For the Love of Sitting Around and Flipping Through a Price Guide, Part 2

Let me be the first to say it: I didn’t realize that so many people feel the same way I do about the meaningless-ness of prices listed in Beckett and Tuff Stuff. Very interesting stuff.

Let me also be the first to say that I didn’t realize just how big an issue this assessment really is. There are lots of thoughts out there about how the apparent demise of the price guide affects collectors, ranging from very much (count me among this lot) to not at all.

In the last post on this topic, I brought up the idea of price guides as hobby infrastructure and claimed that without their consultation the hobby would be thrown into chaos. Tonight I would like to take this a step further. Tonight I want to examine…

A World Without Baseball Card Shops

Here’s the situation. The list prices in price guides have been deemed useless on such a massive scale that Beckett and FW have ceased their publication. With no widely available prices, the majority of collectors now consult eBay for accurate card prices.

Dealers do the same. And after they view the umpteenth autographed patch 1/1 card go for less than $20–pulled from a box that dealers paid a premium on to sell–they stop ordering high-end products from the manufacturers. The dealers understand that if they’re seeing these auctions on eBay, their potential customers are winning them.

So many dealers stop ordering these cards that the manufacturers have a difficult decision to make: finally listen to dealers and put more value in each box of product, or dismiss dealers altogether and work exclusively with big box stores like Target, Kmart and Wal-Mart. It comes as no surprise when the manufacturers go with the latter choice.

Because the majority of shops deal primarily in new cards, they start to close. Collectors don’t notice right away, as most of them are tuned to eBay. And besides, the hobby’s gone through this before and survived, so what’s the big deal? Also, everybody’s got a Wal-Mart near them, so who cares if one more shop goes out of business? Shops sell off their inventory and shutter.

Dealers at baseball card shows don’t feel the same pressure right away, though many of them do feel their brethren’s plight. Instead, without book prices to consult on every transaction, desperate, frenetic dealers result to using their best judgment. Collectors, fully aware of the situation dealers are in, refuse to be charged “judgment call prices.” Many dealers, citing lack of meaningful sales at shows, stop booking booths. What few shows remain shrink in attendance until they cease to exist. The National is the lone exception, chugging away, though it’s a magnet for news media to lament the hobby crisis. “Ain’t in the Card$,” is the New York Post headline.

Without dealers, the manufacturers are no longer in the dominant bargaining position. They’re at the whim of the big box stores. Product’s gonna be late? OK, we’re diminishing your shelf space. The manufacturers are not used to their role as ‘just another product.’ What happened to all those dealers they used to push around?


If I haven’t given my critics enough fodder already, here’s some more:

• The future of the hobby most certainly will not play out the way I’ve got it, though certain aspects of it are very close to happening now.

• No matter how much we distrust the prices within price guides, they’re essential to the well being of the hobby. If you’ve got a plan for injecting realistic card values into the hobby without killing hobby shops and show dealers off, please, I’m all ears.

• One last thing: I wanted to work graded cards into this somehow, but never found a good spot. If raw singles aren’t really worth their book value, what about graded cards? I know that entire price guides cater to graded specimen, but will/should these prices be combined with prices for unslabbed cards? Or would that negate the values assigned to those that have been slabbed? Also, why does it feel to me that dealing in graded cards is going to be what saves shop owners and show dealers?

For The Love of Sitting Around and Flipping Through a Price Guide

Today I walked down to the supermarket and for the hell of it bought the new Tuff Stuff– excuse me, the new Tuff Stuff's Sports Collectors Monthly. And while it was fun to flip through it, scan the ads and learn about cards from the Dark Ages of the hobby (1996 - 2005), I got to the point where I felt like I was deluding myself if I actually believed what was printed in the magazine's price guides. I found myself agreeing with the anonymous commenter on the "Toppstown" post: a conventional price guide has become the string quartet on the Titanic.

I'll admit, that's a dire read on today's hobby, but let's examine the situation. The hobby doesn't need price guides to exist, and yet would be chaotic without them. Beckett and FW Publications (publisher of Tuff Stuff) provide infrastructure for the secondary market. Dealers consult them when setting prices. You want to see a world without the consultation of book prices? Look no further than eBay.

With its low prices and open-source approach to assigning realistic value to cards and memorabilia, it's the new face of the hobby. It's slowly killing independent in-shop dealers. It's taken the bottom out of the value of game-used, relic, auto and other seemingly hard-to-find cards. That Poley Walnuts insert of the squirrel at Yankee Stadium from last year's Topps? Tuff Stuff has it at $40. Here are two eBay auctions: one's at $1.25, the other at $0.99.

I know I'm not the first person to bring this up, but have you really thought about what the hobby will look like in the next five years? I think it's fair to say that both Beckett Publications and FW have enough money to continue publishing their respective fleets, but what will be in those magazines? Or, more appropriately, what will be on their websites? Will there still be price guides? And if yes, will the prices they hold mean anything?

Ebay's not going anywhere. Beckett.com has a large community forum on the site, as does TuffStuff.com. Beckett's got guest columnists, Tuff Stuff's got bloggers...

With realistic pricing coming from a relatively unexpected third party, is original content the infrastructure of the future? Or can the Becketts and the Tuff Stuffs reclaim their relevancy in a traditional role in the hobby? And what about all the dealers who got into the industry only to watch their roles in it disintegrate?

Lessons from the Other Beckett

Yesterday Beckett announced they're shifting the format and timing of their publications.
So let's cut to the chase. Is Beckett making the right move here? Or is this simply a re-hash of Waiting for Godot, as the biographer of that other Beckett paraphrases, "to keep the terrible silence at bay"? Since I'm a little late to this party, here are four things I've been thinking about today:


Competition is real, not matter where it's coming from (i.e. the Internet)
Although I'm probably taking myself and my writing way too seriously, bloggers like yours truly, Chris Harris, David Campbell and others are cutting into the Beckett audience. We're producing fresh content that's opinionated, truthful, and free to read. Heck, even TS O'Connell and the SCD crowd got on the blogging bandwagon earlier last year to keep up the pace.

By moving the printed edition to once every two months, Beckett cuts down on printer, distribution, shipping and production fees and moves their fresher content to the web (at least that's what I would do). So then what becomes of the Beckett Blog?


Where is all this new editorial content going to come from?
Back in the day, Beckett had a ton of new content every month, plus detailed price listings for the majority of sets. Besides Beckett, I distinctly remember Tuff Stuff clocking in at over 200 pages on more than a few occasions. But most of those 200-plus pages were advertisements, and the last time I checked, there aren't too many dealers out there today who can support a national advertising budget. Also, where's all this new content going to come from? Is there a room full of monkeys at typewriters that's going to help churn this stuff out? Or have blogs like Stale Gum, Cardboard Junkie, Cardboard Gods, and The Baseball Card Blog awoke a widespread kindred spirit of old baseball card collectors just itching to write?


What is the breakdown going to be?
With the Sports Card Monthly, are we looking at 10 pages of content for the four major sports and 5 pages for racing, golf, the WNBA and the WWE? Because it's starting to look a lot like Tuff Stuff.

Also, how will new card pricing be introduced? Through the monthly? Or as a way to boost sales of the single-sport magazine? If it's the former, then presumably there won't be an outcry from the hobby. But if it's the latter, and new cards are only introduced every two months, you can almost guarantee that there will be an outcry from the collectors and dealers who rely on Beckett almost every day. Newspapers publish stock prices five days a week for a reason.


The Ramifications of Upping the Cover Price
This is probably the most important thing to come out of this whole story, for two reasons. First, by charging more, Beckett is moving their magazines away from the casual collectors or lapsed collectors who maybe want to check out what's going on or find out how much their Canseco rookie is worth. It may not seem like much, but consider that right now Beckett Baseball is $4.99 per issue. If you buy it at the newsstand, $4.99 is almost the average cover price for any magazine not named US Weekly or OK!. But by suddenly adding between $3 and $5 to that cover price, you're pricing a lot of people out. Not that I would know, but $7.99 and $9.99 cover prices simultaneously scream out 'niche' and 'pornography,' which may seem appropriate, considering the way some collectors covet their cards.

The proposed change in cover price is also important because it will make Beckett more expensive than Tuff Stuff, truly it's only competitor. For those who don't see a difference between the two, it's like if Pepsi raised their suggested cost to $2 a can while Coke stayed at 99¢. Which one are you going to drink?


You could make the case that Beckett had to do something to combat stale months with no new pricing, the immediacy of content on the web, and so on, but then again, to quote the playwright: "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple, I can't make out."