PHOENIX – Today’s sports card market looks different than it did during its inception, when cards were tucked into cigarette packs.
Many card shops host events for the community. In late February, Rip Valley card and memorabilia shop hosted Topps Hobby Rip Night, which featured rip cards, the opportunity to mingle and a collection of athletes, including Texas Rangers outfielder Wyatt Langford and infielder Josh Jung, Cincinnati Reds pitchers Rhett Lowder and Chase Burns.
Young collectors worked their way around the room, looking for their favorite cards.
“Brewers,” Leo Petrangelo said. “Brice Turang is my favorite on the Brewers.”
Rip Valley, which opened just over two years ago in Downtown Phoenix, is among many shops that popped up after the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were looking in new directions for things to do and places to spend their money. In fact, seven of the 10 most expensive sports card sales happened between 2020 and 2022. The most expensive was a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle that sold for $12.6 million in August of 2022. Although the market peaked in 2022, it remains strong.
Shops including Rip City offer a variety of products, from single packs of cards priced as low as 10 cents, smaller blaster boxes, hobby boxes, top loaders to protect cards and even memorabilia such as jerseys and hats. Some fans just come to hang out or catch a game on one of their TVs.
The sports card market started as a way for companies, mainly tobacco, to market their products. Beginning in the late 1800s, these companies would insert cards of baseball players, national flags, wild animals and a variety of other figures in their cigarette packs.
These days, the value of a card is influenced by the condition it is in. Collectors also look for numbered cards, which means the life of the card had a short print run.
Many of today’s cards, including one of Topps’ main products, Topps Chrome, feature different color cards that correspond to a print run.
The lower the number, the more valuable the card is, since fewer of them exist. Another thing that can make a card more valuable is the number of the card matching the player’s jersey number or the color of the card being a “color match,” meaning it matches the color of that player’s team.
While the look of the sports card market has changed, the passion of its fans hasn’t.
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