Baseball Card Business Isn’t Just Child’s Play
When baseball cards moved from shoeboxes and bicycle spokes to safety-deposit boxes and investment portfolios, thieves, counterfeiters and scam artists followed.
Where a young card collector once needed know little more than that a Mickey Mantle for two Marv Throneberry’s wasn’t a good deal--even with Felix Mantilla thrown in--today’s nearly $2 billion-a-year business is infested with myriad, less-obvious ways to get cheated.
“They find incredible ways to do it,” said Ted Taylor, spokesman for the card-producing Fleer Corp. “The lengths people will go to--geez, it’s really kind of scary.”
“It’s a cancer,” said David Malnick, who runs Stadium Sports Cards in this Broward County city and is an expert on authenticating cards. “It’s really getting out of hand.”
Thomas Joswiak, a Hialeah, Fla., police investigator, started a card-distribution business a few years ago as a sidelight. He soon found that baseball cards’ days of innocence--plunking down dimes for a stick of gum and five cards that might wind up as bicycle noisemakers or in a shoebox--were long gone.
Since the late 1980s, when The Wall Street Journal and several financial magazines analyzed baseball cards as a strong investment, card-making companies have profilerated, sales have skyrocketed, card shops have sprung up in nearly every shopping center, and problems have mounted.
“I saw a lot of strange things going on,” Joswiak said. “I said: ‘This isn’t right. These kids are saving their lunch money and allowances and they’re getting cheated.’ So I started poking my nose around.”
Among the cheating cited by Joswiak and veteran card dealers is a variety of ways to “search” and “cherry-pick” packs:
--Precisely calibrated gauges are used to find slightly fatter card packs, indicating cards with holograms or other special features.
--Use of metal detectors or even doctors’ magnetic resonance imaging machines to pick out special cards such as ones with gold flakes imbedded.
--In “sealed” cellophane packs, pins are used to expand the tiny air hole to get a peek at special cards in the pack.
Cheating dealers open the packs with extra-value cards, take the good ones, then use curling irons or glue to reseal the packs and sell packs with nothing but “common” cards to the unsuspecting.
Other methods involve “sequencing,” or following the number pattern of the machine-sorted packs in a given box of packs.
Malnick, using basketball cards, demonstrated the other day. Seeking the popular NBA rookie cards of Larry Johnson, Dikembe Mutombo and Steve Smith, Malnick checked a collectors’ guide and found their cards were numbered 2-3-4.
He opened three packs before he found the No. 2. Then, knowing from experience how the 36-pack boxes are ordered, he then pulled out two more packs--one contained the No. 3 card, the other the No. 4.
By opening six packs that sell for 60 cents each, Malnick had recovered three cards that have a listed collectors’ value totaling nearly $20.
Unethical dealers might put new packs to replace the six opened ones in the box. Fraudulent ones would re-seal the opened packs, without the rookie cards. Honest dealers are likely to shuffle the packs after opening boxes to prevent canny customers from using sequencing.
Searching packs and removing cards is product-tampering and consumer fraud, the card companies say.
But pulling packs with valuable cards before offering them to retail customers is a grayer area, and collectors’ guides carry ads offering “codebusters” that avoid the need for even the kind of searching Malnick did as a demonstration.
Joswiak said $10 bought a facsimile machine message detailing the secrets of pulling valuable “Diamond King” cards from a Donruss box.
Officials at leading card companies say they’re fighting the problems, switching from the traditional “wax” packs to ones that if not tamper-proof, are “tamper-evident.” Taylor of Fleer said the company re-designed its entire printing process, “at considerable expense” to make packs that can’t be easily opened and re-resealed.
Donruss marketing manager Tom Farrell said the company has tried to fight tampering with “shrink-wrapped” boxes and by trying to ensure that packs with special-value cards weigh the same as others. Timm Boyle of Topps said the company works with collectors’ associations to stay aware of the latest cheating techniques.
Another problem is counterfeiting.
Malnick has a Darryl Strawberry card a customer paid $60 for elsewhere. He showed a bonafide Strawberry rookie card and noted the sharper color and quality--the other card was a fake.
The U.S. Postal Service in May arrested a Muskegon, Mich., man who was allegedly selling thousands of counterfeit Will Clark cards. Current card guides warn that counterfeit Frank Thomas cards are being circulated.
Burglaries and shoplifting also plague the industry.
Within the past year, $500,000 worth of cards were reported stolen from a collectors’ show in Anaheim, Calif., a 1911 Honus Wagner card valued at $200,000 and a Nap Lajoie put at $40,000 were reported missing in Aspen, Colo., and Darien, Conn., respectively. An Addison, Ill., dealer last year realized that a man examing old cards had walked out with a Nolan Ryan rookie card valued at $1,200. A Plantation, Fla., dealer lost Duke Snider and Willie Mays in the same day.
Baseball cards are lucrative targets because they don’t carry identifying names or serial numbers and can be quickly re-sold.
Most dealers now use locked cases, like in jewelry stores, to display valuable cards. Malnick has window grating, an alarm system and video camera.
Jozwiak turned over his findings to the state attorney’s office. Malnick said police he’s talked to in crime-plagued South Florida seem reluctant to divert personnel to card fraud. “I think they’ve got so many other problems, they don’t want to open up a new area,” he said.
Malnick worries that many cheated customers will be turned off from the hobby.
Card company officials, who say they expect continued growth, if not the explosiveness of recent years, say they are beefing up security staffs to seek out fraud which they believe represents only a small percentage of the indsutry.
For now, they say, the safest course is for young card-buyers to try to get to know their dealers and to be cautious. At shopping-mall card shows, which sometimes attract stolen-card sellers, counterfeiters and gamblers who lure kids by offering card prizes at dice games with stacked odds, Malnick suggests that buyers ask for some form of identification, ideally a sales license or sales-tax number.
Orve Johansson, who says he was the first dealers in the Tampa Bay area in 1982, won’t let cheaters spoil his enjoyment.
“They seem to weed themselves out of the business,” Johansson said. “To me, there’s no greater thrill than seeing a kid save his money, pay for a pack, then open it up and find a Jose Canseco rookie card. That’s my high.”
