New book details decline of baseball card industry

	Montreal's 1982 All-Stars Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Steve Rogers, Tim Raines and Al Oliver. AP

These days I use my old baseball cards as bookmarks. I had collected cards as a kid, and I still have a shoebox of them in my apartment. When I start reading a new book, I blindly reach into the shoebox, root around and pull one out. The cards get bent and frayed -- but at least this way I get to see them.

The book I just finished reading -- with a 1980 Al Oliver marking the pages -- is one just published, The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card.

The book, lively and well-researched, is centered around the most valuable and controversial edition of the iconic Honus Wagner tobacco card from 1909. This particular card appeared from out of nowhere in 1985 in suspiciously immaculate condition and has since passed through the hands of Wayne Gretzky, Wal-Mart, and several collectors. It was the first baseball card to sell for more than a million dollars -- despite many critics claiming that something was up, because the card's pristine condition was too good to be true.

Much of the book is devoted to solving that card's mystery. But the authors, Michael O"Keeffe and Teri Thompson, also open their narrative to the broader history of baseball card collecting. What in itself is a mystery to me:

What the hell happened?

This book is a case study in how greed and short-term thinking can ruin just about anything they get their hands on.

When I was a kid I would get packs of cards at drugstores, and twice a year I would go to the big card shows that were held at a convention center in Fort Washington, Pa., close to where I grew up. Those shows were a lot of fun -- just seeing all these rare and cool-looking cards of people like Mickey Mantle and Lou Gehrig, even if they were out of reach for someone my age.

Inevitably, my fascination with baseball cards didn't survive the meat of the line-up of my teenage years -- 15, 16, and 17 can be tough outs for a childhood hobby. Even if you are given to a certain eccentricity of mind, you hit an point where it feels more right to be studying the liner notes of Velvet Underground albums than the backs of baseball cards. It's just that way.

But in reading The Card, I think I would have been getting out anyway. Around the same time I outgrew baseball cards, baseball cards outgrew children. It became a world of consumer gouging and joyless economic speculation. Convention halls became a junior Wall Street for people without enough game to actually invest in Wall Street.

Some features of 1990s collecting, as described by the authors:

• Packs of cards that cost $5 instead of 50 cents.

• A glutted market. From the beginning of the 1995 baseball season to the end of the 1995-96 basketball season, seven companies issued 105 sets of sports cards. Who can keep up with all that -- or would want to?

• Monetary value defining cards. As opposed to, say, whether they showed your favorite players, or had cool or weird pictures, or were part of some game you might invent. My brother and I flipped baseball cards against the bottom of the stairwell; now they go into plastic sleeves that protect value. It's about as fun as the upholstery on your grandmother's furniture.

No wonder the business dried up.