ESPN takes a look at the recent resurgence of sports cards.
from espn.com:
The Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle is a well-known object of envy in the world of sports card collecting, selling for nearly $3 million in 2018.
IN AN ANONYMOUS office complex amid the Meadowland sprawl of northern New Jersey, Rick Probstein tears through a standing vault in search of his most prized treasure.
With wire-rim glasses and incandescent red hair, Probstein oversees his dimly lit five-room unit like Richard Branson on "MTV Cribs." He's earned it. EBay's preeminent sports memorabilia proprietor reportedly racked up $50 million in global sales last year.
It's a month before the coronavirus will upend civilization, and Probstein is in a collector's paradise: One room spills over with racks of signed jerseys being prepped for shipping; in another, two dozen employees, sardined at workstations, painstakingly monitor auctions; in Probstein's office, columns of cards on folding tables test gravity with mini helmets littering his desk. Atop the vault sits a Babe Ruth autographed baseball, acknowledged with a halfhearted nod as Probstein rummages below.
Probstein retrieves from the vault plywood-thick cards, autographed and embedded with game-used jersey swatches -- one of them, a LeBron-Jordan dual patch autograph, will soon fetch $35,000 - and two graded 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles.
The Mantles are the showstoppers. In 2018, one went for almost $3 million at auction. Two could buy a private island.
But vintage cards yielding top dollar is nothing new. What is new and hard to fathom: Over the past half-decade, even now amid a pandemic that's decimated the American economy, contemporary sports cards have attracted gargantuan sums from high-rolling investors. And somehow, during a year that included the sharpest GDP quarterly contraction in American history, card sales have demolished all-time records, dumbfounding investors and collectors alike.
Full story:
Sports cards are back in a big way -- pandemic, recession and all