Staff photo / R. Michael Semple George Samonas, owner of Youngstown Sportscards in Poland, left, talks sports cards with Justin Apel, 17, of Vienna, and his grandfather, Tom Apel of Newton Falls. The demand and cost of sports cards has soared during the viral pandemic.
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Mahoning Valley native George Samonas opened Youngstown Sportscards in what he calls “essentially a bedroom” of a historic Poland home-turned-office space to give card hobbyists a place to go.
See, Samonas is a commuter — from Columbus to Youngstown now four days a week to his construction company in the same building. On the nights he happened to stay over, “literally the one thing I wanted to do was my hobby and go into a card store, and there was none.”
Now, he’s preparing to open a second store in nearby Boardman, simply because he’s outgrown the 300- or so-square-foot space he’s in, especially now with the viral outbreak, which has made the demand for and prices of sports cards soar.
Interest, he and others said, was already rising before the pandemic hit in March, but it’s since rocketed faster than a Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn heater.
WHY?
“A couple things,” said Michael Osacky, a Chicago-based sports card and memorabilia appraiser who recently partnered with Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), the world’s largest sports collectible authenticating and grading service. “This hobby is really benefiting from the stay-at-home orders since March. What we saw over the summer (was) people were spending part of their government stimulus checks buying sports collectibles because they were not able to spend their money on travel or leisure or even going out to restaurants because everything was closed.”
“Additionally … people are kind of finding it again. People are very nostalgic. These cards bring back their childhood memories, but if they also have kids, they are talking about collecting as a kid with their kids. Then all of a sudden, you have a father and his son going to the local card shop or go on eBay and buying some cards, bringing them home, opening up the packs, talking about the players, talking about life,” said Osacky, who will be in Warren on Dec. 28 and 29 to authenticate a large collection.
Brian Orfin owns Nowhere Toys in Niles.
“People are trying to recapture a lot of the things from their childhood,” he said. “They remember collecting stuff from when they were 12 or 13 years old, and it kind of gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling inside … plus a lot of people are bored. You get on the internet and buy stuff up because you have nothing else to do.”
The collectibles market encompasses sports cards, autographs, bobbleheads, equipment and other memorabilia such as awards or championship rings.
The sports cards segment, however, is what has taken off.
“I’ve definitely, definitely seen an increase in the hobby,” said Bryan Gerbasi, owner of Supe’s Sportscards in Youngstown. “In just the past year, we’ve seen almost a weekly increase just with new customers, two to three sometimes a week.”
“People still have that little bit of entertainment portion of their budget, but what do you spend it on?” Gerbasi, 45, said. “Sometimes we have people that this is the only place they go. They go to work and they come here and then they go back home.”
Gary Phillips, owner of Special Edition Sports Cards in Cortland, said when restrictions of businesses and movement lifted, business exploded.
“It’s like booming,” said Phillips, who’s been in the industry for about 20 years, the last four alone. “I have more kids now than in the last four years. It’s the greatest thing I have ever seen.”
Sports cards, he said, are a quick and easy hobby for people, especially kids, who are stuck on the computer all day at home.
MAKING A BUCK / VALUE
Some collect as an investment, speculating on cards they believe will become hot and sitting on them to sell later at a higher price. Some buy and sell quickly. If they make 20 percent the next day, “they feel like they beat the system,” Samonas said.
“You can almost compare it to, like, the stock market,” said Samonas, 41, who grew up in Campbell.
And like the stock market, value can fluctuate by the minute.
“You can literally watch a game and if a player starts doing well, because it’s so easy to purchase a card at that minute on eBay, it starts trending up,” Samonas said.
For example, when Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield and Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lavar Jackson played well on Monday night football, people immediately started chasing their rookie cards, Samonas said.
And when Zion Williamson and Ja Morant, two of the NBA’s brightest young stars, each played well in recent preseason games, their cards “went through the roof,” Samonas said.
The next day he called his distributor to purchase boxes with Williamson and Morant cards inside and found in one case the cost had risen $2,000. That’s because there was a chance the boxes contained their heavily sought after rookie autographed cards.
“I literally woke up the next morning and called him at 10 a.m.,” Samonas said. “The market had already changed from the night before.”
The value of cards, said Osacky, “tend to go up in a linear fashion.” The worth of autographs is more fickle, “the peaks and troughs are greater.”
“Demand and supply is a little different, people change their collecting habits,” Osacky said. “So someone who owns a game-used bat and then a year later sells that bat and buys a signed baseball. But with cards, people like to kind of buy and hold, and there is a lot more of them. With the memorabilia, there is a lot less, and so there is less comps to go to figure out a price so some of the gyrations can be quite large.”
DEMAND
When card collecting was hot in the late 1980s through the 1990s, manufacturers such as Topps, Donruss and Fleer mass produced cards, flooding the market, so now decades later those cards are common, resulting in low values for the most part.
But the companies got smart and started to limit production runs and began to include different cards, ones with autographs and even ones with pieces of the player’s jersey.
Back then, a pack of cards could be gotten for a quarter or two. Now, Gerbasi said, the cheapest packs start at $15. Popular hobby boxes that guarantee certain cards are anywhere from $150 to $2,000, Samonas said.
It’s “high risk, high reward,” Gerbasi said.
Said Samonas, “where the money is made and where the demand is, you’re not only going for a really big autograph, you’re trying to get it as short printed as possible.”
But will the bubble burst?
Orfin said maybe in the modern market. Historic cards of the iconic legends the likes of Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Honus Wagner will keep their value, he said.
“It may (burst) because it’s crazy they are spending $10,000 to $20,000 on a modern-day card,” Orfin said. “Say Aaron Judge gets hurt and never plays again and you just spent $10,000 on a card and it’s worthless now.”
Samonas said he thinks there will be sustained interest, but maybe not at the pace now.
Manufacturers’ greed in the 1980s and 1990s led to the slide in the market, but “I think they are more careful about what they are putting out there and people are smarter this time,” Samonas said.
He and Osacky believe new money will continue to flow into sports collectibles.
“This market is going to be stable long term as opposed to just being a bubble,” Osacky said.
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