[USML Announce] Slate Article: Junior Mint

Fri May 30 16:23:54 EDT 2008

Brad Lee Badfinger has sent you an article from Slate Magazine
<http://www.slate.com> .

any of you young folks recall when he 1st arrived...any of you with his
rookie card? 

 <http://letters.slate.com/W0RH020B9669EDE063B3630DEEC1A0> 

sports nut
 <http://letters.slate.com/W0RH0208EC89FCFB9593E30D20DEA0> 

Junior Mint
The enduring popularity (and ubiquity) of the 1989 Upper Deck Ken
Griffey Jr. card.
By Darren Rovell
Posted Thursday, May 29, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET

The most famous card in the history of pictures on cardboard is the T206
Honus Wagner <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T206_Honus_Wagner> , so rare
that one of them sold for more than $2 million last year. The most
well-known card of the modern era is the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey
Jr., the No. 1 card in the company's inaugural set. As Griffey nears the
600-home-run landmark, sales of the Upper Deck No. 1 are as brisk as
always, with buyers snapping up a couple of dozen every day on eBay at
prices ranging from $15 to $300. These two cards, the bookends of the
collecting phenomenon, are exact opposites. The Wagner is the white
whale of the card trade
<http://www.amazon.com/Card-Collectors-Historys-Desired-Baseball/dp/0061
123927> : elusive, highly coveted, and known to drive men to madness.
The Griffey is the childhood lust object that everyone's mother saved,
arguably the most popular, most widely held baseball card of all time.

When Griffey welcomed collectors to the very first Upper Deck set,
investment was just about to trump fun in the card world. Kids had
started putting their collections in plastic sheets and hard cases
rather than bicycle spokes and shoe boxes, and investors would
cross-check every card picked from a pack against the latest issue of
Beckett's price guide. It was in this environment that Upper Deck
launched in 1989 as the first premium baseball card, protected from the
threat of counterfeiting with a hologram on each card, protected from
the stain of the wax pack thanks to its unprecedented foil wrappers.
There was no gum included, and packs cost an industry-high $1. Baseball
cards were serious business.

The Griffey card was the perfect piece of memorabilia at the perfect
time. The number the card was given only furthered the prospect of his
cardboard IPO. Junior was chosen to be card No. 1 by an Upper Deck
employee named Tom Geideman, a college student known for his keen eye
for talent. Geideman earned his rep by consistently clueing in the
founders of The Upper Deck, the card shop where the business was
hatched, on which players would be future stars. Geideman took the task
of naming the player for the first card very seriously. Using an issue
of Baseball America as his guide, Geideman knew that card No. 1 would
belong to Gregg Jefferies, Sandy Alomar Jr., Gary Sheffield, or a
long-shot candidate, the phenom they called "The Kid." It's probably the
most thinking Geideman ever did compiling a checklist, save for the 1992
Upper Deck set when he assigned numbers that ended in 69 to players with
porn-star-sounding names. (Dick Schofield at No. 269, Heathcliff Slocumb
at No. 569, and Dickie Thon at No. 769.)

Despite the fact that Griffey had yet to crack the majors, Geideman had
the confidence that the top pick in the 1987 draft would live up to his
pedigree. It goes without saying that this was a genius selection. You
could imagine how the people at Topps felt when Junior became an instant
superstar?and they hadn't even included him in their 792-card set.

>From the very beginning, card buffs saw the Upper Deck No. 1 as not just
a collectible, but as an investment. Baseball card fans, who had once
traded away duplicate cards in a quest to compile a complete set,
started hoarding as many Griffeys as they could. Collectors' hands would
shake when they saw Griffey's face in their pack, confident that this
card would be the key to financing a college education.

But the truth was that even though Upper Deck printed fewer cards than
its contemporaries?Donruss, Fleer, Topps, and Score?in this case, supply
came close to meeting demand. Today, many people face the reality of
unloading their Griffeys at a heavy discount on eBay. On May 4, for
example, you could find two people selling two separate lots of 11 Upper
Deck card No. 1s. One guy was selling a lot of 26, which eventually went
for $760. 

It comes as no surprise that the Griffey card is the most-graded piece
of cardboard in the history of the hobby. (Card grading
<http://www.psacard.com/grading/grading_standards.chtml> , if you're
unaware, is done by services that slap a card in between plastic and
evaluate exactly how pristine it really is.) Professional Sports
Authenticator has graded 51,800 Griffeys, while Beckett has graded about
25,400. (PSA's second-place card is the 1985 Topps Mark McGwire
<http://www.checkoutmycards.com/CardImages/Cards/020/932/04F.jpg>
Olympic rookie card, with 46,000 grades. Beckett's No. 2 is the 2001
Upper Deck Tiger Woods
<http://www.homeruncards.com/imagesrc/tiger-woods.jpg>  card, which has
been graded about 21,500 times.)

A Griffey that was graded a perfect 10 once sold for north of $1,000.
Now it would go for closer to $275. "Raw," ungraded Griffeys sell for
$15 to $50. (By comparison, Donruss and Fleer versions of the Griffey
rookie, from graded to ungraded, usually range in price from $1 to $20.)

Despite Griffey's illustrious career?some might call it disappointing
relative to all the hype?it's amazing that the card could even command a
couple hundred bucks, given how common it is and how many of them seem
to be in great condition.

More than 1 million Griffey cards were printed. In Upper Deck's original
mailing to dealers, the company said it would sell 65,000 cases of card
packs. With 20 boxes in a case, 520 cards in a box, and 700 different
cards in the set, there would be about 965,000 of each card produced for
the boxes. Combine that number with the amount of Griffeys in the untold
number of "factory sets," and you'd have your production run.

Given the number of Griffey cards in circulation, there have long been
rumors of an illicit reason for the card's ubiquity. Upper Deck, the
legend goes, knew that printing the cards was just like printing money.
As such, there was a sheet the company could run with 100 Griffey cards
on it, instead of the standard sheet that had just one Griffey in the
top corner along with 99 pictures of other players.

"If that existed, I never saw it," says Buzz Rasmussen, Upper Deck's
plant manager at the time. Rob Veres of Burbank Sportscards
<http://www.beckett.com/store/bcs/> , a memorabilia dealership with a
warehouse of 30 million cards, says that if Griffeys were produced in
greater quantity than other cards, he would've expected to come across
larger collections of the card.

If there was no funny business, why are the Griffey cards so abundant?
The most natural explanation is that more were saved. Figure that about
95 percent of Frank DiPinos, Henry Cottos, and Steve Lombardozzis have
hit the garbage can, while a huge percentage of the Griffeys have
survived. Some dealers also swore to me that, although Upper Deck claims
its packs were sequenced randomly, there was in fact a predictable
pattern in the company's boxes that became valuable to learn. Therefore,
the unopened Upper Deck packs that remain are less likely to have
Griffey cards stashed inside them. 

There's one more reason for the Griffey profusion. While the card might
not have received an extra production run, there was extra attention
paid to its condition coming out of packs and factory sets. Because the
Griffey was card No. 1, it resided in the upper-left-hand corner of the
printing sheet. It was therefore more susceptible to miscuts and corner
bends. Being the first card in the factory set also turned some of the
Griffeys blue, the color of the box.

Card collectors and dealers who received less-than-perfect Griffeys
would write in to complain to Upper Deck. The nascent company?surely
understanding that its products would be seen as investments?couldn't
afford any bad PR at that early stage. According to Jay McCracken, then
the company's vice president of marketing and sales, the customer
service desk was the place to find stacks of new Griffeys. The company
was more than happy to exchange the bad card for a pristine one to keep
its customers happy. That came in handy a decade later when the value of
a Griffey would be determined by the card graders.

When Griffey hits home run No. 600, don't look for the value of Upper
Deck No. 1 to skyrocket. After all, there's likely a card in circulation
for every person living in the city centers of Cincinnati and Seattle.
That sheer quantity, though, does mean that the lasting image of Ken
Griffey Jr. won't be anything he does on the baseball field. It will be
a picture of an overjoyed teenager in an airbrushed Mariners hat.

Darren Rovell <http://sportsbiz.cnbc.com/>  is CNBC's sports business
reporter. He can be reached at sportsbiz at cnbc.com
<mailto:sportsbiz at cnbc.com> .

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2191533/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lyra.siteprotect.com/pipermail/announce/attachments/20080530/e98c7470/attachment.htm