If You Build It, They Will Come

By now you've probably heard the news that Twitter is about to be bought out by Elon Musk.  Regardless of your feeling about him, this has the potential to upend how Twitter is used in the hobby, and this has many people scared.  With Elon in charge, we don't know if the man child will decide to add 69 to the end of everyone's handles for fun, or if the man who built Tesla will have some good ideas for the platform.  I have opinions, mostly centered around the idea that being incredibly successful in one realm doesn't always translate to other realms (see Steve Balmer's Clippers, Oprah's TV channel, Isaiah Thomas as a coach, etc.)  There is a conversation to be had about the balance between free speech within a private companies digital space vs. the safety of those effected by said free speech, but I won't start that here. For now I will remain hopeful. I've had this post percolating in my head for a bit, and the Twitter news made me want to get it down...

 When I was a young kid, I along with everyone I knew depended on two sources for how much a card was worth.  How much a dealer was selling a card for was one way, but the main way was to look up that card in Beckett.  Beckett listed out the notable cards in every set and set a value for them.  You'd grab every issue and see if the cards you owned had that coveted up arrow indicating that the card had gone up from the previous issue.  How much?  You'd have to do that research on your own. I have been reliant to those numbers for years.  Almost more now, even though I know that the economics behind it is bunk.  The value of a card is not what a magazine says it is, but what you can get for it.  However, it does help out a guy who can't possible keep up with everything in the hobby just to have a baseline. Back in 1996, I came across a stack of Steve McNair rookie cards.  Fifty, I think, and the dealer offered them to me for a quarter each...

 With the news last week that Fanatics was going to be taking over the sports card scene in a few years, everyone jumped online with their reactions.  My reaction at the time was similar to what I was seeing from a majority of people.  Sadness over the end of an era, worry that change will make things worse, and anger that money is at the root of this all. The most positive reactions to the news was, "Let's wait and see."  I didn't see anyone posting why they thought that Fanatics was going to be good (other than a couple notes on distribution).  I saw a few happy posts that weren't pro Fanatics, rather just reveling in the old power structure in the #thehobby crashing down. You'd think all this sadness would be accompanied by a bunch of posts reminiscing about Topps, but even the scorned lover of baseball was the target of our dismay.  Complaints about distribution, cost, poor design, overuse of vintage designs, and over-reliance on the same players every ...