1540 - Hobby Dinner Convo: Ten Year Forecast

Foreign. Doctor James Beckett Sports Card Insights. Thanks Sponsors Topps Panini Upper Deck Heritage Auctions Hugs and Scott Auctions Mike Stadium Sports Cards, burbank sports cards comc.com and Beckett Media Beckett Grading Beckett Authentication this is the not so great audio from my hobby dinner conversation at the Waters Creek show and several parts. Hopefully you will enjoy this and suffer through the bad audio for some great content with some great guests. So here it is. Jim osborne I started collecting 97 Tim Duncan's rookie year or into basketball like Kevin. I ran into Tim at a local show in the Seattle area. I worked for Cup C and basketball has been my love. And then I found Cup Century, the leaf product. So I embrace that as well. That's my collecting piece as a collector. I used to bust a lot of wows back in the early Upper Duck days. I loved all that. So much fun. The question I have now is wax has gotten so expensive breakers have come into the scene. Like many people, I've done a lot of breaks myself. I do less now because everything's gone up. My question is, has breaking been good or bad for the hobby? Chris Carlin I'm the youngest of four brothers and they are all a lot older than me. Nine, 10, 11 years. I wasn't a mistake. My parents went to a Catholic marriage encounter and I came out of the I was supposed to be Christina, but my dad Silver bullets all the way. It's not too late. Yeah, when they were in high school and going into college they found out about girls and it wasn't cool to collect. Back then there were no Instagram accounts or things like that. So all their cards came my way and it was incredible. You inherited all your cards? They just didn't care about them anymore. And it was right around early 80s when your price guide came out and I remember asking my parents every Christmas I need my Beckett subscription. That was my gift and I would actually call the operator and they would do it all with you online and it was great. I've heard about this dinner and I was like, I'm never gonna ask. But I got the email this week and I was so excited to come. Tell me, hey, I'm gonna be coming in this. I did. I may have chummed the water a little bit. Yeah. By the way, just so you knew Dr. Jim, but I came into the industry on accident. Honestly. I happened to be living in Carlsbad after I graduated college. I was supposed to be a te and I found out Upper Deck was in the same town and I had a free Summer. And I was like, I'm doing that. Whatever they got. I'm in my first job. There was a minor league baseball player, used the wrong pen on his cards, so they bled into the back. And it was me, and I'm wearing a suit and the other two guys are in cutoff shorts. And we had alcohol and Q tips and we were cleaning the backs of the cards so they could pack them out and moved up from there. So my question is one that's daunted me for a number of years, especially as a marketer, is you look around the show, not a lot of culture diversity. And it's wild to me that most African Americans love watching basketball and are interested in other sport, football. And why don't we have more African Americans collecting? I know it's a cultural thing. Dove into it quite a bit. There's a dealer, Anthony Devine out of Chicago that I worked with and he has a program called Rise where he brings in inner city youth to the National. He gives up his space to show them what the hobby's about. So it's kind of cool. My name's Dave Zenzel. I'm from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Born in 82. Grew up as an 80s kid, collecting car was my favorite thing to do. We didn't have a lot of money though, so we couldn't afford the Beckett monthly subscription. So I actually want to pay for my dinner tonight because I feel like I owe you money because I was the kid who went to the LCS and just right in there. Yeah, it's not a newsstand. I jipped you a little bit, but yeah, we couldn't afford a lot. But once I got a paper route and I got older, I wasted all my money on packs. Never pulled anything good back then. When I got back into the hobby as an adult, I vowed to never buy a pack ever again. And I haven't. Just buy singles now. Smart. Completely obsessed with Star Co. Basketball cards. So that makes up came in packs. All of my collection C3 packs, little seal. Does that count? We had a problem in the beginning when they first came out of pricing individual cards. The sentiment was these should be priced in the price guide as bags because that's the way they were. Yeah. Team set. Right. Team sets or the groups that they were sold to. See this for a few years, very thin market. I was talking to Brian Gray today and he told me he used to go into your part shop as a kid. Well, he didn't say that. He just said he went to buy star basketball here. It comes. I didn't realize you had your own card store. I was a junior partner to Wayne and smart enough to know even though I wasn't there all the time that all the Bird Magic, Dr. J cards, as soon as it got put out, it was sold to the same person who came in. Brian Cleen. Seven. Wow. So Wayne was a case of holic, came from Arizona. He got a lot of remainder stuff in Arizona, bought a lot of that stuff and so he probably had several cases and it was always hard to collate, but somehow he didn't need to collate him for Brian. He just scoop up the ones. So yeah, Brian was one of our famous alumni customers. That's hilarious. We were the place. We were the main shop I think in Dallas for a number of years. Then we got passed up by the hedge man. Was it JW's Richmond? Something like that. And they were way more aggressive than we were with open stuff and making markets really pretty savvy. Brian got involved in that. Yeah. I only collect Star company basketball cards, so I've got a ton of questions I'd love to talk to you guys about about Star cards, but don't want to bore the group, so I'm going to keep it general. Lifelong goal is to get the first PSA 10 star Jordan 101 rookie card. Right. There are no PSA 10s on that card. There's only three PSA 9s. So general question for the group. What I'm wondering is what percentage of valuable are still out there ungraded? So not specific to star, but just in general, like cards over say $10,000? What percentage have already been slabbed and what percentage are still out there raw and maybe what percentage are in a landfill somewhere? Trying to figure out my odds of achieving this goal someday. Thanks. Questions. What are we going to be laughing about in 10 years in the context of the hobby? Are we all optimistic? Would that be saf? I would all be laughing about the strategy by fanatics and Topps with the Waves releasing product, creating artificial scarcity, really and passing that price on to breakers dealers, customers. You know, at Upper Deck, if we had a really big product, we would do a Wave one and Wave two, but they would be offered at the same price. And this new mechanism of only releasing a limited amount, it's their version of dynamic pricing. It's wild to me and I can't imagine it can go on much longer, but I think in time it might be something we laugh at. Like, can you believe this happened? I don't understand why people are paying this price. Pretty hot. Absolutely. And I think the consumer will smarten up on that. But for the first top school football, everyone's chasing it. They gotta have it. It's the first top school in football. But it's last year's. Exactly. And there's going to be another one coming out in four months, which will be this year's. Yeah. And then the 2025 is chop. I wonder, are you worried about the person opening the pack? You know what I mean? Tops is not worried about me. They're worried about him breaking because he's going to buy those because he's going to make money. They don't care if I buy a single box. Somebody brought up allocation earlier. It's an honest question. Why would Tops allocate to them? It's one of those things where I might buy a blaster if I'm at Walmart. But to your point, I'm not going to say too much, I'm in trouble. But there is with any business an expectation to participate in those prices to the penalty if they don't. I, I, I don't understand why the leagues have allowed a single license. I mean, it's rational. It's not irrational. Very good friend of mine and he had a photo license and the NFL loved him. They called him one day and said, we are reducing our licenses from 330 and you're not going to get a photo license. They said, it's nothing you've done wrong. We just want to consolidate the number of licenses we have. And that's why there's only one. And fanatics came up with a prop that embraced both the players association in the league and it made more sense to them than anything else that was being proposed at the time. So that's why there's only one. I'm going to be optimistic and say we'll be laughing about box prices being way less than they are now. How high they've gotten. Yeah, because it's insane. They'll be even higher in 10 years or they'll be lower. I think they'll be based on the value of the dollar. Yeah. It's so hard to make a collectible and make enough to satiate the demand without it being seen as overproduced. Which is why I think the WAVES is a way of reducing that. You can speak to this. I don't think Topps Chrome was designed to be a thousand dollar product. No, it's designed to be in the 2 to 250 range. That's what you could Expect to maybe get out if you're lucky. But when you're paying 1200, 1600 and getting $200 out of it, it's picking the. You say maybe at 400, you say no at 600. They can't do that. And in 10 years, surely they won't have to be able to do that because otherwise it's self destructive. We've had at some of Jim's hobby dinners, people now at fanatics and they were at Panini at the time and they were very honest and they structured their boxes. They said let's and I'll just write a number. These boxes are designed to be $100. Then when they came into the world, people started paying 300. Well, that's not something they can. They knew what they were designing to be the SRP and they knew that was a problem back then. Pre pandemic. Looking at 15 years from now, I don't know because one of the questions I asked Jim, there's an explosive growth. You're going to have card outlets probably in every stadium and every arena. I think we'll laugh about how long it takes for processing for consignment companies, for grading. I have to believe that with AI in the next 10 years, we're gonna, we're gonna be able to figure out how to maximize the human element and not get rid of that, but make it more efficient. Tim Catch came out to upper deck, presented us with this whole concept of a robotic warehouse and it would pull orders and take the place of humans. But did that ever happen or anything? Movements made that way? He's talked about a couple different things, but it's not in development. I think when he spoke about it, it was like something to look forward to from a fulfillment standpoint. That probably will happen. I'm fascinated by the robot workers in Japan and China. They're deploying right now. And from a shipping perspective, they can already do that just years behind Amazon. When we look at how long it takes us to do accurate scans, taking that car from a pile or from a box or from a package, getting it scanned, putting it in, whatever element you're going to store it into, there needs to be. But what is that human element? I don't think we're going to be able to replace a lot of the humans involved with the robots. It'll be accentuated, but we're a long way from the robots working perfectly anyway. So again, it'll be an augmentation. Do we think Michael Rubin will be smiling and we'll be smiling too. Because there's 10x whenever we're collecting in 10 years, I thought it was supposed to be 10x and cheaper. I think the 10x dollars would be there. Well, 10x collectors maybe. I don't know. How do we measure that? You got to wonder yourself. You walk around these shows and I'm a collector guy. I don't care if it's a dollar card. I'll dig through dollar boxes, $20 card, $30 cards. You hear people talking 40,000, 50,000, $60,000. That money dries up. Those guys are gone. A lot of them don't care about the sports. I only buy Michael Jordan, Kobe, Brya. That's all I deal in. And those guys, once that money dries up, I think they leave because the love for the hobby is not there. And there's so many different sex now in the hobby. Yeah, you've got your breaker guys. You got your gamblers that'll buy into a break. You got your guys that are pure collectors, that collect players. You've got your guys that love this part of the hobby. So I wonder financially if when it does hit or how long have we been here? And now that we're going back into another junk wax era, it's overproduced. But the problem now is there's nothing not being over open. These breaker guys are opening. It's out there. There's cards I've got that are numbered at 25, that I have 16 of. Like when exquisite came out, I worked on Tyson Chandler forever. Like the. During a trick of year, I might have got nine of them because that stuff was still sitting. You'd see packs and boxes at shows that were. You don't see it. It's there and it's gone and it's just a turn. So you wonder how long the hobby really stays. The hobby in 10x, if the money dries up and. And the love for that goes away. Maybe the only way to connect to the hobby is to make it cheaper. It's hard to get somebody in. The people don't want MVP and they don't want hoops and things like that. They want the premium stuff. Even kids. You can't even give cards to kids for free. They won't even take them. Not at a show. At a baseball game maybe. Yeah. I just think about being in northeast Pennsylvania Growing up 20 miles from Duria and waiting every single for the flagship for tops. We would do everything we could around the house to earn that money. To walk two miles down to the country store to be able to get a pack or two at Tops Baseball. That'd be through the snow. Yes. Uphill, both way. Both way, Yep. In coal mining country of the Poconos. Yes. My favorite card I ever pulled was a 1986 Tops baseball Ron Darling, blank back. I pulled it out of a pack in 1989. I carried it with me everywhere. I was stationed in the AR army for 10 years. Anytime I moved, it went with me. And finally I tried to go ahead and get it graded. I went to three companies before I found one that would grade it because it was a blank back. Got an 8.5 from CGC. You carried it with you? It wasn't in your wallet. I kept it in a screw down and I taped it to my duffel and it went with me everywhere I went. I was seats for three years. It didn't matter. Everything except for basic training. Darling. The blank bag, well, was a Met fan. Okay. WW and WPIX were stations. I could see where we were. We didn't get the Philly stations. I could watch all the Yankees games and all the Mets games any night of the week around the same time TBS came around. So my dad had his Brave games. So between my mom liking the Yankees and me liking the Mets and my brother liking the Phillies and my dad liking the Braves, there was always baseball on and the half. We were 20 minutes from Durier. It was easily accessible. Like you go to flea markets or garage sales or it doesn't matter. You could still find sheets and strips and anything you would want to find from the 50s and 60s if you're looking hard. Yeah, absolutely. The my so and so used to work for tops. They passed away and now we're trying to figure out what to do with it. We have sets here is a 52 top set worth anything. But like why is it here at a garage sale? Now we know why your valuable sealed that open. With the exception of breakers, most people, it seems like, don't open anything. They just put it on the shelf hoping it'll swirl it away. Look at the price difference between like 1213 prism. If you had a case of 1213 prism and people you know, well, I'm going to get my 24, 25 and put that away. A friend of mine has a store and he takes six tables to sell and open. I sit with him every show and you'd be surprised every out how many people will buy a box, open it up and then come back for a second box. You'd be surprised. That retail stuff? No, I saw lots of hundreds of dollars. But one of the things we look about is the sheer explosion. I ran my first show 12 years ago in DFW and at the time there were maybe five or six cards stores period in the DFW area. Now within 20 minutes of where we are eating dinner there are maybe 10 stores. So true. I was driving ubering and I saw three from the airport to here. Will they even be around? Is doing gala rights.