This isn’t your dad’s baseball card hobby today

That exhilarating experience of opening a pack of cards to find a favorite player or a star still exists in the sports card industry.

Someone thousands of miles away just might be opening the pack. And the cards might not even be of athletes.

A concept called breaks has caught on like Milwaukee Brewers fever across the industry, in part thanks to social media.

The process entails customers paying ahead of time for certain players, teams or divisions, then watching someone “break” open packs of cards online. Buyers are then mailed their cards.

“There’s a little bit of lottery to it. You could pay $50 and end up with $500 or $10 worth of cards,” Bobby Strandt, owner of Barbell Breaks in Brookfield that used to be in Port Washington, said.

Strandt grew up in Big Bend collecting and got away from it before his older brother brought him back to the hobby a decade ago. He did his first livestream in 2021 and eventually left his job to do breaking full time. He has a schedule of breaks that people across the world follow.

“I’ll ship globally. Basketball is huge in China,” he said.

Mitch Reid, owner of Mitch’s Sports Cards and Collectibles in Mequon, is in the third year of owning the store and also does breaks. The 2002 Kiel High School grad started out of his house, then moved to the store. Now, breaking is so big he has a separate location for it.

In addition to sports, Reid has gotten into Pokemon cards, which are booming in popularity as the phenomenon turns 30 next year.

Strandt said breaking is just one of many ways to collect cards. He’s as much a customer as he is a business owner.

“Nothing quite beats going to a hobby shop and picking out a pack to open, trading with friends or hunting for cards at a show. I am invested in just about every side of collecting and enjoy it as a business and a hobby equally,” he said.

Strandt and Reid were among the hundreds of vendors at the days-long National Sports Collector Show in Chicago two weeks ago that featured a treasure trove of cards, memorabilia and athletes signing autographs for varying fees. It broke attendance records.

Pandemic proliferation

Everyone with casual knowledge of the sports card industry knows the industry began to slide with overproduction in the 1990s.

Strandt said the Tom Brady rookie card in 2000 helped drive the market back up, and the pandemic sent it to the moon. 

“I think people had too much free time and were just looking for a hobby,” Strandt said. “Cards that were worth a buck were going for $20. It was just wild.”

Reid said social media and influencers helped spread the hobby, and so did the budgets of collectors who weren’t children anymore.

“People my age (42) have a lot more money than they did when they were younger,” he said.

Former store owner Anthony Paneech of Youngstown, Ohio, who still has a vendor’s license, said rookie cards of Mike Trout and Bryce Harper kept growing the industry around 2011 and 2012.

“It seemed like every year there was a rookie that people wanted to collect, which helps,” he said.

Production of some cards has since swung the other direction.

“It’s a double-edged sword from the 1990s when they printed way too much,” Reid said. “Now the price goes up in the secondary market because there’s not enough to go around.”

Rookie card values retreating

A player’s rookie card has traditionally been the most valuable one. That’s still the case with older cards, but not with new ones.

First Bowman cards — a designation will appear in the upper righthand corner — from the Bowman company have moved in. For Brewers’ fans, rookie Jacob Misiorowski’s 2022 Bowman Chrome is going for $100 to $150, Paneech said.

Misiorowski’s rise in value was as fast as his fastball.

“His cards weren’t worth that much. He pitches two times and his cards are worth 2,000% more than they were,” Reid said.

Misiorowski doesn’t even have an official rookie card. Those aren’t released until after someone plays his first season in the big leagues.

Unlike today’s rookies, Paneech said, a 1980 Rickey Henderson rookie retains its value because “that was the only Rickey Henderson you could get. They didn’t print as many as they do now.”

For those chasing Pittsburgh Pirates’ star  Paul Skenes, Paneech said, there’s likely 1 million of his rookie cards floating around and their value isn’t what it once was.

Whose cards are valuable tends to fluctuate. Wrestling is hot right now.

Paneech bought a signed card of the Boogeyman at the National and turned around and sold it for $40.

“It was in my case a day if that,” he said.

“Ten people looked at it before somebody bought it. The Boogeyman’s as hot as Babe Ruth right now. That’s kind of scary.”

Strandt said the best way to determine a card’s value is to check eBay or auction websites.

“It’s worth whatever people are willing to pay,” he said.

Corporate industry changes

Licensed cards that allow a company to use team and league logos are sought-after, and one company is starting to dominate that market.

Fanatics Inc. bought Topps in 2022, and with it came its Major League Baseball license. The company is going to get the NBA license in October and the NFL license in April, both from Panini America.

For stores and those doing breaks, they’re just buying from a different company. Strandt is excited because he likes Topps better. For Paneech, it’s a killer.

Since he has a vendor license but not a brick-and-mortar store, Paneech isn’t allowed to buy directly from Fanatics, and the wholesale market has been eliminated, he said. That leaves big-box stores and hobby shops, and those are being cleaned out by people without vendors’ licenses, he said. So he doesn’t sell Topps baseball anymore, and football and basketball might be next.

“Fanatics is ruining the hobby,” Paneech said.

But, he said, he will do what he has to in order to stay in it.

“I enjoy it. I just have to continue adapting with it,” Paneech said.

Some of the labor that comes with the business isn’t so bad, he said.

“You watch sports and you’re doing your homework,” Paneech said.

Beyond sports cards

Rick Haskins of Arlington, Texas, had a booth at the National that was full of hundreds of pennants spanning decades of product. The former computer programmer for Dallas Public Schools in his 40th year of selling them.

While he said he knows sports cards are driving the memorabilia hobby, pennants have their place.

“That’s part of Americana,” he said. “Everybody can relate to pennants. They understand what they’re for. There’s eye appeal.”

Multiple vendors have pennants, but next to none have Haskins’ selection.

“I am unique. That’s to my advantage,” he said.