Barkley’s Card Prices Jump. Why Don’t Baseball Cards Work the Same Way?
Saquon Barkley was the number one player in fantasy football on Sunday and his cards have taken a nice jump. Actually, his cards have downright exploded since signing with the Eagles rising almost 40% according to his Card Ladder Player Index. That’s how the market is supposed to work. Player does good. Card goes up. It’s great. Love to see it. The thing that I keep coming back to though is if Barkley were a comparable baseball player there’s no way his cards would go up.
Football and basketball markets reward the accomplishments of semi-stars and lower-tier stars through higher card prices in a way that the baseball market does not. The question then is what gives? Why does every baseball collector know that Ketel Marte, Anthony Santander, and Jurickson Profar will never have much hobby value? More importantly, why does that fact mean that they avoid them even during times of great play?
The HOF
Long-term card value is tied to making the HOF in all leagues. It’s hard to find many players with decent card value who aren’t in the HOF without a good reason. Baseball collectors know this and all of their buying choices reflect this. Step off the HOF path and your cards are now $1 box fodder.
Football and Basketball markets also emphasize the HOF path; however, when a player is hot, collectors are willing to ignore that fact for a time. It’s all about the narrative for these markets. Even though everyone knows how the story ends for Barkley (way outside the HOF), as long as he’s in the part of the narrative where he is playing well his cards will continue to go up.
So why does the narrative matter so much for basketball and football and not baseball? One answer is that baseball has always been a numbers game and so the numbers actually are the narrative. Baseball fans know how Santander's number will end up. For Barkley, the narrative is a new team and a Super Bowl quest and that’s all football collectors care about. Santander’s on his own quest for a ring, but baseball fans are numbers, numbers, numbers.
So Many Games
Another reason for this is that baseball has games constantly. It’s hard for narratives to develop when there are new games every day. Football allows for everyone to step back and talk about Barkley’s brilliance for a week. If Santander has a three-homerun game, it gets forgotten about by the next day. It is harder for baseball fans to notice hot stretches during the season because of how stats are presented as well. A player’s OPS jumping 50 points in August means they are on a hot streak, but it is hard to notice. 120 yards and three touchdowns in Week 12 is pretty obvious and self-explanatory.
Goofus or Gallant?
It’s worth asking if baseball collectors are smarter. I think the answer there is no and I’m sure we all know (or are) dunderheads who are baseball first. Baseball collectors have lost millions on Wander Franco and Fernando Tatis and countless others in the past few years. There is plenty of doofish behavior to mean we can’t just call baseball collectors geniuses and be done with it.
That said, the baseball market was the most rational during the pandemic boom (don’t celebrate too much the baseball market was bonkers too) and bounced back the strongest because of that. I’ve always found baseball sellers to have the tightest windows of prices they’ll accept which to me is because they are most aware of their prices. I did previously find that the football and basketball markets moved fairly closely with Bitcoin prices and baseball did not so I do think there is some different decision-making going on.
Hope for Growth
Personally, I’d love it if baseball semi-stars started getting more attention. Much is made of Fanatics wanting to 10x the hobby. I’ve long hoped that some of the growth would be more than just adding in more collectors who act exactly like the current crop. I hope that Fanatics can get baseball collectors to embrace guys like Santander or even guys like Trae Turner, Manny Machado, and Teoscar Hernandez.
Just as getting football collectors to embrace non-quarterbacks more should be a goal for growth, getting baseball collectors to collect players not on the clear path to the HOF would go a long way in growing the baseball market.