Sport Cards: At-A-Glance
When I was little, my friend had an affinity for collecting football cards and all other assorted sports cards. He would come in to my dads toy store and buy all the packs that he possibly could, usually buying out the packs that my dad had in stock. To this day I don’t know who he got all of the money from. I once asked him why he always bought so many packs, he said that he was searching for a specific card and thought that his chances increased with each pack he bought. I suppose all of his hard work paid off because he eventually got the one he was looking for all those years ago.
Football cards and sports cards as well as baseball and hockey cards, were often called tobacco or cigarette cards because cigarette companies would include these cards in their packs as a sales gimmick, placing their bets on the chance that people would buy their smokes at least for the cards if not for the cigarettes alone. A player, Honus Wagner is said to have the most exclusive and rare card. He was so against his card being sold as an insert in cigarette packs, because kids would end up buying them for the cards, that he ordered that his cards production be stopped. It did, almost immediately, and it is said that at the time only a hundred or so of his cards had been printed, making them extremely valuable.
Being that the card companies have to pay the player that they want to make a card of to use his image, they typically only select professional players to print. This is so that more people will buy the card, the ones with the more famous and well known faces on them, and the company will garner more profit from that card. Rarely are amateur players and college players printed on a card and only then by the college they are promoting or playing for.
Finding a sports card in mint condition today can be extremely difficult, even impossible. I remember that when I was little my dad showed me pictures of his old bike. He was very proud of it because of the plethora of sports cards inserted into the tire spokes on his bike. This of course damaged the cards greatly but was a very widespread trend. I remember him telling me that if he had kept some of those cards off his bike and in a case, he would’ve been able to sell them for thousands of dollars and sent me to college with that very money.
Since the opportunities for making more, different sports cards with players faces on them, is difficult, the sports cards market has begun to use pieces of game equipment, such as bats, flooring, jersey pieces et cetera to keep collectors interested in the ever-broadening market of sports cards that still exists to this day. There are also sports cards that feature the autograph of a certain player or carry a serial number, both of which are rarer than base set cards.
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