II. (This is a continuation of the topic in a previous post.)
The bubble in the world of baseball card collecting grew steadily throughout the 1980s; the air came out in the early 1990s. It grew as a result of the overvaluation of the cards of contemporary players. The fact that these stars were new, hot, present, and
capable of raising or dropping their stock with every at bat inflated their
values; they got traded up. At core, the general sense was that these cards would
eventually be the Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays rookie cards of a new
generation. That's what casual hobbyist's assumed. I can recall being at
a baseball card show in 1987, when a young Eric Davis had risen to the fore of
the game, even inviting a Sports Illustrated cover story that wondered
provocatively if he was the next Willie Mays. That Saturday afternoon in 1987, in a day game, Eric Davis
hit three home runs; it was all the chatter; and the value of every piece of
Eric Davis merchandise in the hotel convention room went skyrocketing. What people were unwilling to
understand was that the value that these older cards had was due not to the
deeds of the players, but do to their low numbers. There were smaller printings to begin with (America was
smaller), and the children of the 1950s and 1960s, save for those fastidious,
can’t-have-the-shoes-in-the-closet-touching types, handled their cards
destructively. They stuck them in
bike spokes, and punched holes in them with hole-punchers so they could string
them up in decorative festoons in their bedrooms. I would not be surprised if one or two wasn’t spread with
peanut butter and fed, to an unsuspecting dog, who probably would
have been game for as many as peanut-buttered slathered cards as the neighborhood kids were offering. The cards that survived, that
ended up in a shoebox, untouched, were generally thrown away by mothers.
The point is that though Eric Davis might have been thought
of as the next Willie Mays, (rather, even if he had BECOME the next Willie
Mays), a 1985 Eric Davis card would never be a 1951 Willie Mays card. Though I might have the same nostalgic
response in the year 2064 (should I live that long) to a photo of Eric Davis as
he was, the card would never trade that way. The conditions could never be right. There were millions of cards on the
market in the late 80s. Topps was
joined by Fleer, Donruss, Score, and finally Upper Deck. People were trading on these newer
cards, Mark McQuire rookies and such, as if they had a scarcity that they’d
never have. $7 for a Mark McQuire
rookie in 1987! It was a
great time to open wax-packs. His
first full year in the league, his cards were already being sealed up in
plastic, and being kept away from the conditions that would have given them
actual value. Nobody was going to be putting these in spokes. It was an obvious
bubble, and like all bubbles, it popped.
You have a bubble any time people behave as if there is
value when there isn’t value. I
suppose, in that light, that the foil ball could be perceived as a bubble – or if
not a bubble, a relative species of a bubble. In the case of the ball, you have a man out there in the
world, filling his pockets with foil as he walks along, let us say, 125th
St. On one level, it is a personal
overvaluation of trash….) Anyway,
when this bubble popped in the early 1990s; all the inflated values of these
newer cards plummeted. Many of the
older cards were knocked down a notch in the process. There were some new strategies employed to get value into
the new cards, and in many ways these were successful. Personally I found them disturbing, as a pond stocked with fish is mildly disturbing. (Man's conscious hand at the rudder in such matters causes you to feel not in reality, but in proxy, ersatz reality....) For instance, there was implemented an extremely harsh grading system
that would reward only the one card in ten thousand that was, in the lingo,
“gem mint.” This drew value from
the many and imparted it onto the few in a relatively closed system.
There was also the attempt to use fancy materials, to stamp gold-foil
onto the cards in various places.
In practice, this chintzy tattooing only highlighted the fact that it
was preposterous that value would exist at all in a mass-produced piece of
cardboard. Manufacturers also did
some low-volume printing of ‘limited edition’ sets. Essentially they were trying to fabricate the conditions of
scarcity. That someone was trying
to raise the level of value on cards by simply pushing the button fewer times (I mean, this is cardboard rectangles spitting out of a machine, not
Faberge-egg painting), is innately unattractive to the soul. There is something infinitely repugnant
about artificial scarcity. A final
thing they’ve done is to include fibers of game-worn jerseys in the cards of
the best players. Sealed into a plastic window in the card itself, you will see
a few pieces of authenticated thread, a snippet of a game used jersey. The collector gets to look at the
jersey in the photograph on the card of, say, Derek Jeter, and know that he has
a few threads of a jersey that might even be that jersey he’s looking at.
It is this last practice that is fascinating to me, and it’s
started me up thinking about baseball cards in a way that I never quite
have. Neil Postman used to
maintain that a good question to ask when encountering a new technology is,
“What is the problem for which this is a solution?” The example he always gave was the cruise-control function
on a car. What problem does cruise
control solve? Assailed that way,
you see it solves the problem of keeping the foot on the pedal, which isn’t a
problem for hardly anyone. Upon
encountering a phenomenon such as this rending of jerseys, you want to ask
yourself a different sort of question: “What is the religious phenomenon that
this phenomenon is a secularization of?”
Is what we we’re doing essentially what we used to do, only in varied
form?” The idea that miraculous
power inheres in the bones and teeth and garments of our greatest citizens, has
deep roots in the psyche. When I
feel myself, say, dressed up in catering attire, in well-pressed white jacket,
clean shaven, and bending into a table to gently ask a guest, “Coffee or tea?”,
I feel nothing like the member of a species that would rip apart the garments
and even the teeth and hair and bones of its most revered deceased
members. It is one of our most
peculiar attributes. Of course
it’s aboriginal, pre-Christian, the sense of the magical body, though absorbed into
Christianity; it demonstrates a belief that holiness inheres in the flesh (and
by extension) in the things of this world. A saint’s tooth, planted, might help create an area of
holiness to protect a cathedral being built. Gandhi’s shirt sleeve pressed to the forehead of a dying
child certainly cannot hurt. The
belief is still in practice in Catholicism; still there are bones in altars,
even in the newer churches, which retain a bit of the religion’s essential
horror; i.e. What is best is torn apart (and must be torn apart) if its
goodness is to be spread to all.
If you find that horrifying, ah, well, then that is because it is
horrifying. The world is
horrifying, at least partially. As it’s a practical analogy, it’s worth
pointing out that the jersey of Mario Mendoza, or any other weak player, isn’t
being torn about into thousands of individual threads. Ad men and marketing men, as we all know,
are the deep-sea divers of the human psyche. We learn as much about ourselves by studying the ways they
attract us than by anything.