Back in the late 80's early 90's I got heavily into sports card collecting and if you know anything about the hobby at the time you're probably already letting out a sigh. The only player I know of still active from that era is Derek Jeter and his time is running out. I've decided to purge most of my cards which is a painful act given the time and money I spent on the hobby but I have to face facts the nearly 100% of all the cards are essentially worthless.

I put most of the blame for what happened on Beckett and their stupid price guide. The guide was intended to reflect the prices of cards based on what dealers were selling at and yet every dealer I came across was selling at half Beckett or less so unless there were a ton of dealers selling at twice Beckett, Beckett was pulling the prices out of their rear ends. Mind you even the half Beckett price was inflated and driving up demand beyond reason.

Besides offering inflated prices the Beckett guide (a magazine I bought religiously) hyped up rookies to no end. Once a player was in the league a few years Beckett couldn't care less but an unproven draft pick was golden. The card makers responded to the overinflated hype and price speculation by cranking out millions of cards and is if that weren't enough more card makers entered the market and each company started producing multiple sets. Instead of a player having one, maybe two rookie cards they could now have a dozen diluting the price of each. Collectors were stocking up on dozens of Gregg Jefferies and Todd Van Poppels and each one was going directly into a sleeve and kept in mint condition. Beckett can never seem to do enough evil so now you can have your worthless card graded and slabbed at a price that would almost assuredly cost more than any value you could get out of it.

Another thing that happened that I don't blame on Beckett or the card industry is the reputation of almost every player from that era was ruined. Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens; some of the greatest statistical players ever and I don't know if any will make it into the Hall of Fame. Other players like Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez and Jose Conseco not only got pinched in the PED scandal but are also looked at as jokes. Even players untouched by the scandals like Ken Griffey Jr, and Frank Thomas were either tainted by the whole unsavory atmosphere or perhaps just were so overproduced that no statistics could overcome the excess availability.

I also collected basketball, football and hockey but the overproduction killed them all. I called a local sports card store and offered hundreds of mint cards of some of the era's stars and the store had no interest so I'm just throwing most of them in the garbage. It's just not worth my time and effort and it's a fitting end. Comic books in the 90's also seemed to be desperate to commit suicide but at least they produced entertainment (occasionally). There is a reason I stick to Golden and Silver Age comics because I've painfully learned that once something is considered collectable any new items produced are no good as collectables.

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