By the early 1990s, baseball card manufacturers were printing 81 billion of the things a year, or 325 for every person in the United States.
Anyone could have looked at the situation and said, Well, there’s your problem.
What was once a giveaway to get kids to buy more bubble gum had bloated into a $1.2 billion-a-year business. Kids no longer dominated the ranks of buyers; instead, there were collectors. Legitimate financial publications carried stories about what grand investments baseball cards were.
Of course it ended badly. How and why is the subject of Dave Jamieson’s absorbing “Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession.” The book was triggered when Jamieson, 31, discovered the cards he hoarded in the 1980s and 1990s were now worthless.
It’s not because the players at the time, guys like Ted Simmons and Pete Vuckovich, were somehow inferior. As Jamieson points out, the market collapsed because more and more manufacturers were authorized by the players union (which makes lots of money from licensing its members’ pictures) to produce cards, and they responded by printing zillions.
The market would have blown up eventually, as all bubbles do. It was sparked by the players’ strike of 1994-95, which soured fans. New- issue card sales collapsed.
The pages of “Mint Condition” are filled with compelling stories and often manic characters. A return to those heady days seems unlikely in the video-game age.
