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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Tuesday, January 04, 2022Fanatics acquires Topps trading cards for $500 million
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: January 04, 2022 at 12:24 AM | 57 comment(s)
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1. The Duke Posted: January 04, 2022 at 10:03 AM (#6059555)I am a little surprised that people keep buying sports cards but I'm also not sure why people like buying vinyl records.
Kids these days are well trained to spend real money to get virtual items.
Modern "collecting" is more like playing Powerball where everyone is chasing the Big Hit of any pointless ultra-rare card (This Mike Trout 1-of-1 has a red border! This otherwise identical Mike Trout 1-of-1 has a blue border! This otherwise identical Mike Trout 1-of-1 has a pink border! This otherwise identical Mike Trout 1-of-1 has an orange border! etc) that is essentially no different than last year's crop of rare cards nor next year's offerings. And if you do hit big, then the race is on to ship it to PSA for grading and slabbing (with rates currently starting at $100/card), praying for the almighty 10 grade, then getting it onto eBay and hoping there's a bigger fool out there waiting to lay down 4, 5, or even 6 figures for it.
eTopps was an idea 22 years ahead of its time. If only they had the vision to cut out the physical cards altogether. Thank goodness for our new Fanatics overlords to lead us into this brave new virtual world.
Yea, so MLB has a stake in Fanatics. Topps was valued at $1.3 billion before they lost their licensing deal. Topps loses the licensing deal with MLB, Fanatics/MLB buys Topps at a reduced price. Seems legit.
Because baseball isn't popular, or because collecting isn't lucrative? I think most people collect just cause they like baseball, right?
I don't think so. Pat Rapper's Delight description of how it works in post 5 is not an exaggeration.
Fanatics is probably paying $100 million more per year for the licensing than Topps was. By doing this, they:
1. knocked close to $1 billion off the purchase price of Topps;
2. eliminated any competition in the baseball card market for the next 20 years, as the Fanatics licensing deals are exclusive, while Topps' deals were not.
They don't have to phase out printed sports cards to sell NFTs. And if Topps' valuation took a $1 billion hit when they lost the licensing, I'm guessing they are still making enough money on printed cards that it's worth their while to continue.
At this point Topps is probably selling 90% of printed cards to collectors and speculators. If they reduce their output by 1% each year they could probably increase the price by 5-10% each year and make more profit, since the speculators will gladly pay more for a more scarce supply.
Substitute Sotheby's for e-bay, add some white wine, and you have described the rare art market.
It certainly isn't. Went to card show this past weekend (I'm a collector, not a speculator or a seller. I collect Hall of Famers for fun regardless of the year or the product). Overheard a dealer/customer conversation about a $1,700 card. The customer wanted the dealer to come down from $1,700 to $1,100 because "I can't sell it for a profit if I'm into it at $1,700." The discussion seemed to be getting a bit heated, so I returned to picking out about 250 HOFers from a 10-cent box to add to my collection, including a 1982 Donruss Alan Trammell that I didn't have.
So I have a 50-count box of 1987 Topps Barry Larkin rookies- big deal! Sure they aren't going to fund my retirement, but I'm into them for less than ten bucks, I like Barry Larkin, I like baseball, and no one gets into a hassle about price and profit. I have the stock market and my retirement funds for that sort of thing...
So wait.... dealer has a short-print alternate-picture flipped-back green-border throwback-uniform card (or some such dizzying permutation) and wants $1700 for it, but Card Bro wants it for $1100 so Card Bro can be the one to flip it for $1700? Yeah, that sounds exactly like the mindset of the contemporary "collector."
I have a few thousand cards sitting in a box in my basement. I used to like to go through them when I was listening to the game on the radio to get a picture of the player and their stats. I have meant to go through and purge most of that collection for approximately 20 years but never get time to open the box.
** In December I bought a few packs of Topps Heritage cards (they look like the 1972 design) to put in stockings. We get a kick out of opening them. I got a Shohei Ohtani. Eh, I'd rather have the Stengel.
You can buy most of them on eBay (minus a Mike trout card or two) for a buck. They're worth less than that, but you gotta cover postage.
(I'd love to have a Goudey, but everytime I mention it, my wife looks at me with divorce in her eyes.)
I have a few thousand cards sitting in a box in my basement. I used to like to go through them when I was listening to the game on the radio to get a picture of the player and their stats. I have meant to go through and purge most of that collection for approximately 20 years but never get time to open the box.
I had a few thousand cards in my childhood bedroom that I also hadn't looked at in 20 years. When my parents downsized into an apartment I went through my collection and cut it down to a couple of shoeboxes worth of cards that I wanted to keep. I let one of the movers take the rest for free. He was super excited and said his son would love them.
If I understand the law, someone else could still make and sell cards but they couldn’t use team logos etc on the card outline. Seems to me a good biz opportunity - photography technology being what it is, somebody could probably put out a high quality set for not much money.
Imagine the hype if there were only like 50 1989 Upper Deck Griffeys printed and people were offering thousands of dollars for them right out of the pack coupled with the pull of social media for all the valuable street cred you get from posing with a card like that. That's today's high-end Rookie Card scene.
IANAL, but MLBPA is also a party to the exclusive license with Fanatics, so a third party would not be able to issue trading cards of players in the union.
I love that card! It's right up there with my favorite manager cards along with the 1967 (I think) Topps Herman Franks yelling apparently at whomever happens to be holding the card and the 1972 Topps In Action card of Billy Martin arguing with an umpire...
Well there are collectors. But the current boom in new LP sales is driven by (arguable) superior audio fidelity -- analog better than digital** -- and no doubt some hipster/fashion conspicuous consumption. (There are a lot of very stylish turntables out there these days.) Then there's the out-of-print situation ... it's improving some with sites like bandcamp but there's still a ton of small-label and just plain old stuff which, if it's available at all in digital format, is on one of those crappy mid-80s cds so finding a used LP is your best bet. (Note mid-80s LPs were usually pretty crappily made too.)
** analog is technically superior to digital, the "argument" is over whether humans can tell the difference with of course many claiming they can and some no-fun scientists claiming they can't. As for me, I have never been able to keep LPs in decent shape no matter how often I changed the stylus nor how much zerostat, cleaner, etc. I bought. Even if I could tell the difference, I'm not willing to put up with the hiss, pops, scratches -- my moral failing I'm sure.
I usually end up purchasing old CDs for a dollar or two. Pretty easy to get a dollar's worth of entertainment value from avoiding streaming advertising.
I might get that enjoyment from looking at old baseball cards except I can google any of them now and see the picture without purchasing.
Sports cards were 55% of their business and it should be noted that it was Topps itself that was saying they were valuing themselves at 1.3 billion.
Not as much as a vintage B1tchin' Camaro.
Sports cards were 55% of their business and it should be noted that it was Topps itself that was saying they were valuing themselves at 1.3 billion.
The SPAC had agreed to buy 46% of the company for $521 million, so that gets you to about $1.16 billion equity valuation. There was also about $150 million of net debt which gets you to $1.3 billion enterprise value. Here's their investor presentation if you're curious.
It's a little different from saying you have an agreement to sell the whole company for $1.3 billion in cash, but it wasn't just a made-up number. (In fact, the stock price went up quite a bit after the deal was announced...at one point the implied value was ~$2.3 billion.)
Notes:
1) It is at least NR MT (corners are pretty good)
2) It is signed by Kevin Romine (tried to get Lamp's signature, but Romine was closer to the stands, and...what are you going to do, right?)
3) Dennis Lamp finished 21st in the MVP vote in 1985, tied with Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett in that year's voting.
I just like the image of the old man sitting on a bench with his Mets jacket on.
Insert Showalter joke here.
It could make sense if Dealer sells mainly at card shows and Card Bro sells at retail.
TJ's attitude makes perfect sense to me. He's paying a nominal amount and simply plans to enjoy his collection.
The idea of day trading baseball cards turned me off as a kid and still turns me off now.
So I have the Johnny Bench rookie card, the Rod Carew, and the Nolan Ryan (!).
incredibly, Ryan was paired with Jerry Koosman on his card - so more than 500 MLB wins there.
but Bench had a nobody named Ron Tompkins (who pitched in 1965 for the KC A's in a cup of coffee and also some IP for the Cubs in 1971).
Tompkins previously was on a KC A's rookie card in 1966 (with OF Larry Stahl), but as he never panned out I decided as a youth to - wait for it, wait for it - fold the card in half in homage to Bench's greatness.
I chose poorly.
still have the cards, though
:)
No, it isn't. Given a band-limited signal and a sampling rate at least twice the frequency of the signal being sampled, the samples of your signal describe a unique function. The signal transmitted from your digital source to your amplifier (via a DAC) expresses that function. Moreover, anything you get on a CD will have a sampling rate way higher than you need to meet the sampling requirement. Here's a better explanation.
That's why I buy them.
Thanks, Zach- I wish my wife had the same level of understanding as you! (To be fair, she says at least I don’t waste money on cocaine and hookers…)
or the regular 1972 Martin where he's leaning on a bat, with middle finger extended!
I assume you mean day trading in the sense of trying to make a little coin off those cards, rather than spending the afternoon with friends trading cards, which was awesome.
I'm sure individual records/CD sales don't pay out a ton to the recording artist, either, but surely it's much better than Spotify and the like.
Come on, how can you take that article seriously when it has something like this in it:
I did it Warren Buffett style: Assembled a set of 1953 Topps back in 1953, with little attention to condition. Total outlay maybe 10 bucks. Stopped collecting 3 years later, stashed them in a closet. Got out of college 11 years later, left home, thought they might be worth something someday, so "preserved" them in 5 albums only to find they were hopelessly stuck in there and couldn't be removed without damaging them. Kept the albums anyway, and 40+ years later got over $2000 for them in a local sports memorabilia auction.
Of course if I'd paid attention to condition and hadn't glued them into those albums, I probably could've gotten ten times that.** But WTF, you can't win em all.
** And if I'd invested those ten bucks in unopened wax boxes at 76 cents each per box, my wife and I could easily upgrade to a McMansion.
Ah, the joys of life when you were still a little kid...
Also traded away a 1977 Pete Rose for a 1977 Dan Frisella because I had recently read in one of my library book fair books that Frisella had died the prior off-season in a dune buggy accident. RIP.
I had an old "Tom Seaver Price Guide" book from 1984 that had the Mattingly listed at like $1. Using the argument that "who would know more about the ability of hitters, and thus their card values, than Tom Seaver,"* I convinced the other kid to trade me the Mattingly and some other cards for a stack of 1987 Topps, mostly commons, that he needed for his set. If memory serves, later that afternoon he told his mom and she unilaterally rescinded the trade.
Now, I am not proud of this story today, but it does make for a memorable trade.
*Yes, I did eventually become a lawyer. Why do you ask?
Never did get another Millstone.
But my favorite kid baseball card trade wasn't as disastrous. One kid in school had a card commemorating the 1973 World Series, the one with Willie Mays on it. I don't know how he got it (this was considerably after 1974), but I had to have it. Willie Mays! Can you imagine! It was by far the coolest card going around in my middle school. So, I traded him a pile of Frank Thomas and Ken Griffey Jr. cards for it. He later begged to undo the trade, but there was no way I was giving up Willie Mays. (I guess we didn't have a price guide - it's only worth a couple bucks.) And I've still got it.
We used to “flip” cards face up or down with fellow card holders. You would say “match or unmatch” and would win the card if your call came true.
We’d also put the beat-up cards in the spokes of our bikes so when we rode along they made a chittering sound.
I began collecting in earnest by the mid 50’s and had boxes and boxes (shoe) but when I went into the Navy in 1963 mom pitched them out - without even asking- and that was that.
Baseball cards were our touchstones to the immortals.
We were never going to meet Willie Mays or Stan Musial so I daydreamed my young years away swooning at the accomplishments of my hero’s of the ballfield.
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