The Baseball Card Bubble Can Tell You A Surprising Amount About How Markets Work

Joe Weisenthal (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

So Tracy, we continue with our bubble series this week.

Tracy Alloway (0:21)

Bubbles.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

Bubbles are just the best, aren't they?

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Yeah, they are. And what's amazing is there are so many of them.

Joe Weisenthal (0:28)

Should we just stop doing other non-bubble episodes and just do bubbles from here on out? Because we probably could, couldn't we?

Tracy Alloway (0:35)

I would be into that. Plus, you know, new bubbles are being made every day.

Joe Weisenthal (0:39)

Yeah, exactly. I think we should seriously consider just doing until we've really run out of bubbles and that will be never.

But today, I'm particularly excited because we're going to be talking about a bubble in which I was an active and enthusiastic participant.

Tracy Alloway (0:57)

Okay, wait. I know you dabbled in trading tech stocks in the late 1990s and that of course was a huge bubble. Is it that or is it?

Joe Weisenthal (1:06)

No, it's not tech stocks. So I guess now that I think about it, I guess I have a personality that's sort of drawn to riding bubbles up and then all the way down. But no, it's not tech stocks. Do you want to take a guess?

Tracy Alloway (1:17)

It's not beanie bubbles, is it? No. It's beanie bubbles, beanie babies.

Joe Weisenthal (1:21)

That one I was not into. I'll give you a hint.

I was a 12 year old boy when I was into it in the early nineties.

Tracy Alloway (1:29)

I'm really, I'm trying to figure out whether or not you would have been like trading, I don't know, emerging market debt during the Asian financial crisis or something.

Joe Weisenthal (1:42)

No, I was not trading Mexican bonds before their bailout or anything like that. Today, we're going to be talking about the baseball card bubble in the early nineties, like many other 12, 13 year old boys. I got super into baseball cards, both the ones that were coming out and the historical ones.

And maybe if you weren't involved in it, you didn't remember this, but there was a massive surge in interest for a few years. I think it sort of ended in like the mid to late nineties. People were paying all kinds of money for them, and then it sort of just disappeared and people stopped doing it.

Tracy Alloway (2:20)

Joe, I have to say, I was never into baseball cards, but I'm going to admit something to you really embarrassing right now, which is I used to be into Magic the Gathering, and there was a lot of card collecting in that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:33)

I suspect that there's some similarities, and I think you'll find in our episode that there's a lot of really interesting finance lessons that this bubble has to teach about other bubbles.

Tracy Alloway (2:45)

Well, it sounds very cool. Who are we talking to?

Joe Weisenthal (2:48)

Today, we're going to be talking to Dave Jamieson. He is the author of Mint Condition, How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, and he is a labor reporter at the Huffington Post. Let's bring them in.

Dave, thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the Odd Lots Podcast.

Dave Jamieson (3:15)

Hey guys, thanks a lot for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:17)

First of all, why did you write a book about the baseball card bubble? We'll get into what it was, but I'm curious what drew you to this story. Were you a baseball card collector at the time?

Dave Jamieson (3:29)

Well, Joe, like you, I am a man of a certain age, we can say. Like yourself, I don't know what year you were born in. I was born in 1978, and so I was 12 years old in 1990, and I was there for the same baseball card frenzy that you were. And this was a personal obsession of mine, I would say from age seven to about 13

And all my friends were crazy for it too. And then for whatever reason, around age 13 or 14, it disappeared from my life.

And my interest was rekindled when I was around getting close to 30 years old, and my parents were selling the house I grew up in. And my mom said, you've got to come get these baseball cards out of the closet because it's full of them. And so that sort of sent me down this rabbit hole of, oh yeah, whatever happened to baseball cards?

Joe Weisenthal (4:23)

So your story is very similar to mine. I mean, I didn't write a book about it or have it get rekindled, but I was born in 1980 So just two years after you, so all the years line up.