COMMENTARY : Blame Your Mother for Baseball Cards’ Skyrocketing Prices

Sometime just before the Berlin Wall was dismantled, I walked into a baseball card store a confident and capable consumer--certain that the rules as I had always known them were somehow unalterable--and left a shaken, half-broken, mostly broke man.

The world had changed, and no one had bothered to tell me.

OK, I knew some things were different. For instance, there is music now called hip hop. And though they don’t sell box turtles anymore, they do market the teen-age mutant ninja model. It isn’t like I’m not in tune with the pop culture. Most guys my age think Milli Vanilli is an ice cream flavor and not a pair of singing beauticians.

But I didn’t know and I still can’t quite believe that a Don Mattingly rookie baseball card could cost $28. It was a birthday present for my nephew. Big spender that I am, as we waltzed into the store I told the kid to pick out any card he wanted. He picked out the Mattingly. When I spied the price tag, I said, gasping only slightly, “Gee, isn’t that a very interesting Don Slaught card over there?”

He didn’t bite on that so-smooth sales pitch, so I ended up eating Mattingly, the 28 bucks breaking my personal high spent for a single baseball card by only $27.99.

Actually, I used to pay a nickel for five cards plus that slab of pink bubble gum that I, as the grandson of a dentist, was forbidden to eat. I could sniff it, though.

I would spend every nickel I could get my hands on down at Minnie’s, the local candy-toy store, collecting those cards as if they were gold. Now, it turns out they are. I had complete sets. I had doubles of every Dodger. My friends and I spent hours trading the cards, fondling them all the while. No one fondles baseball cards now. You put them in plastic, knowing that frayed edges hurt the resale value.

We used to play a game, sort of like war, where we’d deal out the cards, and the card representing the best player would win. You probably used to flip them. But those were kids’ games. Collecting these days is a grown-up affair, sort of. It’s confusing because the card store I walked into Thursday is run by an 11-year-old entrepreneur named Robbie Davis.

According to Bob Davis, his dad, who helps out at Robbie’s First Base when Robbie is in school, they started last August with a card collection worth $8,500. Now, he says, their inventory is worth--hold on to your Bill Ripken card, at $40 for the one with the interesting bat handle--a cool $125,000. However you add it up, that’s a lot of Don Mattinglys.

The most expensive card at Robbie’s is Mickey Mantle’s rookie card. That costs $2,000. When I was a kid, you couldn’t put a price tag on a Mantle, for which you spent nickel after nickel in a vain search, only to have your little sister buy one with the one nickel your dad gave her. And then, even though she had never heard of the Mick, she wouldn’t trade you the card for two Yogi Berras and a Whitey Ford.

A rookie Nolan Ryan goes for $1,200. Jose Canseco will cost you $55. Bo Jackson $20.

You buy cards on speculation. There was a well-dressed man who walked into the store and plunked down money, just as an owner would, for a Mark Langston and a Bret Saberhagen, saying he liked their futures.

“If you buy a card of somebody you think is going to the Hall of Fame,” Davis said, “you have a chance to make some money.”

The Jim Palmer rookie card, as an example, is priced at $175.

It’s no kid’s game all right. Davis estimates that 60% of his customers are adults, which explains, in part, the price explosion as people find a way to recapture their youth and make a buck at the same time. Ah, nostalgia.

When I asked Davis how the cards have come to cost so much, he answered with a question.

“Where are your baseball cards?” he asked.

I told him my mom threw them out, by the drawer full, when I went to college.

He smiled.

“Everyone’s mom threw their kids’ cards out,” he said. “That explains the prices.”

No one throws out coin collections or stamp collections. But, turn your back, and the baseball cards go in a Sandy Koufax minute. And we still celebrate Mother’s Day.

As the cards’ value skyrocketed, there came a need for price guides. There’s the annual guide, of course, and, lately, the monthly update. Even the monthly guide can’t keep up with the market forces, though.

And now there’s even a video out, explaining card collecting as if it were a science instead of something you needed to go to business school to understand.

“The kids know everything,” Davis said. “They know the value of every card. They know who to buy and how much they’re making.”

Warms your heart, doesn’t it? Once upon a time, you wanted a baseball card for the romance of it. Now, it’s the finance of it.

Here’s finance for you. The hottest card company is Upper Deck, which makes a designer card out of acrylic, instead of cardboard, and costs five times as much as your basic set of Topps. On the Upper Deck 1990 Ben McDonald card, there’s no mention that he’s a rookie, meaning the card, because of the error, suddenly is worth $110. That’s not a misprint. That’s the new age. You could look it up.

But it’s not all bad. Remember that Mattingly I bought back in the summer for $28? It’s worth $55 now. As Ernie Banks would say today, let’s buy two.