Down in The Pit, the Trading Is for the Big Kids

On this particular day, the Mike Mussina baseball card was up 24% on the stock exchange, while the Mark McGwire card fell almost 10%. The Blue Jays’ Carlos Delgado was up while veteran slugger Jose Canseco was bearish in the marketplace.

Baseball cards? Stock exchange?

It’s called ThePit.com, where trading cards are bought and sold like commodities. Pitchers instead of pork bellies, fielders instead of futures. Last month, more than 20,000 cards valued at $1.5 million were traded on this sports card stock exchange. And while the average transaction was $188, two well-heeled traders have $50,000 accounts to cover their daily deals.

And, said company chairman Marc Lore, “They may never see the cards.”

Such is the new era of trading cards, which has evolved from the wax paper pack (gum included) traded on the playground to a high-priced world in which sports cards are no longer a collection stashed in a cigar box, but a portfolio locked in a company vault.

In the case of Lore, a former risk manager for Sanwa Bank, his stock exchange idea sprang from noticing that trading cards and sports memorabilia were hot sellers on Internet auction sites. For him, it was a logical jump to trade cards on a stock market model. “My vision was to create a sport-card stock market that would appeal to any sports fan who also enjoys trading stock,” said Lore, who runs his one-of-a-kind operation out of White Plains, N.Y. “That’s a big audience.”

And a volatile one. A card’s value often is determined by how a player performed the night before. Delgado hit three home runs in a recent game and the value of his 1992 card rose 14.6% to $55. The next game he went hitless and the card value dropped to $51.

So far, ThePit, which launched in October, seems to have found a niche that industry insiders predict will be copied.

Lore is not the only one to see the Internet as a valuable tool in the trading card arena. Topps, the elder statesman of trading card manufacturers, is preparing to issue a limited-edition set that can be bought only on its Web site.

Internet card sites are sure to affect both neighborhood card shops and the large shows that put dozens of dealers under one roof simply because they offer so many more choices.

“It’s definitely a threat,” said Rich Klein, a price guide analyst for Beckett.com, the bible of trading cards. “The card dealers on the corner depended on walk-ins, and they were the primary place where cards were bought and sold.”

Not all stores, though, are threatened. Burbank Sportscards, the nation’s largest, with more than 6 million cards in its inventory, is thriving in this new Internet world. Owner Rob Veres, who started in the card business when he was 12, said the key to his success is having 650,000 cards cataloged online. Taking duplicates into account, he said that number represents roughly half his vast stockpile, which he stores in his spacious 4,300-square-foot store.

“Sometimes customers come in and I tell them it would be easier to go home and shop by computer.” To prove his point, Veres typed in Dodger Eric Karros on his computer. Up came 22 pages of Karros cards, 440 in all. On any given day, his staff of 19 fills more than 100 orders worldwide.

The buying and selling of cards over the Internet would seem to be somewhat risky. After all, a buyer can’t actually hold the card and see what kind of condition it’s in. That has given rise to the increased use of professionally graded cards. Several companies dominate the market, including Professional Sports Authenticator in Newport Beach. Dave Gioia, vice president for marketing, said about 150,000 cards are examined each month at both company headquarters and at card shows around the country. The average cost of grading is $8 per card but can run as high as $50 for immediate service.

“What grading does is give the buyer and the seller a third-party opinion about the quality of the card,” Gioia said. “We are the certifier.”

Card collecting is a hobby in which the main enthusiasts of the past--children--have been largely priced out of the market. Though some packs are still cheap enough for kids and harken to another era, others with guaranteed high quality collectibles such as graded cards and the new so-called memorabilia cards can quickly escalate in price.

Fierce competition among the dozens of card manufacturers drives the constant effort to one-up the others. Those efforts range from holograms imprinted on cards to the memorabilia cards, which contain such items as pieces of a player’s jersey or a sliver from a bat he once used. Those packs can run anywhere from just over a dollar to $100, depending on what’s guaranteed to be inside.

Carlsbad-based Upper Deck, for instance, has come out with a line of “Hall of Fame” cards that will be inserted in its packs. They range from more common cards that will be inserted once every six packs to those that are extremely rare. For instance, there will be only seven cards containing Mickey Mantle’s signature.

Topps, celebrating its 50th year, spent $250,000 buying up vintage cards to insert randomly in new packs. Included are vouchers for three 1952 Mantle rookie cards, the most valuable of the Topps collection. An original Mantle rookie card has sold at auction for $121,000.

For all the different kinds of cards that have come on the market--from wrestling to stock car racing to Pokemon--the mainstay remains the packs with pictures of baseball players inside.

“Our bread and butter is baseball,” said Mary Mancera, the Upper Deck head of corporate communications.

With all the high-tech innovations, Veres said the best part of the business is still this: When it’s a child and not an adult who opens a pack and finds that once-in-a-lifetime card.

“Now that’s a thrill,” he said.