Worst Sportscards Investments

[OSJ]

Okay, from the response in Collecting Sportscardz we obviously have more than a few folk on here that are still into buying the pasteboards be they wrestling, baseball or one of the lesser sports. That being the case, let's punt the idea that we're buying them simply for aesthetics, who among us has not immediately checked on-line prices to see if there was gold or garbage in that there pack? Taking it a step further,  who among us has not speculated on the fortunes of a given player that seems possessed of a fantastic college or minor-league career or simply good genetics. But what were some of the worst calls that you made? Sure, picking Ken Griffey's kid wasn't exactly rocket science, Junior had been raised to be an outstanding baseball player. Senior was a hell of a five-tools player and anyone watching the Kid play in Bellingham knew that he was going to be even better than the old man. Sure, I can brag about stockpiling Barry Bonds RCs, but the thing is I also picked up a ton of Bobby Bonds jr. cards. The difference between the two brothers was as dramatic as the difference between Hank and Tommy Aaron.

But how about this, we often read of National League players going to the junior circuit and being baffled by the weird off-speed stuff they get thrown. How about this man-bites-dog tale of woe... A young outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, Phil Plantier showed all the promise in the world, then he was traded to San Diego in the NL, surely his power numbers would surge... Never one to do things by half-measures, I bought an 800-ct  lot of his Upper Deck RCs. Mr. Plantier had demonstrated that he could hit weird, off-speed stuff... Given a diet of straight NL fastballs he was totally at sea and out of baseball in a couple of seasons. More Red Sox foolishness, a young chap name of Tim Naehring played short and had a good deal of pop for the position... I ask, how the hell does a guy make it through AA and AAA to the big club without anyone noticing that one leg is three inches longer than the other. No, we're not talking something weird but not uncommon like a half-inch, we're talking THREE INCHES, the dude would have to be walking like Quasimodo, how does this not get scouted. Thankfully I showed some restraint and only bought a 400-ct lot at eight cents a card. 

While he's had an indifferent career as a manager, I'm sure that some of us have fond memories of Matt Williams as a player. Matt was an absolute joy to watch, he played every game like it was Game 7 of the WS. Sadly, his hard-nose style of play likely shortened his career and kept him from the HOF career that he seemed destined for. Yeah, in his case  I bought a shit-ton of his minor league cards too. FWIW, every time I've invested in minor league cards it hasn't ended well, organizations are just too good at spotting talent, the idea of a guy "surprising" an organization is pretty damn unlikely, either they are heavily touted and carry an inflated value on their minor league stuff,   (remember Albert Pujols cards gong for big bucks before he'd ever stepped foot in a major league park?) I recall one throw-back set that emulated like 1956 Topps or something similar that had a Pujols RC as one of the short-printed high numbers, and it was like $100 out of the gate, well in advance of him being called up. 

I'm not sure when manufacturers started allowing the sale of bulk lots, the first year that I was aware of it was 1986 for Topps and 1987 for Fleer, I don't know about Donruss, but who the hell wanted Donruss in bulk anyway?  I've never checked to see if the practice is allowed for wrestling cards, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't be, if anything the volatility of the market with the sudden pushes and depushes of talent would seem to really lend itself to the practice. 

[Contentious C]

Oh, I have a story. 

After the Sosa/McGwire chase in '98, they put out a 22-karat gold card set as a collector's item. My grandparents got it for me for Christmas; it was apparently the most expensive thing anyone got from them. 

Now you can't get rid of for $10 on eBay (part of that could be that eBay has made collecting moot, but Bonds didn't help, nor did bad behavior). No idea what it originally cost. Maybe the gold is still worth melting down. 

[Hail Sabin]

I know for my Dad buying a graded PSA 9 Ryan Leaf RC instead of a graded PSA 9 Peyton Manning RC when both were the same price would be on his list. 

[hammerva]

The easy one for me was 1989 Pro Set Football.  They were the new brand completely endorsed by the NFL and they looked so sharp compared to Score which was so dull.  The only advantage Score had was they had rookie cards in the 1st series.  And 1989 was maybe the greatest draft class ever.   Me and everyone else was buying packs and packs and packs of Pro Set at frankly overpriced pack cost.  Mostly built on hype of the Refrigerator Perry error card, some NFL hologram card inserts, and their card quality.  I probably only bought one box of Score which early on you could get for under $20

Eventually we found out that there was millions of Pro Set everywhere and especially when they did a 2nd series with the rookies and traded players.  The price dropped hard.    Meanwhile people started realizing that Score was extremely scarce and by the time I noticed packs were in the $2 - $5 dollar range.   Today a box of 1989 Score football is in the $300 range

 

[Hail Sabin]

I will think of some more in the future but right for me it would not buying a 2011 PSA 10 Mike Trout Update Rookie Card for $100!

Last I checked a non graded is booking for $400. 

[CSC]

 

On 1/21/2019 at 9:14 PM, Contentious C said:

Oh, I have a story. 

After the Sosa/McGwire chase in '98, they put out a 22-karat gold card set as a collector's item. My grandparents got it for me for Christmas; it was apparently the most expensive thing anyone got from them. 

Now you can't get rid of for $10 on eBay (part of that could be that eBay has made collecting moot, but Bonds didn't help, nor did bad behavior). No idea what it originally cost. Maybe the gold is still worth melting down. 

Those 22-karat gold cards were big time Grandparents gifts in my family.  I still have the 1993 Nolan Ryan that sells for about the same on ebay.

Like pretty much my entire card investment from my childhood - almost no value other than sentimental. 

And not even to mention the sheets and sheets of cards I have of lumpy 1st basemen that I put so much time and money into as a kid trying to find that are worth like 5 cents a piece now.  

[odessasteps]

You can probably lump together all the hockey boxes I bought in the 91-92 to 94-95 years. Pro Set, Bowman, OPC, UD, Score, ...

[elizium]

The 1990-91 Pro Set hockey set is infamous. Well over 100 different error cards; spelling mistakes, mislabels, wrong pictures, misalignments. Some of the error cards they fixed even had new errors.

Strangely, that set also has one of the only worthwhile 90s hockey set chase cards. The Stanley Cup hologram card was a run of 5000 (small by the standards of the day) and the holograms of the time did not age well (a bunch of my early 90s Upper Deck hologram cards have faded to almost nothing). I'd never pay that much, but some have sold on ebay for $100-400.

I used to have one that I got out of a box back in the day, but an unscrupulous relative pawned it and a few other of my cards. I'm sure they got $1 for it.

The 91-92 set is actually pretty nice. They clearly learned they lesson and gave the set a minimalist design with a large picture on front (and very few errors!). But I think the name was just ruined by the previous set and no one cared.

[odessasteps]

I have a bunch of those UD holograms from that era, including the ones from McDonalds Canada.

i love the kitschiness of some cards from that era, including the roller blading Bure brothers.

[elizium]

Thankfully, I've never really looked at cards as an investment, so I don't have any horror stories (other than I don't want to know how much I've spent in total).

I definitely did speculate on some players that didn't pan out, Bret Barberie comes to mind. I was also convinced that the O Pee Chee Premier hockey and Leaf baseball sets were gonna be worth something.

[Serious Darius Bagfelt]

I cry when I think of all the old cards I go rid off.  Would love to have them back today.  Not for value purposes but just to have in a collection.  Had some great pre expansion NHL cards

[Serious Darius Bagfelt]

On 1/22/2019 at 12:01 AM, OSJ said:

Okay, from the response in Collecting Sportscardz we obviously have more than a few folk on here that are still into buying the pasteboards be they wrestling, baseball or one of the lesser sports. That being the case, let's punt the idea that we're buying them simply for aesthetics, who among us has not immediately checked on-line prices to see if there was gold or garbage in that there pack? Taking it a step further,  who among us has not speculated on the fortunes of a given player that seems possessed of a fantastic college or minor-league career or simply good genetics. But what were some of the worst calls that you made? Sure, picking Ken Griffey's kid wasn't exactly rocket science, Junior had been raised to be an outstanding baseball player. Senior was a hell of a five-tools player and anyone watching the Kid play in Bellingham knew that he was going to be even better than the old man. Sure, I can brag about stockpiling Barry Bonds RCs, but the thing is I also picked up a ton of Bobby Bonds jr. cards. The difference between the two brothers was as dramatic as the difference between Hank and Tommy Aaron.

But how about this, we often read of National League players going to the junior circuit and being baffled by the weird off-speed stuff they get thrown. How about this man-bites-dog tale of woe... A young outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, Phil Plantier showed all the promise in the world, then he was traded to San Diego in the NL, surely his power numbers would surge... Never one to do things by half-measures, I bought an 800-ct  lot of his Upper Deck RCs. Mr. Plantier had demonstrated that he could hit weird, off-speed stuff... Given a diet of straight NL fastballs he was totally at sea and out of baseball in a couple of seasons. More Red Sox foolishness, a young chap name of Tim Naehring played short and had a good deal of pop for the position... I ask, how the hell does a guy make it through AA and AAA to the big club without anyone noticing that one leg is three inches longer than the other. No, we're not talking something weird but not uncommon like a half-inch, we're talking THREE INCHES, the dude would have to be walking like Quasimodo, how does this not get scouted. Thankfully I showed some restraint and only bought a 400-ct lot at eight cents a card. 

While he's had an indifferent career as a manager, I'm sure that some of us have fond memories of Matt Williams as a player. Matt was an absolute joy to watch, he played every game like it was Game 7 of the WS. Sadly, his hard-nose style of play likely shortened his career and kept him from the HOF career that he seemed destined for. Yeah, in his case  I bought a shit-ton of his minor league cards too. FWIW, every time I've invested in minor league cards it hasn't ended well, organizations are just too good at spotting talent, the idea of a guy "surprising" an organization is pretty damn unlikely, either they are heavily touted and carry an inflated value on their minor league stuff,   (remember Albert Pujols cards gong for big bucks before he'd ever stepped foot in a major league park?) I recall one throw-back set that emulated like 1956 Topps or something similar that had a Pujols RC as one of the short-printed high numbers, and it was like $100 out of the gate, well in advance of him being called up. 

I'm not sure when manufacturers started allowing the sale of bulk lots, the first year that I was aware of it was 1986 for Topps and 1987 for Fleer, I don't know about Donruss, but who the hell wanted Donruss in bulk anyway?  I've never checked to see if the practice is allowed for wrestling cards, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't be, if anything the volatility of the market with the sudden pushes and depushes of talent would seem to really lend itself to the practice. 

Todd Van Poppel was the one that got me

[Hail Sabin]

In 1998 I knew a guy who was all in on Robert Edwards being the next Barry Sanders or Emmitt Smith so you could trade him Edwards for any Rookie you want my choice was Randy Moss. I traded him 5 different Robert Edwards RCs for 5 different Randy Moss RCs then the Rookie Pro Bowl Beach Game happened he never collected Football cards again and only did Basketball. 

[OSJ]

On 2/26/2019 at 9:09 PM, Serious Darius Bagfelt said:

Todd Van Poppel was the one that got me

Oh yes, Todd Van Haha as we called him at the card-store. I don't know how many friends I dissuaded from wasting their money investing in his minor league cards. (Biggest problem with minor league cards is back then (and maybe now) you had to buy the whole set to get the guy that you were really after. Think about it, you are paying for a couple dozen cards of various doofuses who will never so much as have a cup of coffee in the big show). Further, you are compounding this foolishness by going all-in on what is basically a recent high-school grad who has yet to prove that he can do much of anything at the major league level. Yes, you are going all-in on one 25th of the set of cards maybe becoming a breakout star. Look, buy minor league shit because it's fun to watch and they have goofy promotions, not because they have the next Barry Bonds in the line-up.

[Hail Sabin]

Honestly this thread is why I'm not 100% going all in on buying Luka Doncic cards on Ebay and just trying to get to 2 or 3 of several cards of his. 

[OSJ]

11 hours ago, Hail Sabin said:

Honestly this thread is why I'm not 100% going all in on buying Luka Doncic cards on Ebay and just trying to get to 2 or 3 of several cards of his. 

It has already prevented me from dropping several hundred dollars on Ronald Acuna jr. RCs. (That and the wife looking over my shoulder to see what I was up to and why I needed the credit card...)

[Hail Sabin]

Speaking of Acuna if you buy a 2018 Topps Factory Set it has a Acuna RC and Torres RC you only get by buying the set. More then likely sometime in the next month Walmart and/or Target will discount the Set by $10. 

[OSJ]

49 minutes ago, Hail Sabin said:

Speaking of Acuna if you buy a 2018 Topps Factory Set it has a Acuna RC and Torres RC you only get by buying the set. More then likely sometime in the next month Walmart and/or Target will discount the Set by $10. 

Now that's exactly the sort of horseshit that got me out of the hobby. There should never, ever be anything in the factory set that you can't pull from packs and building your own sets. I fully expect updated and traded sets to have cards not available in packs, but I should be able to put the WHOLE set together from packs if I'm stupid enough to do that (and yes, that's a rhetorical statement, because for over fifty years I have been stupid enough to do that very thing). There's just something addictive about opening packs.

[Hail Sabin]

They Put a card in the set because the ones of those two you can pull in packs are Super Short Prints thus incredibly hard to pull. 

[OSJ]

1 hour ago, Hail Sabin said:

They Put a card in the set because the ones of those two you can pull in packs are Super Short Prints thus incredibly hard to pull. 

I have been outraged about short-prints or high numbers (as it used to be in the sixties) for over fifty years. For some reason (likely just to piss me off), they seemingly always made one of the players that I collected (usually McCovey or Billy Williams) a high number and thus a short print. The local grocery store made it a point to not understand that you got cards in August that were not available in May or June and we didn't care that you had a bunch of boxes from May and June still in stock, we wanted the new stuff, damnit; it's not our fault that you over-ordered at the start of the season. This is why I spent a bunch of time and money in the 1980s buying high numbers of sets from the 1960s. Goddamn Willie McCovey ran me broke putting together a file of his cards. 

Funny but true story: I've always believed that a "collection" should have particular ramifications, otherwise what you have is an "accumulation" which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just undefined and therefore infinite in scope whereas a collection can be defined by a few set parameters. So... My collection was defined by the 300-HR club. As of 1970, this was a do-able if expensive concept, so I modified the parameters a bit, for players active prior to the 1950s, a Baseball Greats card from Fleer (I think the years were 1962-1963 or maybe 61-62) would be acceptable as I wasn't about to shell out big bucks for Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, etc. but five bucks for the Baseball Greats card of the Babe was do-able and I had no problem with paying that amount to get both Foxx and Gehrig. For some reason, my local grocery store never got boxes of either series of Baseball Greats, but the kid who lived two blocks east of me and thus went to a different grocery store, had dozens of the cards that he got by the pack. Never occured to me to check out the store that he went to, it was eight blocks east of where I lived so it might as well have been on Mars. 

Anyway, it soon became apparent that 300 career taters was not the milestone that it had been a mere twenty years ago. When I realized that my collection would have to include guys like Roy Sievers, the concept lost a lot of appeal. So what about 400 HRs? Now that's quite a few, enter on the radar one Dave Kingman, if my collection has to include a player file of Dave Kingman, something is seriously amiss. So what about 500? Now we're talking Mickey fucking Mantle and Jimmie Foxx territory. As much as I hated to drop guys like Rogers Hornsby and Chuck Klein from the collection, 300 HRs was something that any fairly decent player who was active for over a decade could reach pretty easily, 400 was a bit tougher, but with guys playing longer instead of retiring at 33, 400 career taters simply wasn't that big a deal. 500 seemed then and still does in many ways seem like a magic number that you have to be pretty damn good for a long time to reach. 

Anyway, the collection is due for a serious overhaul and possible rebuilding. I haven't bought more than a pack or two of cards in years, I'll usually pick up a couple of packs of Topps just to see what they look like, but my days of buying several boxes and putting sets together by hand are long since done. Yeah, there are a few new guys that I'm pretty high one, (Like Acuna, who has the advantage of playing for God's Own Team, the Immortal Atlanta Braves), and a couple of others who get my baseball spider-sense jingling, but rather than buy sets or boxes, I'll probably just bite the bullet and see what I have to pay for these short prints on eBay.

[OSJ]

1 hour ago, Hail Sabin said:

They Put a card in the set because the ones of those two you can pull in packs are Super Short Prints thus incredibly hard to pull. 

Okay, help a brother out... Is this the Acuna card that I should have?

RONALD ACUNA JR 2018 TOPPS SERIES 2 #698 SSP SHORT PRINT RC 

 

[Hail Sabin]

That's the card that they put an alternate version of in the set like they did for Bryce Harper his Rookie year. 

2 hours ago, OSJ said:

Okay, help a brother out... Is this the Acuna card that I should have?

RONALD ACUNA JR 2018 TOPPS SERIES 2 #698 SSP SHORT PRINT RC 

 

That could be one of them don't know what it goes for on Ebay. Turns out Beckett mention 2 different version of the card Bat Up and Bat Down. I know Acuna has several cards that are going for crazy prices. 

[OSJ]

5 hours ago, Hail Sabin said:

That's the card that they put an alternate version of in the set like they did for Bryce Harper his Rookie year. 

That could be one of them don't know what it goes for on Ebay. Turns out Beckett mention 2 different version of the card Bat Up and Bat Down. I know Acuna has several cards that are going for crazy prices. 

Yeah, I don't care about the artificial scarcities that they produce, I just want to pick up a few legit RCs (ie: regular-ass cards that you can pull from packs, not nonsense with bat chips, pieces of pants or any of that silly horseshit; I'm thinking regular issue Topps 2018 bat up or down or both, but something that you could legit pull from a late-season box without too much difficulty). As you know, I owned a cardstore for a couple of years and developed an overwhelming distaste for what I call "artificial rarities". Look, when you legit have an error card (like the Billy Ripken fuckface deal or something like that) that's cool. When you're printing fifty cards or less of something, you are creating an artificial rarity. I know a good deal about printing and trust me on this, no printer in their right mind is going to set up and print one sheet of anything. It simply costs too much to be feasible. This is why we such such inflated prices on packs, they have to make up the cost of these short-print cards somehow and jacking the consumer is the easiest way to do so. 

Far as crazy prices, I restrained myself when Pujols had a Fleer high number that was going for over a hundred bucks before he ever set foot on a major league park, so I can control myself when it comes to the ridiculous short prints and so on for Acuna. The problem with these types of cards and I've seen it over and over and over again, is they debut at such an inflated value that they literally have nowhere to go but down. Remember when someone )I think it may have been Leaf) did like a ten card subset of Frank Thomas? Hey, I liked the Big Hurt as much as anyone, but do I really need eleven cards (there was a regular one in the basic set of course) of the SAME PLAYER from the SAME MANUFACTURER? I rather think not. I can see two or three cards of the same player if he gets a particular award or something, like they used to do with the Sporting News Player of the year back in the sixties so you would have two Mantle or Mays cards to chase after as opposed to just one, but ten cards of the same guy? I haven't seen anything quite so ridiculous since Fleer did their Ted Williams set. (Williams got his panties in a bind in an argument with Topps over money, so he refused to participate in that year's set (1959 I think...) It's been a longass time and I got the cards that I did from an older kid down the street...) Anyway, Teddy Ballgame went straight to Fleer and volunteered to do a whole set of Ted Williams cards! So you have I think a sixty or so card set of Ted fishing, barbecuing, hanging out with Jimmie Foxx the one year that they played together (I still have that one framed in my office) and so on, pretty much anything Mr. Williams was doing (at least with his clothes on) was immortalized in this ridiculous set.

Fleer was always my favorite card company based on some of the goofy (but cool) things that they did. The two years that they did Baseball Greats were as informative as hell and really cool cards for a kid learning about the early days of the game. Of course, they were an amusing blend of retouched photos from the players active careers mixed with current photos of guys in their sixties and seventies squeezing into their old uniforms. I recall "Sunny Jim" Bottomley as looking particularly ridiculous.

The one year (I think '63) that they signed a small number of players that hadn't signed the blanket deal with Topps was as bizarre a set as you could possibly imagine. You had Mays but no Mantle, you had Yaz and Cepeda but no Yogi or McCovey. A really odd set but with the best photography I ever saw until Upper Deck came along years and years later. The more I think about it the more I realize what a nice set that Fleer issue was, hell, you had Clemente, Drysdale and Koufax if memory serves, and best pf all the short-print card that everyone had to chase after was my man Bazooka Joe Adcock. (Reminds me, I really need an upgrade there, the one I have is from childhood and amazingly enough is still Ex-Mint, but I should get me a real nice one. Oh yeah, the other thing that Fleer did, Topps always gave you that horrible gum, Fleer gave you (and I shit you not) a cookie! It wasn't a particularly good cookie, sort of this wafer type deal, but who thinks of giving you a cookie instead of gum? Only Fleer.

Edited March 8, 2019 by OSJ

[BrianS81177]

I recently opened up my mom and dad's old safe they had buried in the back of their closet and discovered I had some rookie cards in there.  A couple Peyton Mannings, etc (all from around that time). One big miss: I had Brock Huard's rookie card in there. Guess I thought he was gonna be big. To be fair, I live near Seattle so a little homering is allowed, right?

[OSJ]

1 hour ago, BrianS81177 said:

I recently opened up my mom and dad's old safe they had buried in the back of their closet and discovered I had some rookie cards in there.  A couple Peyton Mannings, etc (all from around that time). One big miss: I had Brock Huard's rookie card in there. Guess I thought he was gonna be big. To be fair, I live near Seattle so a little homering is allowed, right?

Well of course! I recall getting a set of the Bellingham Mariners back in the day as I thought that this Griffey kid might be as good as his old man was... That one worked out pretty nicely. Didn't offset the 800-ct box of Phil Plantier RCs from Upper Deck, but we can't pick 'em correctly all the time. At least Plantier was nice enough to sign a bunch of cards that I sent him during spring training, hell, they might be worth as much as fifty cents each now... I should have learned my lesson regarding Red Sox rookies with Tony Conigliaro and "Boomer" Scott back in grade school. 

Somewhere in the vast array (I mean literally tons of junk) that my mom accumulated (she sort of went off her rocker, but concealed it pretty well for years, but hoarding junk big-time), took several truckloads of crap out of the house. (She was volunteering at this sort of Goodwill-like facility and unbeknownst to my sister and I was bringing 90% of the donations home with her and stashing them for an "emergency". Anyway, somewhere in the mountains of junk that my sister oversaw being removed (I'm a long ways away from Seattle), a small box disappeared. In that small box, were cards of the guys that I thought for sure were bound for the HOF. Maybe fifty cards in total, but they included Mantles from 19953 through 1968, 1962-1963 Musial's, a complete run of McCovey and Cepeda, Mays from 1963 through 1971, Aaron from 1962-1970, Banks and Frank Robinson from 1957 through 1970 for Banks, 1972 for Frank, Joe Adcock from 1961-1963 (okay, nobody's perfect); Eddie Mathews from 1956 on through the heart crushing trades to Houston and Detroit, lots of Spahn, Koufax, Drysdale, Gibson, and Ford. 1963 Yogi, etc. Believe it or not, they were all ex-mt or better, it was drilled into me early on to take good care of paper goods such as books, cards (and unbeknownst to the parental units) a massive hidden comics collection. It really helped having an older kid (by about eight or nine years( down the street who rather than throwing this stuff out was nice enough to give it to me. (Which would explain the presence of so much stuff that came out when I was just born through my toddler years.) He wasn't quite as fanatical about cards as I became, he completely avoided the 1960 set because he didn't like the horizontal cards, and he was light on the 1961 set because he thought they were butt-ugly (and he was right), but he had loads of the 1957 and 1962 sets (both of which are still among my favorites and I got all those just handed to me.