Baseball Card Collecting: A Look into the Past at a Dying Hobby

I used to collect baseball cards back in the early 1990's and recently revisited my stash of over 10,000 baseball cards from my childhood. After recently having my second daughter, and last planned child, I decided it was time to finally get rid of my once prized collection. I, however was very disappointed with my findings. I sadly realized the popularity and profit of baseball card collecting has declined over the past decade.

I remember spending hours sorting through my collection, putting them in protective binders and covers, looking up prices Beckett's Price Guide, and trading cards with friends. There was nothing like opening a fresh pack of baseball cards trying to find the latest hot star and of course the free piece of stale bubble gum.

I also remember dreaming about how much my collection would be worth in 20 years. Now that the 20 years has passed and I'm now 30 years old I'm so disappointed that baseball card collecting is pretty much a dead hobby. Values of many of the card sets I purchased in the 1990's are worth about the same price I paid for them 20 years ago.

Many people might say that baseball card collecting is just like everything else, a fad. With the growing popularity of electronics, computers and video games classic hobbies such as sports collecting are fading away.

I personally think the baseball card companies have actually killed the hobby themselves. One of the major reasons I stopped collecting baseball cards was because the growing number of sets and special cards that were being produced. It was costing too much money to keep up with the number of sets that were popping up. Finally, I just gave up and stopped trying to keep up with them.

Baseball card collecting has been around in America since the early 1900's, and even though the popularity has greatly decreased they are still selling hundreds of thousands of cards today. Do I think the popularity of baseball card collecting will come back? Of course not there are too many other things for kids to pursue these days.

It's a sad fact of life but as much as I would love for cards to come back into popularity, they wont. Their time has come and gone. So I guess I will just keep my collection in the basement collecting dust. I'll pull them out occasionally to remember the fun times of my youth.