One of the oddities about the collecting space is that baseball dominates as if it’s still the true American Pastime. While the NFL and even the NBA have surpassed baseball when it comes to television ratings and fan engagement on social media, they’re also-rans when it comes to vintage and modern cards.
This was evident in The Athletic’s recent collectibles survey, where 56% of respondents said they collect baseball above all other sports, 14% said they collect multiple sports equally, 9.5% said they collect basketball first and 9% said they collect football above all.
Consider that a 1961 Fleer Wilt Chamberlain rookie card graded a perfect 10 by SGC just fetched $1.7 million, a new record for a vintage basketball card. That’s a fraction of the $12.7 million a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle by the same grader in 9.5 condition pulled in a 2022 auction. (The record sale for a modern basketball card came in 2021, when a 2003 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection LeBron James autographed rookie card that featured a piece of his jersey in it, one of 23 produced, sold for $5.2 million.)
“On the vintage side, there is no doubt that baseball rules, no other sport is close,” said Leighton Sheldon, owner of JustCollect, who has bought, sold or appraised over $50 million of cards. “But on the modern side, while baseball still has an edge, football and basketball are catching up.”
Vintage is typically cards from 1973 and older, though for some it includes more recent but retired stars like Michael Jordan. Modern is basically cards of active players.
Massachusetts-based dealer Kevin Randall, who recently sold cards to Tom Brady at Fantatics Fest in New York City adds, “My vintage baseball moves consistently while other sports tend to take much longer to sell.”
According to CardLadder, which tracks trading card sales data across the top online marketplaces, five of the top 10 card subjects in total value for all cards tracked in their database fall into the vintage baseball category — Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron. Basketball has three — Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Football only has Tom Brady. (Pokemon’s Charizard ranks fourth.)
As for active athletes, it’s basketball players James, Stephen Curry, Luka Doncic, and Giannis Antetokounmpo; hockey players Connor McDavid, Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby; baseball players Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and football player Patrick Mahomes. But when you adjust the market cap for the number of different cards that have been issued, Ohtani and the hockey players rank ahead of the rest because they have far less card variations.
What really separates the baseball side from the other sports is the range of possibilities. There are not only the players in MLB but those who have just signed contracts and are working their way up the professional ranks, with prices rising and falling as they experience bouts of success or failure along the way.
“In 2017, when Aaron Judge’s rookie card hit the market, I don’t think anyone expected him to be this player he is today,” Jessie Harrison of the E And J Boutique collectibles shop in Brooklyn said. “People collect the rookie cards in hopes that every rookie will someday turn out the way Judge is today.”
She adds collectors hope Judge cards — primarily those with autographs and limited print runs — in the future become what Mickey Mantle cards are today, and that goes for other baseball players like Ohtani and even Bobby Witt Jr., too.
“The modern side of the hobby is speculation (like an IPO) and the vintage side is blue chip,” Bob Beck of Bob Beck Sports Collectibles in Livingston, NJ said. He said that baseball is more aligned with speculators who want the possibility of exponential return on investment. With vintage, it’s price stability in the near term but steady growth over time. That’s more true in baseball than in basketball and football, where vintage cards have seen dramatic fluctuation in prices, mostly on the downside since the pandemic (when they exploded in value).
“During the pandemic, vintage basketball and football and hockey started to catch up (to baseball),” Beck said. “People saw them as grossly undervalued. But then people sold at a profit and put that money back into baseball cards like Babe Ruth, whose cards took longer to rise in value and were viewed as a value compared with some of those basketball prices.”
Eventually, the gravity of baseball eventually pulls in most vintage collectors.
“With modern though, the sports are much closer,” Beck said. While baseball is still No. 1, “basketball and football have made a lot of strides.”
Beck sees a generational divide. The youngest people in the hobby want the instant gratification of “buying a C.J. Stroud card and seeing him play that Sunday.” Beck said the modern baseball hobby is more nuanced and research driven and thus generally more suitable for older collectors.
JustCollect’s Sheldon doesn’t think that baseball’s dominance in the collecting space is set in stone, though. Football, he thinks, has it within its power to rise.
“Football doesn’t honor its history like (baseball),” Sheldon said. “And it’s pulling in so many billions of dollars with its current product that I understand why it doesn’t focus on the past.” But if it chose to, he added, the dynamics of the hobby could change.
Basketball’s history is dominated by a living person, Michael Jordan, the player with the top market cap in all sports, according to CardLadder. However, he has 1,802 cards for his $956.6 million in value ($531,000 per card type) while No. 2 Mickey Mantle has only 544 cards for his $808 million total ($1.48 million per card type).
Jordan’s dominance has left some other living basketball icons like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with less card value than a layperson may expect. Abdul-Jabbar’s market cap, according to CardLadder, is $27 million (170 cards); that’s about the same on a per-card basis as Doncic.
Football is unique in that “93% of the modern market is quarterback-based,” Sheldon added. You don’t see one position dominate in other sports, though in baseball hitters rule over pitchers because pitchers carry so much more career-altering injury risk and are less likely to win awards such as MVP because they don’t play every day.
On the other hand, Sheldon noted, “There’s a ton of value in non-QBs.”
The affordability of iconic football and basketball stars in vintage cards (typically 1973 and earlier) enables collectors in those sports to build a museum-worthy collection for a fraction of the cost of baseball.
What baseball collectors buy is not just a connection to the sport’s past, but their own, as well.
“Dads start off with baseball and it becomes a generational tradition,” Sheldon said. “My father collected baseball cards and passed that on to me and then I passed that on to my son.”
E And J’s Harrison said, “Everyone always has a special baseball story to tell. Whether it’s the first game they attended, the first game they watched on TV or why they became a fan of baseball. I was born into a family of Mets fans. My mother collected baseball cards with her brothers as a kid. That hobby was passed down to me.”
Baseball also has more transcendent cultural significance beyond sports due to its long-standing preeminence. Babe Ruth was the towering sports icon of the 20th century. Then Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and Roberto Clemente became sports’ first Latino superstar.
“What it comes down to really is that over all the decades, baseball has a lot more history, a lot more stars and a lot more stats,” Sheldon said.
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(Top photo: Kris Connor/Getty Images)
