Baseball cards still hot

In the old days, Jim Hainline will tell you, kids used to buy baseball cards for a few pennies per pack, eat the bubble gum and throw away the cards. Or clip them to their bicycle spokes so they made a cool noise as they rode along.

Those days are long gone.

“It used to be that, if you collected baseball cards, you tried to collect everything,” said Hainline, who owns Sports Cards Northwest, 13817 E. Sprague. “You tried to collect the complete set of everything. You can’t do that anymore. There’s just too much.

“There are so many different labels with cards out there that you would go broke trying to collect them all. These days you pretty much have to specialize. I see a lot of people collecting their favorite team or focusing on their favorite players.”

Hainline has operated his card shop for 20 years, long enough to see the hobby reinvent itself, starting with the arrival of Upper Deck in 1989 with a set of baseball cards that featured high-quality photos and better-quality card stock. Suddenly, baseball cards went from being a quaint hobby with a long history to a hot investment opportunity.

“That changed things,” he said. “Today you pretty much have two main manufacturers: Topps and Upper Deck. Fleer went out of business and Upper Deck bought the name, so you still see Fleer cards out there, but it’s a subsidiary of Upper Deck.”

Upper Deck recently offered to buy Topps – further unifying the market.

“That one is still in the courts,” Hainline said. “They’re going to take a real close look at that before it goes through.”

Investing is still a big part of the hobby, and most card manufacturers play to that market by including special, hand-signed autographed cards in their sets. Others include swatches of actual, game-worn jerseys attached.

“I have one customer that has probably collected 3,000 autographed cards,” Hainline said. “He loves to collect those. I have kids who like to specialize in the uniform cards – those are very big.

“And of course you see people buying rookie cards as an investment. That’s still very big. I guess that’s for the speculators out there.”

Those additions helped to drive up the price. A few years ago, the average price of a pack of baseball cards was about 75 cents. Now it’s between $3 and $4 per pack.

Hainline predicts a hot market for the new lines of NBA basketball cards.

“I think we’re going to see things go crazy here in the Pacific Northwest now with (NBA rookies) Greg Oden and Kevin Durant,” he said. “The demand for their cards is going to be intense nationwide because of all the attention they’ve gotten. But with the local connection it will be even more intense here.

“We saw that this year with Adam Morrison cards. Any time you get a local connection like that, you get more interest in their cards.”

With so many different ways for collectors to go, the hobby still attracts kids of all ages.

“I have kids who bring their parents in to buy cards, I have parents who bring their kids in to buy cards,” Hainline said. “I even have a couple grandmothers who come in to collect their own cards.

“I have a lot of dads who collect with their sons and I have moms who collect with their daughters. That’s really cool to see. Of course, I also have parents who don’t understand why their kids waste their money on this kind of stuff.”

Hainline’s shop is filled with sports cards and sports memorabilia – autographed balls of all sorts, signed jerseys from many of the greats and near-greats, and signed photos.

One such photo depicts then-New York Yankee Roger Maris rounding the bases after hitting his 61st home run in 1961, a dejected 24-year-old Red Sox pitcher, Tracy Stallard in the foreground, his back turned. The photo is signed by five pitchers, including Stallard, who surrendered home runs to Maris that season.

In a case at the end of a row filled with thousands of sorted cards is a case with autographed baseballs from signed miniature football helmets. In a row down the middle of the shop hang signed jerseys from such immortals as Jerry Rice, Dick Butkus and Edgar Martinez.

“That’s what’s fun about this business,” Hainline said. “There’s so much out there that it’s always fun to just see what you can find next.”