Sports card collecting won’t die as long as there’s community, nostalgia, and the thrill of discovery

There are thousands of boxes like this sitting on tables on the convention floor. Thousands of boxes that contain thousands of cards, two images on two sides of a piece of cardboard, slipped into a little plastic sleeve, labeled with a price, sitting.

A man, one of tens of thousands of people who will be in attendance over the course of the week, pulls up a chair and sits in front of the box filled with thousands of little cards. In his seat, he browses. Some flip in the box, some take out little piles one by one, flip through them with their fingers, and return the piles back into the box. At one point, as a non-collector looking to simulate this process for myself, I ran my fingers through a row labeled NBA, idly looking for a Tony Allen card. A man near me, flipping through the same box handful-style, looks up and says, “Hey man, I’m looking through this box right now. Can you hold off?” He was right, I had committed a faux pas, so I drifted away while he kept at it.

Another time, a man drops a handful of cards, and every flipper near him springs to life, broken from the spell of the flip. He laughs it off. “Just making sure everyone is awake,” he says,. They were deep in a zone, looking for something. It could be they are trying to finish their complete set of cards that were packed away in loaves of Hostess bread sold in the year 1979. Or maybe they are a Mike Caldwell completist, and his appearance in the 1979 Hostess set has eluded him for years.

“I started collecting when I was seven years old,” B.A. Murray told me. He is from Carbondale, Illinois, and sitting dead center at the entrance of the National Sports Card Collectors Convention, which everyone there calls The National. “That’s 70 years ago. Back in the day only kids collected. Adults didn’t deal with this stuff until the early ’70s, when, I believe, the adult hobby developed from the boomers who, they were finished with school or the military, they finally have a regular job and said, ‘Hey I got this collection of cards,’ a few other guys says “We got em’ too, let’s get together and do stuff.’ This happened all over the country. Clubs were formed. And they said, ‘well, let’s meet one day,’ and after a while they said, ‘let’s meet for a weekend.’ And that’s where we came from. In St. Louis a group of people started a group called the St. Louis Cards. It happened in Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland and other places, and then they started having shows. Through the mid-’70s shows developed everywhere. Then, by 1980, a California promoter says, ‘I think I’m gonna call my show The National Convention,’ and we said ‘Hey, that’s a good idea.’”

This year’s National, tucked into Cleveland’s I-X Center, a gigantic brown convention space on the edge of town, is split up into two big halls. The first, where B.A. here is playing his trade for the 44th time, is a gigantic hall of sports memorabilia dealers, selling sports stuff. Here is some of the stuff I saw for sale: extremely old baseball cards from cigarette packages, three whole boxes full of identical self published cards all signed by Pete Rose, a signed picture of Donald Trump getting shot, replica Super Bowl Rings, a Barry Goldwater campaign button, gigantic oil paintings of famous old cards, a button commemorating the life of Roberto Clemente after he died in a terrible plane crash, thousands of stray wax packs from the card industry’s glut years during the George H.W. Bush administration that were practically begging to be shoplifted, some signed photos of prime George Brett looking uncannily like Mac DeMarco, and anything else you can imagine. If it has to do with sports and can be sold, someone at one of these booths was selling it.

The other hall, past all the dealers, belongs to big industry types. Card manufacturers like Upper Deck, Panini, and Topps, odd ventures like a new Bo Jackson branded trading card game, appraisers and graders like Beckett and PSA, and online commerce platforms like whatNot—a commerce platform that, full disclosure, paid for my travel and credential to the event—or Fanatics Live or eBay, all hosting live streamers sitting behind phones and barking into camera. Sports memorabilia sales are big business, an estimated $44 billion in total. Fanatics, a new colossus in the industry, bought Topps for $500 million dollars back in 2022. eBay alone processes $100 million a month in single card sales transactions.

A reasonable question to ask here would be how and why acquiring fragile slips of cardboard with little pictures and instantly dated numbers on them, one of the most analog hobbies imaginable, is flourishing in an age where pictures and statistics and analysis about the same subject are a few keystrokes away? A hopeful answer is “feelings,” which these cards invoke among the people who find them sacred, or cool. A more practical one, which is maybe more correct but not unrelated, is “money.”

The people passing through The National, the ones buying into breaks, submitting cards for professional grading, and the like, are dreaming of a big payday upon opening a card pack. You might not even see the windfall right away; some rookie card pulled out of a pack might balloon in value when its subject has a breakout season. That fantasy—it’s sort of investing, and sort of discovering a gold vein in your backyard—is why the convention center is flooded, and the superstructure within which the broader industry lives. There are other things at play—people looking to possess some living history, or using these objects as a way into some community or other, or transmuting deep feelings about sports into a financial gambit. All of this is in some way about money, but money itself is never about money. It’s about what someone values, and what card collectors and speculators value is sports.

Everyone I spoke to remarked on how Covid changed the industry. When I asked Joseph Robertson, a card dealer from Dallas, he moved his hand in a steady incline as he talked about prices through 2019. “And then Covid shot like steroids into sports cards,” he said. “Everybody stayed home, had stimulus checks, and it was in the news because it was getting popular.” His hand jutted up. “It just went straight up in 2020. Also, Kobe [Bryant] passing away made his stuff grow like tenfold or twentyfold. All these Kobes I was into for like four or five grand, they just turned into a $15,000-to-$100,000 product overnight.”

Ryan Johnson, a Columbus-based card dealer, told me about his counterintuitive Covid experience. “I bought the shop in 2019. In January of 2020, I sold some of my collection off. It was like, I can’t eat these cards, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, so I sold off a piece. I thought, nobody is going to be spending money on sports cards if they’re afraid of walking outside and dying. [Covid] forced us to go online to sell because the shop couldn’t be open. We had a really big presence online at the time with 20-25,000 Instagram followers, and that was big for cards at the time. We said let’s sell boxes, let’s do breaks [opening a box live], and we just did it on Instagram Live. It exploded. We went from one employee to six in a six-month period. If you told somebody the world was gonna shut down because of this crazy, unknown disease, and you weren’t gonna leave your house, you wouldn’t expect a hobby like sports cards,” which had traditionally been a face to face business done out of strip mall card shops and conventions, “to flourish. But it did.”

Covid took pre-existing trends in the industry towards streaming video and online purchases, and accelerated them. Some of the results of this will be familiar: selling boxes and singles on eBay, talking about collecting in Discords and on live streaming channels. But some of this move involves media you likely can’t imagine if you’re not already an enthusiast.

Let’s say you are a card collector with a normal amount of money. Your dream is to get a valuable card without buying it directly from a dealer, and so you try to get it by opening a pack—that route offers big money, big aura, big bragging rights, and as a bonus involves ripping packs, which scratches some Proustian collector-brain itch. The best way to do this is to buy a big-ass box of packs, which you open, one after another, “breaking” down the box into its component parts in the hope that you will come across some hot merch. One problem with this is that every other card collector has the same idea, and since the last sports card bubble burst back in the mid-90’s, publishers prioritize keeping supply tightly controlled. This makes big boxes of cards expensive enough that the cost exceeds anything a person with a non-investment grade quantity of money could reasonably spend.

Box-break streamers, who have investment grade money but also the powerful desire for attention shared by everyone else on the internet, have created a workaround. They buy those valuable boxes of cards, then auction off the rights to all 30 teams, one after another. Then, they open the box on camera and rip the packs, one by one, fingers framed in tight close up, audio lovingly rendered and mic’d for maximum material ASMR. They go through the cards one by one, alternating between chit-chatting about sports (or whatever) with the audience and gabbing in the chat, and getting juiced when they draw a big card for the guy who bought it.

This is the whole world of collecting in one media product. There’s the thrill of light gambling that comes with acquiring the team and sitting and waiting to see what product you get in the break. There’s the chit-chatty nature of dudes talkin’ sports, Remembering Guys™, socializing through the material of sports’ living history. There’s the thrill of acquiring something valuable and the disappointment of buying into a break and not getting anything.

Breakers, who work out of studios and card shops and condos across the country, are a potent multi-tool for the card industry. They are aggressive purchasers of products, driving up the prices for high end boxes so they have products to feed their streams. They market the product and the riches it can generate for enthusiasts vibing behind a computer or buying into a break. They tend to the social aspects of the product, a central thing in collecting—and, until recently, all commerce. For better or worse, it has come to represent the future of the hobby.

Jeff Holt, the President of Icon Auctions, a memorabilia consignor and auctioneer, sells high-end stuff to collectors across the country. He’s been in the industry for decades, since he was 21. Many people in this, like his father, are “passionate collectors. It’s in their homes, it’s on their walls, it’s what defines them.” Holt says a passionate collector is driven by a desire to acquire something, some collection of things. Once the chase concludes, they may or may not hold onto it. “My mentor in this business always told me [that] it’s a very incestuous business. You might sell something and five years later you’ll see it again in the market or something. I’ve sold many great things multiple times over. They are more like me. It’s like climbing a mountain. It would be great to own these 30 things, they buy those 30 things and now, their mission’s complete.

“Thirty to 40 percent of people in this, they’re investors. They’re intrigued by the stuff, they like it but… listen, you can go buy stocks on your Fidelity app and own great companies, but all you have to show for it is your app. But if you have a lot of disposable income, you see this crazy stuff—things that athletes wore, guitars that rock stars played—and if you look at the trends in value on this stuff, it just goes up and up and up over time. Not only can you put your money into that, but there’s a sexy element to it, where you can put it in your office, up in your house, and show it off to people.”

That principle undergirds the obscene prices you see on cards. Fond memories of Michael Jordan annihilating cigars and tequila while chewing out Rip Hamilton as a 40-year-old in a Wizards jersey might make this card worth $50 or $100. It is very funny that the greatest basketball player who ever lived wore a stupid blue jersey for a bottom-feeding franchise while turning his astringent personality on annihilating himself instead of his opponents; maybe it’s worth commemorating if you have some treasured memory of him being really mean to Tyrone Nesby. But the thing that makes this card sell for $400 is mostly the possibility that, someday, it could be worth more. That price reflects, more than anything else, the speculative belief that someday the card might be worth $1000, or just that it will ride a gentle upward trajectory under its own steam.

The most common objects for sale in the main hall aside from sports cards and merchandise were Pokémon cards. If you can get past the nerd/jock dichotomy, those two interests share some deeper, stranger similarities. They both involve possessions over something intangible: in sports, your connection to teams and players and games you’re not actually playing in; in Pokemon, your connection to various little guys who don’t really exist. Collectors manifest intangible feelings into an object, a card or a print or a stuffed animal or whatever, and value those feelings enough to pay out the nose for a single card, or to take a chance on a pack that may or may not make that dream realer.

Since I started doing research for this piece, my Instagram feed has become inundated by videos about card collecting. One series of videos, “Should I Open It, Or Should I Keep It Sealed?” captivates me. In these videos, the host will go to a card show and buy a pack of Pokemon cards for more money than a normal person probably would. Like, $400 for older stuff, $200 for stuff from the last decade. He will spell out what the most valuable cards in the pack might be: often some form of Charizard, the creature affixed to all of the most valuable Pokemon cards. He will say “hey, should I open it, or should I keep it sealed?” This is where I say, generally not out loud, “clearly you should open it, because it’s not serving a function as a pack of something.” The reason you buy a pack of cards is to open the pack and possess the cards, right?

And then he proceeds to open the pack, and goes through the cards one by one, telling the audience how much each little cardboard slip is worth. The first cards usually add up to like… two dollars in total value, because they’re just, you know, crap. Then he sits on the second to last card for a second, and reveals the final card. Something like 90 percent of the time, it’s nothing special. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him draw something that justified the base price of the pack. The answer, repeated implicitly, over and over and over, is Keep It Sealed. The known quantity is generally a disappointment; the opportunity, the shape and sensation of it, is at least something you can sell.

If this sounds like gambling, it’s because it pretty much is. Having reported this right after I did a survey of sports gambling addiction, it was hard not to notice where the two pursuits rhyme. There’s the physical feeling of ripping the pack, the leap into the unknown, disappointment existing alongside the rush of having taken the risk. This relationship is known, and it clearly unnerves the people who work in a youth-associated hobby—one person I spoke to mentioned gambling unprompted, and then quickly retracted, disconcerted with the idea of being attached to this sentiment.

The idea of a child collecting baseball cards feels gauzy, almost nostalgic; the reality, at The National, was far stranger. The basement of the I-X Center was home to an ad-hoc VIP section for people who bought more expensive passes. On the escalator down to this area, I saw kids sitting at tables with hard-cased cards sitting in front of them, laying out fucking stacks of cash—wheeling, dealing, trucking around merchandise in big-ass bulletproof cases. This was something like the emotional opposite of the feeling you get watching a child at play. The kids, for their part, seem mostly to have seen it as a choice they made; instead of frolicing in a field, they opted into the slime and slog of commerce.

Ryan Johnson, the aforementioned dealer who also creates family-friendly video content about buying, selling and collecting cards, has been selling and trading cards since he was 13. I asked him if he saw himself in these kids strolling the floor with bulletproof cases. “In a sense,” he said. “A lot of kids now are far more developed than I was at that age. Access to a more developed internet, more tools for cards. I didn’t have anybody back in the day to learn from in this space. There wasn’t content around sports cards, it wasn’t a cool thing. That’s why I make content now, to be the person I didn’t have when I was a kid.”

I asked Johnson what he thinks draws the kids he interacts with to The Hobby. “I think companionship is often pretty big,” he replied. “We see a lot of kids collecting with their friends, with their dads. It’s a thing to do with other people. I think the other piece of it is entrepreneurial. If I can buy a card for five and sell it for ten, you can teach a kid about financial literacy and money and negotiation.”

“Kids like to be on the grind,” I said.

“Yeah, sure. That’s what I was. We don’t learn that in school. They don’t teach you how to negotiate.”

He’s right: school really doesn’t spend a lot of time teaching people about the actual function of the economy, the wheeling and dealing and bullshit out of which markets are made. Economics as a discipline is more concerned with grand abstractions than material analysis; the day-to-day market itself is mostly built on salesmanship and wild guessing. You could say this seems like a way for kids to get involved in gambling, but the truth seems at once more benign and more troubling: they’re getting involved in asset trading, which is the gambling around which the global economy is built.

Cards have this quality that most investments have: the unknown, the dream of something wild paying out until you weep golden teams, that transcends any more tangible thing. The pack is a POTENTIAL CHARIZARD or POTENTIAL WEMBY until it’s open. Then it’s just another Bidoof, another Anfernee Simons. A tech company that seems like it could dominate the world is hot, and valuable for that heat. A company that turns a consistent profit, year after year, though, is something that will never grow—a dud that sits on your shelf and takes up space.

The biggest time for sports card collectors is the preseason. The biggest prices in a common streaming card break are not last year’s title winners, usually, but the team that drafted first and is bringing the hottest rookie stock on hand. A shot at Caleb Williams or Zaccharie Risacher, and the wildest dreams their futures represent, is more enticing than yet another piece of the Kevin Durant pie. Nevermind how many players flame out early, get injured, get dragooned into an intractable situation that eats away their prime. In that moment of pure notional potential they are pure, and beautiful, and a must-have. They could be anything.

Society has a great deal riding on the idea of investing as a sober, clinical practice; the stock market has to reflect some identifiable reality for it to mean anything. By those standards, what happens at these card shows doesn’t really count, because these are just slips of cardboard with pictures printed on them. This belief is horseshit. All markets are bizarre, irrational things driven by pathologies: stock prices are set behind insane projects about a company dominating American life in ten years, crypto is a neverending shell game predicated on a real or professed minority belief in the imminent collapse of fiat currency, real estate is just some rich guys betting they can get an area rezoned.

***

John Statmuller, a dealer from Little Rock, Arkansas, has been collecting since the 1970’s. His mother gave him 1975 Topps packs to encourage him to practice the piano. He can’t play the piano, but he does still have those cards, and has been selling on and off since the ’90’s. I asked him how the internet has changed the hobby and expected him to talk about marketing or social reach. His answer was more practical: “I used to hate when the grading came out in the ’90’s. Why pay the card companies to grade cards? But once I got back into it and you try to sell cards on eBay that aren’t graded, it’s a little tougher. That made it a little more of a commodity, where people knew what a PSA 5 was gonna look like and it didn’t get any returns.”

Once, valuation was pretty informal: card shop guys were the experts, Beckett price guides spelled out board outlines for value, and values were highly dependent on the interaction between dealer and buyer. Paradoxically or not the internet, the greatest tool for scamming that has ever existed, brought about a more standardized approach. Centralized grading companies have gone from fringe operators to an essential cog in the machine.

I asked Ryan Hogue, the CEO of PSA, the industry leader in card grading, how his company would grade, for instance, an autographed Sandy Koufax card. “The autograph makes it a little more complicated,” he said, before taking me through the process. A customer submits the card through PSA’s website or app; they will choose a service level, generally based on turnaround time and the estimated value of the card. The client then sends the item to PSA, generally through the mail. (PSA does on-site grading from a makeshift office PSA sets up at The National every year, for anyone who would rather not spend a day or two worrying that their obscenely valuable Sandy Koufax card got lost in the mail.)

The card is identified, labeled and imaged with a DSLR camera; a scanner is too invasive. Then it goes off to human graders. My imaginary Koufax card would go off to the autograph team, which determines if the autograph is real through the use of exemplar samples. “Some of our autograph authenticators have been doing it for 40 years,” Hogue told me. “They know what a real one looks like, what a fake one is. They can also determine if it’s a printed signature or if it’s wet ink, if it’s a real signature.” From here, the card is sent to the card grading department, who rate the condition of the surface, the edges, the corners, and the centering—it’s a measurement of the printing quality: off center cards were subject to printing errors—on a scale of one to ten. The card is subjected to a counterfeit check, and any inconsistencies that might suggest counterfeiting are pointed out and labeled for the submitter.

“The biggest thing with grading is you have to be consistent, you have to be repetitive.” Matt Quinn, a VP at CCC Trading Cards, a grading company who specializes in rare money and TCGs, tells me. “A lot of people will burn themselves out when they’re grading cards. You’re sitting there grading a hundred cards a day, two hundred cards a day, finding that line and keeping that line consistent can be very challenging. You have to make sure that you can repeat the process you do, day in and day out.” I ask if tedium can be an issue. “It is. It’s challenging to know if this is where a line is, is that where a line is. But you see a lot of cool stuff.”

“Once it goes through the grading room, it goes to the next process, which is sealing,” Hogue continued. The card gets encapsulated, placed in a little plastic box with a label on top that tells you all the pertinent information from the grading process. “It comes back into the grading room, they verify the card again, making sure the grade matches what’s on the label. If there’s any changes that need to happen it gets re-encapsulated with a new grade. Then it goes to another process we call ‘Verification two,’ where we give customers the choice between getting the card shipped to them, selling the card on eBay, or sending the card to the PSA Vault.”

“The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” That is Walter Benjamin, in his 1940 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He was writing about an original work of art, a painting or a sculpture that you might see on a given Sunday afternoon at the museum. Reels of a film or photographs, mass distributed by their very nature, lacked “the historical testimony [that] rests on the authenticity” of a work of art, painted by hand and transferred from artist to dealer to buyer to estate to auction house to owner to museum. That trail, and the capital produced along it over the years, gives the objects we see in the museum an “aura” that a mass-produced piece of work could not attain.

What Benjamin didn’t know or couldn’t understand from the vantage point of 1940 was that this process, where verification and selling and reselling created aura in an “authentic” object, was not or would not always be limited to the “original work” produced by the hand of the artist. That 35mm print is a valued aesthetic property to film geeks, for instance, even as digital transfers get better and better. A film negative is a loaded, special object compared to its digital counterpart. It’s a real thing.

The sports trading card, throwaway objects once packed away in cigarette boxes, have attained an aura and value beyond the wildest imagination of the companies who manufactured them. This is not just a common understanding or shared delusion between everyone that a 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card is valuable simply by dint of its existence, or even because of Mantle’s legend. It happens because of the appraisal processes that allow a manufactured product to attain the rarified aura that was once limited to original works of art. Objects with that aura are expensive, and have the potential to get more expensive as the years go on.

“There’s some people who hate graded cards,” says Statmuller. “It adds more to the cost, it adds more weight.” I ask which he would rather own, a card graded and locked in lucite or one that he can touch and, in so touching, potentially diminish in value. He laughs, then thinks for a second. John told me he has an extensive collection of the cards from his youth. A thousand or so were graded, commoditized in the proper way, given meaning by process. But another 10,000 or so are just vibing in boxes, assigned meaning only by John’s personal relationship to them. A personal aura.

I went into this trying to figure it out, about what exactly makes all this cardboard worth anything to anyone. As an aggregate, I understood—it’s like anything else, and the market-making and speculation and notions of authenticity were familiar. The big hall filled with dealers and graders and corporations, and the floating world money built within it, were engaged in work that I recognized.

But that guy at the beginning, flipping through the shit box, he was something different. The building is made from money, as buildings tend to be, but the people inside are not. In asking people about why they collected, what they were rooting around for, why they sought to build their collections, I didn’t get any stable or specific answer that pointed toward some universal reason. Instead there were thousands of sui generis and specific reasons—ideas about value, sentiment, sports, whatever.

“I’m a psycho,” one collector told me. This was Darren Rovell, a sports business reporter of note and the founder of cllct, a website that covers the hobby; he is pretty upfront about why he collects. Rovell attends The National every year with a collection of stuff he’s acquired over the years in tow. His traveling collection includes signatures from George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr; a check Jerry Garcia wrote for glasses; a check Walt Disney wrote to the IRS; an Apollo 8 press pass; Jack Ruby’s telephone bill; a ticket from the first Beatles show; Amelia Airheart paying for nose surgery; a ticket from the first ferris wheel; an American Express card signed by Tiger Woods from a commercial Tiger did for them; Jackie Robinson’s rent check from when he broke the color barrier; a ticket from the NBA Finals game that was interrupted by OJ’s white Bronco chase; one of the dollar bills that DB Cooper took. There’s also a bunch of Billy Joel stuff.

“I collected baseball cards and I got… frustrated by the population of a lot of these things,” he told me. “So I got obsessed with collecting one-of-one stuff. It allowed me to sleep at night because I didn’t have to worry about what other people were collecting. If you have one-of-one, you don’t have to worry about what another guy has.”

“I just love history, and I like the idea that I could be tied to the stories. Some of it is, when I buy something…” Rovell pauses a second to tell a potential customer how much he is willing to let something on the table go for, then picks up his train of thought. “I basically am like, amortizing the cost into my story. Once I tell the story enough, I let it go.”

“I think the hunt is always more fun,” says Grant LaFontane, Whatnot’s CEO. Grant taught himself to program by building a bot to farm loot in Diablo II, a game that exhibits a purity of collector’s spirit. “I have a really cool shelf in my office,” he tells me, “Sort of like my trophy case. It’s the hunt for the next thing, trying to make my trophy case perfect.” I ask him if he sells. Yes, he says. When? “When it doesn’t fit on my trophy case. Because there’s only so much room.” Could the trophy case ever be perfect? “No,” he replies, a little sheepishly. “Things always change.”

Scott Bleznick, a streamer for Blez Sports Cards, told me that he and his brothers, who are his partners in the business, “just love the NBA, love basketball. It’s all we used to do in the backyard, just play basketball. We just loved opening the cards. Our parents took us to the local card shop when we were young, it’s just a big part of our lives.” Why cards specifically? “It’s just exciting, opening the packs, because you don’t know what’s inside. There’s always something to chase. A new rookie card, an autograph card, pieces of the jersey in the card, it’s just a fun feeling, opening the packs.”

“I collect antique bank notes, still, and Magic: The Gathering cards,” Matt Quinn tells me. Why? “Well, Magic cards, it’s nostalgia. That’s why anyone collects, really. You see this market, right here, with trading cards in particular, and the average group of people who collect trading cards, they haven’t even come close to their prime income years yet. Once people hit that mid-50’s cycle, when they start hitting their peak income years, that’s when they can buy those things they couldn’t get as kids. You didn’t have that first edition Charizard as a kid? Well, now you have some extra coin in your pocket. Buy your Charizard.”

A connection to history, a never ending hunt for curatorial perfection, the thrill of tearing packs, the ability to recover some trace of childhood from a purchase—the answers were varied, but familiar. Even those who made collecting their business had an emotional component to that decision. Ryan Johnson told me he switched over to sports cards when someone he went to high school with went pro; B.A. Murray, 52-year National veteran, told me he figured out really early, in childhood, that his cards might be worth something sooner or later. The only thing that seemed to unite anyone when confronted with the question of “why” was that it was a nice social scene, a good way to vibe with people, a half-sacred ritual of Remembering Guys that never ends.

Only one guy seemed to fall into a niche I really understood. On my way out of the convention center, I ran into Andy Friedman, a fine artist who was here signing a lovely set of baseball cards he draws and paints for Topps. I had spoken to Andy earlier about some other stuff on the record, but this time we were just sort of chatting before I headed home.

Andy told me that when he works these shows, he tries to get old cards that look like shit—poorly graded cardboard warriors who have been in bicycle spokes. He’s not averse to buying a ’52 Mantle, but he’d prefer one with the marks of human interaction on it, some visible story hinting at their previous, pre-commodity life. To Andy, this was where aura lived, in the lines created by human experience. This made sense to me.

B.A. Murray and the guys who decided on a common convention four decades ago, the guys flipping through little packs, the people standing chatting with other guys around the country about sports miscellany and trading and selling, the people buying into breaks online—they’re all trying to find a way into something, to connect to the emotion that sports creates. They are looking for something tangible that will remind them of something intangible, of familial connections, or a sense of place, or the aesthetic beauty of the games. The cruddy cards in the flipping boxes, the stilled tide of ungraded nonsense pumped through a printer 30 years ago with no particular destination in mind, makes for a strange vessel for this. But it works, because even this tossed-off chum somehow makes those feelings into something you can touch. Sometimes the cardboard’s aura gives it a value that translates into a price; sometimes it’s just one person’s gold, buried but findable in an ocean of material.