It’s all in the cards
Paul BOLLE sits alone at a table in a shop, sifting through baseball trading cards, placing them in three piles: those he will buy, those warranting further consideration and those he rejects. It is his Saturday ritual, he says, his chosen form of therapy.
He started collecting as a child growing up in Topanga Canyon, when baseball and Hot Wheels were passions. Baseball in particular helped him through difficult times, he says, primarily the divorce of his parents when he was 8. By the time he was 11, however, he stopped collecting.
“In a sense,” he says, “I’m the classic: I grew up with cards, but they all sort of vanished. They probably got dumped.”
Like many others, he did not return to collecting until adulthood. When his son, Walter, 6, was found to have diabetes, baseball became an important part of their daily routine, providing exercise, time together and a way of dealing with stress.
Then, a couple of years ago, Bolle chanced upon a hamper filled with baseball cards at a yard sale. Bolle, 41, bought the treasure chest for $5, and as he was going through the loot, he remembered the thrill of the hunt for cards of his favored Dodgers, and the important role baseball played in his childhood.
Then came Sept. 11.
“I think that was when I really started collecting again,” he says. “The more stress there is in my life, the more time I seem to spend with the cards. It’s a form of escape that provides me with a sense of comfort.”
Rob Veres, owner of Burbank Sportscards, says most collectors are adults. Younger consumers are more likely to collect game cards, such as the popular Yu-Gi-Oh, based on Japanese cartoon characters. During the past two years, Yu-Gi-Oh has surpassed baseball as the top seller for the Upper Deck Co., one of the nation’s leading card manufacturers.
Attempting to reach more consumers, Upper Deck plans on releasing card games based on SpongeBob SquarePants and the Hulk as well as Disney and DC Comics characters.
Industrywide, the sale of new sports cards has dropped from $1.1 billion (in wholesale sales) in 1991 to $350 million to $400 million annually in recent years. It is estimated that there are between 5 million and 6 million collectors in the United States.
Despite the drop, interest in sports cards is more constant than in card collecting games, says Rich Klein, price analyst for Beckett, a publishing firm that caters to sports and game card enthusiasts.
“You don’t know if Yu-Gi-Oh is still going to be played five years from now,” Klein says, “but you have a pretty good idea that five years from now they’ll still be playing baseball.”
In 1998, the popular game was Pokemon, and for a six-month period that year, it was the top seller at GamesandCards.com in Eagle Rock. Yu-Gi-Oh, says owner Arto Poladian, is about third in sales now. In his store, card games take up about half the shelf space.
Since Sept. 11, he has seen many new faces in his store. “Nothing is more American than baseball,” he says.
Burbank Sports- cards, where Bolle spends Saturdays, is one of the largest sports card businesses in the country, with 922,000 cards listed on its Web site (www.burbanksportscards.com). Owner Veres says he can find any single card in his inventory in 20 seconds or less.
“Southern California is a great market for sports cards,” he says, “because there are so many transplants living here, people who grew up with teams from Chicago and Boston and all over. The interest isn’t just in regional teams. Diversity is an important advantage for us.”
Veres has a small selection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, but it’s primarily an attempt to introduce youngsters to sports cards as a form of entertainment.
His biggest competition, he says, is video games. Back in the day, however, there were no video games. Youngsters bought baseball cards for three reasons: the bubble gum, the joy of collecting and trading cards with friends, and because it was one of the only ways to get information on individual players.
That’s no longer the case, as information is accessible through the Internet, and cable stations offer a full baseball menu. The pastime also has changed by the money some of the cards attract.
Perhaps the best-known card is the 1909 Honus Wagner sold three years ago on EBay to Brian Seigel, 43, a longtime collector from Tustin, for $1.265 million. Seigel says he has declined offers of more than $2 million for the card.
You don’t have to spend millions, however, to enjoy collecting. Veres says 50 cents buys a pack of about 15 cards (and bubble gum to boot). From there packs can sell for hundreds of dollars. A full set of Topps baseball cards for the current season runs about $70.
Serious collectors can buy and sell cards much as stocks are, with cards held in portfolios the way money is held in a checking account. Owners may never see the cards they own.
But the joy for Bolle, who once traded two Mickey Mantles for one Wes Parker (out of loyalty to the Dodgers) is being able to hold them and share them with his son. The writer and stay-at-home father sets aside and protects those that might be valuable someday, but for the most part the cards are to be held and enjoyed. “I don’t want them to be like art museum pieces,” Bolle says. “I want him to be able to play with them.”
At the same time, he doesn’t want to limit his son’s interest to baseball and Walter’s favorite player, Alex Rodriguez, shortstop for the Texas Rangers.
“I want him to admire the chief justice of the Supreme Court too,” Bolle says.
You get the sense Bolle, perhaps, may be holding out for one who not only shares his concerns and beliefs, demonstrates courage and integrity on the bench, but also holds a .300 lifetime batting average.