“Breaking” Into Sport Card Collecting
It is time to start the ritual. The room is clean and eerily quiet, not a sound. The cameras are assessed for their correct positions. One camera pointed directly where the massacre will take place, another overhead, providing a spider’s view of the scene. The table must be spotless, as to not risk contamination. The buyers don’t want anything tainted, only the highest of quality. The live feed is turned on and, within seconds, the buyers flood the stream. Hungry, the buyers are hungry for the ritual. Some have invested heavily in the product; they are collectors of these sacred pieces. Others that partake in the stream are solely watchers; they get satisfaction purely from observing the ritual. The executor dons his black gloves and walks over to the table. Showtime. The plastic is ripped off, with his dark pale gloves, he selects the first victim. Viewers of the live feed have gone from hundreds to thousands in minutes. Rip, crack, crunch, he tears into the vessel. Throwing the metallic shell to the side, he moves his fingers across the innards, searching, elevating. Finally, the hands stop; he’s found what he was looking for. The camera focuses in out as it strains to see what has halted the process. With a radio-style announcer voice, the executor proclaims, “Ezequiel Duran! That’s a solid card.” The card is quickly slipped into a plastic cover, never to feel the touch of human skin again.
Baseball cards. Yes, baseball cards. Those flimsy dusty cards you might have come across while helping your uncle clean out his garage one summer. The 2.5 by 3.5-inch piece of cardboard with some athlete’s mug shot on it are actually making a comeback in value. In an article by Marketplace.org, Ken Goldin, a card auctioneer and collector himself sold a 2009 autographed Mike Trout baseball card in May for a whopping $922,000! Goldin was mystified over the final selling price; he was only expecting to get a lousy $500,000 for the card.
Let’s first understand why it’s mostly your uncle or parents who may have a grimy box of baseball cards sitting in the attic or somewhere not much fresh air gets to. According to goldcardauctions.com, a premier place for sport card auctions calls the 1980’s & 1990’s the “Golden Age” for a baseball card. The monthly magazine called “Beckett Baseball Card Monthly,” produced a shift in the market. Consumers saw them as investments rather than collectibles. The monthly magazine would provide collectors with prices and specify what a card in good condition would look like. Topps was the leading and only producer of MLB cards at the time until a 1981 lawsuit allowed other companies, such as Donruss and Fleer, to also have the right to manufacture MLB cards. Early in 1991, the baseball card market reached its highest revenue point, $1.2 billion in sales.
So what happened? The sports card bubble burst just like the housing market did in 2008. Actually, that’s a horrible reference to explain the card bubble. Card companies saw the potential revenue golden egg they had. As any business does, they cut their initial customer out of the picture. Targeting older customers, those with more of a higher income than the brace-faced teenagers they initially targeted. The famous 1994–1995 MLB lockout happened due to MLB team owners proposing a cap on players’ salaries. When the league evidently returned, the hype was gone, and the cards’ demand had drastically fallen.
Fast forward to the now, amongst the COVID-19 pandemic, the baseball card market is once again surging. There are a few factors to the revival, the internet being a large one. Card collecting has become more comfortable due to the accessibility of the web, from specialty websites like goldcardauctions.com, to eCommerce giants such as eBay. Aside from the usual online bidding websites, another key contributor to the second rise of baseball card collecting are breakers. Breakers are live streamers who break open packs of sports cards. Here’s where it gets interesting; breakers buy a box of sealed cards and they put it up on their website. Buyers will then purchase the rights to receive specific cards within that box. If you were a Seattle Mariners fan and I had a box of fifteen unopened MLB card packs, you would pay me a specified amount for all the Seattle Mariner cards that I pull from those packs, regardless of the rarity or condition of the cards.
Breakers such a Justice, whose been “breaking” since 2007, sells every box he lists online. His live streams pull up to 2000 viewers at a time; some are those who have invested in the box he’s breaking into; others are those who just enjoy watching people open up card packs. There is a sub-culture just for people who enjoy watching others open packs, from MLB cards to other franchises like Pokémon. After watching a few YouTube videos of different breakers, I now understand the thrill. Some of us will remember the pure bliss we received when breaking into a crisp Pokémon pack and praying it contained a holographic Charizard. With these live streams, one could experience those emotions for hours.
Sportscard collecting has evolved from just MLB; breakers are now opening NHL, MBA and MLS packs. Now female oriented teams such as the WNBA, and NWSL cards are also a part of the breaking culture.
If you want to read more in-depth about the Breaking phenomena, I’d suggest the SI.com article written by Emma Baccellieri. The article deep dives into the Breaker mania and how the pandemic has increased its popularity.
Sources:
https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/05/04/breaking-the-fall-sports-cards-and-the-pandemic
https://www.prospectslive.com/general/2020/9/6/these-are-the-breaks-an-introduction-to-card-breaking
