I wonder if they come with jokers in the deck.
*This article links sociologically to Alfred Schutz’s The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), and especially to Schutz’s notion of “finite provinces of meaning.” It is to him, among others, that we owe the popular conception of subcultures as social and cultural “worlds” of meaning.
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
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