Back to the morgue

 

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about some clippings I found in our newspaper morgue that pertained to baseball cards.

 

I featured only one of the clips because it came with half-tones of two old baseball cards, the 1975 Topps Bert Blyleven and the 1976 Topps Pete Rose.

 

But the envelope was filled with other clippings related to baseball cards. So I pulled a few of them that I thought were interesting to show here.

 

The most interesting one to me is from 1970 (that's why there's a 1970 card here).

 

You can see this is from the New York Times and I was greatly amused by this because it reads like the new-fangled thing that kids like to do is -- gasp -- collect full sets!!!

"A Willie Mays is no more valuable than say, an Ed Spiezio to these kids."

I guess this article is talking about me! I'm the "new sophistication"! But it's certainly not talking about most of the collectors I come across today or probably for the past 35 years or more.

I also enjoy reading Sy Berger's quotes where he laments not being able to pull the wool over collectors' eyes by reusing old photos because the youngsters know the ballplayers' "mod" haircuts!

Moving on to 1973 and another wacky new hobby invention, the card convention.

This focuses on a card convention in Detroit, which had been going on for four years.

Per usual in these past clippings, the writer is always looking to hammer home that collecting has suddenly become big business, this seems to be an annual shocker for newspaper writers.

"There are thousands of collectors who think nothing of stashing away 100,000 baseball cards."

Uh, yeah.

I think this writer would have a heart attack if he saw my card room. Also, I almost had a heart attack when I read the sentence about the Honus Wagner card being valued at $1,500.

Oh yes, and shady characters were stealing cards in 1973. You criminals in 2024 are doing nothing new.

It's 1980 now, which means articles about the lawsuit against Topps. I found lots of those in that envelope.

This is a straightforward news story. I think this story played out through various updates all through 1980 but I was completely oblivious to it. I think I had some inkling heading into 1981 that there would be new cards besides Topps but I can't remember how I found that out. Perhaps I read it in The Sporting News.

You could not be a baseball fan in the late 1970s and early 1980s without seeing Pete Rose everywhere. Heck, you didn't even have to be a baseball fan with the Aqua Velva commercials showing up on prime-time television.

 

He also appeared in commercials for Zenith TV, Kool-Aid, Tegrin shampoo, Swanson's Hungry Man meals, Nestle's Crunch, Encyclopedia Britannica, Grecian-Formula, Atari, no wonder the guy annoyed me.

This article starts with Pete Rose and mentions his 1963 rookie card selling for "$100 to $120," oh, I wish it still was. Then it quotes a Mark Lewis who publishes "Card Prices Update" -- the '80s were full of Card Prices books, who says he is so confident that Rose's rookie card will quadruple in the next 10 years, he will "write this in blood." But he was right.

But then the article goes into more people getting into the hobby and using cards as investments during a time of recession. This was around the time when people first started getting into the hobby to make money. It was much more prevalent later in the '80s but it started probably around 1980, 81, 82, maybe earlier.

 

 

 Just one more, from 1983, showing what started to happen when adults saw value in baseball cards.

This is from a Syracuse paper and it's about a guy with 11 kids who quit his banking job to become a baseball card dealer.

It gives a good look at those early days of people become full-time card dealers and what that looked like in 1983 -- i.e., $17 complete sets, which is about how much I remember those first complete Topps sets going for (I believe my brother bought a complete 1978 Topps set for $12 or $13).

So there's just a little look at our hobby past.

It's nice to have these clips and know where to find them. In these days of A.I. online, it's getting a little more difficult to find what you're looking for when it comes to history ... and that's why I find newspapers so valuable still.

Too bad other people don't.