1559 - Virality in the Past

Welcome Dr. James Beckett. Sports Card Insights. An episode about the history of virality in the hobby. I have gotten a comment or question from Darren Ostrom, who's the sports card professor who goes deeper into things. I guess if you are saying you're a professor, which I was a professor too, you go deeper generally. When I was teaching college students, they expect you to go deeper. Every year of education, it ought to get a little tougher and you ought to go a little deeper in your understanding of the field. So Darren obviously does that and he's occasionally sending me stuff for us to interact. And we have an episode coming in two days and that episode went a little bit longer. And so I'm going to do an intro for that here. And the episode is going to be about publishing his book, which I think is really interesting but really challenging because people don't read books as much. So I wanted to be encouraging to him because I think he has information that would be enjoyable. But it's tough to make money doing books. And I mentioned the greed factor and the other thing that came up in it is the virality I think I had going when I did my books. Now, obviously they were price guides and people had a financial reason to buy the book, whether it's defense or offense, just to know what things were selling for. Anyway, we got into what some of his options were, and I think it's an interesting topic because Greg Miller just self published his own book. Jeremy Lee pretty much self published. Mike Kramer. There's a number of books in the hobby that are just really excellent, but you kind of have to market it yourself. It's really difficult to get a mainstream publisher to say, I'm going to pick this up and warehouse it and put it in all these bookstores and all that. There aren't even that many bookstores anymore anyway. So Darren has a challenge of how does he publish or get that information into the hands of people who would want it. So I'm going to release that in my next episode after this one. And so consider this a double sponsor list. Thank you. Sponsors Media Beckett grading get vacation, compse.com, burbank sports cards, Mike Stadium Sports Cards, Heritage Auctions, Huggins, Scott Auctions, Topps, Upper Deck and Panini. All of those are appreciated. And you need to appreciate them in two days when the next episode comes out. Because I'm just going to let it rip with my discussion with Darren. But the initial question Darren asked me that we were going to talk about, and then we decided to talk about the Publishing was about what was going on, what was viral back in the early days of the hobby. And he mentioned, I think when he was younger, the 83 tops traded or extended Daryl Strawberry, which was the first extended card that predated the Wax Pack released version, which caused a dilemma for what would be the true rookie card. And then the Fernando Valenzuela, which certainly the way he came on so strong early in his career, that was something that people were looking for and obviously viral. And the point I was trying to make, that I'm going to expound on here is I got the benefit of a lot of viral buzz, but I didn't pay for it. I didn't have paid advertising to create the buzz. And I think so much of what's going on in the hobby now is the influencers, the content creators try to get something going. I don't know that I tried to get something going as much as I just tried to put out a good product. But then people tell their friends, hey, this is a good product, you need to get it. Same thing with Daryl Strawberry. Fernando just read the sports page and people did read the sports pages in those days and get various magazines and all that. One of the reasons Strawberry went viral and also Fernando, those are the two examples Darren brought up to me. Part of it was it was so limited. It was pretty much the only Daryl Strawberry. You had some minor league cards, Fernando, same thing. They just came on the scene, came out really hot and there was limited access. It's focusing on the rookie card or the XRC in Strawberry's case. By 84 he was still hot, but then he started cooling off after that. But in 83 and 84 it was viral. There was no marketing campaign. It was just this guy has the potential to be a great slugger and his highlights and his high points were great, but he was not able, able to sustain it. So Darren wanted to know what was going on in the 70s or the 60s. I don't know that much about the 60s. I mean, I was there in the 60s, but I wasn't really part of the national scene. I guess Gervis was, but I barely met Gervis in the late 60s. And frankly, the virality that was, there would be the buzz and you'd have to go through the mail. Long distance phone calls were expensive in those days and there weren't card shows in the 60s to speak of. Hardly. The very first card show that was really a card show was probably 69 and it was very small. But the key people knew each other. Darren the best example of virality was a new discovery. There was not a superstar orientation in the 60s. There was somewhat in the 70s, but it was discovering a new card more so it wasn't about condition rarities or this is really tough in a certain grade. It was just, hey, this is a new card. It's just been discovered in the 60s and the very early 70s. You're probably still trying to figure out the 48, 49 Leaf baseball set that, hey, there's some other cards here that are rumored to exist. In some cases. There weren't any price guides. And so the viral buzz was about something new that had been discovered certainly in the mid-70s. I think there was a buzz about the 67 tops Brooks Robinson as being a tough card. I don't think it's considered quite as tough now, but it was at the time and people were really hunting that down. 63 tops rose, the four player rookie card that was viral because Pete was coming on strong and you could see he was going to be the hit king. And it was a tough card. I guess what I'm saying is the virality in the old days was about something that was hard to find. Now is stuff that's out there enough that you're seeing it a lot and you're thinking, hey, I want one of those too. Might be a Wemby or Cooper flag or something like that. I got to get one of those. Everybody's got them. It was the opposite in the 60s and 70s. When everybody's got one, it's with, hey, they just found out there's a new hot dog card, a new card that we didn't even know existed. I've said, I found a collection. I got a card that the foremost collector in the world of those cards did not have it. And he called my bluff. He said, that card doesn't exist. I don't have it. I have a complete set. I said, no, actually I have it. And so at the next show I had to bring it. Now so much condition was not. The situation is that this guy was just salivating when I had a card that he didn't know it existed. But then he thinks, okay, now it exists. I'm going to circulate around and redouble my efforts to see if I can find one. The card that I had that he didn't have, that was the only one at that time. I think they found a few more now. It had a staple in it. And did that upset him? He was salivating, no less. It wasn't a 10, it wasn't a 9, it wasn't an 8, it was a 1 or a 2. In fact it had a rusty staple in it. And so he completely, he couldn't even see that I said there's a staple there. He did not care. He wanted the card. And he started to try to pile up trade material for me to get, but it's the only one I had. I knew it was a rare card and I just, I still have the card but it's not as valuable as it would have been then because again the virality in those days was about new discoveries. Things that hadn't happened had nothing to do with condition. And in some cases it didn't always have to do with the superstars. Could be the Dan D. Paul Smith or the Glendale Howdeman. Those were things that wow, you would just go straight to if you've got any of those with. Or the. Or the Ted Williams, Wilson Franks, 52tops.mail. Back in 1980 there was a viral buzz, but it moved on because after those three cards sold for 3,000 bucks each, which was a world record price in rapid fire form, a year later they were in the dumpster. They weren't thrown away, it's just enough of them came out to send the price back down to where it used to be. And so a few years later it's down less than a thousand bucks. And so there's always been an ebb and flow. And the problem with virality, which I would have gotten into with Darren, is that it can be fickle. Some of the examples he's asking about the Wagner card, The Lazuie card, the 33 Gowdy which really was not issued till again they were short print but again that was a buzz. If you got T206s or Goudies, you were going to look to see if you had 106 in the Goudies. And my dad did not. My dad had 33 Goudies and he had a couple of Ruth cards and a Garrig but he didn't have Lazuais, which how could he have. It was only available by mail the next year. And the Wagner card. Anytime anybody got any T206s, they're always hunting to see could there be a Wagner in there. Okay, so is that viral? Yes, but it wasn't based on the price in those days. That's my point. Nowadays the virality and the buzz is based on the price and I think it needs to be available enough one of one, only one person can have it that's why some of these cards that really get actively traded and talked about are 1 of 50 or 1 of 25 or 1 of 10. The PMGs, the green ones that are say 50 out of those, again, new discoveries were where it was at. The viral really was more about hot dog cards and other very limited regionals. There was a limit if it was a known card. Again, I was one of the young guys and the older guys had gotten there first guys that have been collected in the 50s and the 60s. And I come along into the national collecting scene and I'm a grad student at first and then I'm a young professor and I was very aggressive. But these people that were 20 years older than me had a 20 year head start at availability at much lower prices. I still did great. But I guess my punchline is I don't think I really followed the virality other than I thought, you know what if I come across a collection and it's got these Stahl Meyers in it, I'm just going to buy them. And I did. And I'm thinking, what did I pay for them? Did I pay 50 bucks for a card or 10 bucks for a card? Whatever it was, it's peanuts for what it was now. But it wasn't because it was viral in any sense other than there was a buzz about cards that you didn't normally see. That's how I formed my strategy. I think of when I've been in a buying mode, which I wasn't for all the years I was doing price guides. I wanted to be buying the cards that I guess were not viral, that were not being talked about, that were under the radar. Darren, I don't know if that helps you. Again, Darryl Strawberry wasn't under the radar, but it just became an IT card. It became a card. I gotta have this card. And I think the hobby is a lot more like that now because it's more based on demand and followers and likes and what everybody's doing. In the old days it was more about low supply and to this day I'm a low supply guy. If in doubt I'm going to buy the card with a lower supply. Obviously I do have some cards that are high demand too, but low supply and high demand is going to be very expensive and could still be a good deal. High supply, low demand, that's junk wax. It's not where the paper's printed on. So that's reverse virality that you see the junk and you turn the other way. My wife pointed out a Facebook Marketplace collection. That was 20,000 cards for 500 bucks. And she said, you better hustle over there. It's only a few blocks away. I said, there's some pictures there. And you look at the cards and you can tell when they're stacked up in these monster boxes. Number one, an unknowledgeable collector doesn't usually have the monster boxes and super monster boxes. So it was hobby supplied. There were some penny savers in there, things like that. And there were these. The telltale sign of these kind of bricks of cards where you could see that they were the old fashioned. The tops cardboard that they used back in the day when they had gum. There was. The darker. Was not bleached whiteness. Uh, so you could just tell. And I thought, I'm not even gonna go over there now. I may find out that I made a big mistake. But I. I don't really need more cards. Again, my 1% a month, I'm doing just fine. That would be. That'd be adding to that. That would be digging myself a hole. So that again, that's. That's reverse virality. I went the other way when I heard that being touted, even though by my lovely wife, I'm still. And that was a kind thing. And the fact that the few cards they showed were the kinds of things you would show if you thought the junk wax was so anyway, Darren, thanks. I look forward to getting feedback for the publishing episode that will be released in a couple of days. Thanks for your hard work and I hope your research efforts are rewarded. And even your inquiry about virality, I think, is interesting to me because it's evolved and changed over time to be something very different than what it was in the 60s. Again, it was word of mouth. So everything's viral when it's word of mouth. So it's like a whisper or a game of telephone. You're getting lost in the translation now. Digital communications. You could just take a picture with your phone and shoot it over. Anybody who wants to see it can see it. And so it's not hard to see what it is. In those days, like I said, I had to physically bring this card to this national hobby figure and prove that I was not bluffing him. He called my bluff and I showed up. All right, thanks, everybody. Thanks, Darren. Again, consider this an intro for this next episode with Darren. That'll be in a couple of days. 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