Baseball’s spring season revives lifetime investment

Global Business

Baseball's spring season revives lifetime investment

For many, opening day of the Major League Baseball season is a chance to resume a favorite hobby, collecting baseball cards.

But for a few collectors it’s more of an investment. CGTN’s Hendrik Sybrandy reports.

For most baseball fans, each new season always offers lots of promise.

Darrin Duber-Smith of Arvada, Colorado hopes this is the year he completes another set of baseball cards from the 1950’s or 1960’s. He’s been collecting these individual player cards for over 40 years now.

His collection, which fills a closet at his home, goes all the way to 1952, when baseball trading cards company, Topps produced its first cards.

Baseball card collecting took off in America before sports became the omnipresent, multi-billion dollar industry it is today.

“Like when I was a youngster in the 60’s, it was kind of a social thing,” Bill’s Sports Collectibles Owner Bill Vizas said. “Even kids that weren’t baseball fans collected baseball cards cause everybody in my neighborhood collected baseball cards.”

In the 1980’s, card companies, responding to increased demand, ramped up their supply of these cards. Their value dropped dramatically.

“All of a sudden we had what you call suits just coming in and buying them by the case and putting them in their basement or garage thinking that today they’d be worth tons of money,” said Vizas.

Today, baseball cards make up a relatively small part of Bill’s Sports Collectibles’ business. In this digital era, there are other ways to find the information on the back of each card.