Sports Card Dealers
CARD SHOW BOOM: Sports card shows continue to enjoy incredible growth, success in hobby
In 2023, I attended 14 different sports card shows, ranging from a small, 30-table show near my hometown in Tennessee to The National in Chicago.
All the promoters I talked with throughout the year were excited about the hobby's continued growth.
I enjoy browsing and looking for unique cards that catch my eye and just talking to dealers and collectors. More often than not, I come away with a hobby-related story I can write about.
Show Calendar: Find a card show near you with our state-by-state calendar
One of the first shows I visited last year came pretty much by luck. While in Florida in early March, on my annual Spring Training trip, I saw a sign at the Holiday Inn in the Westshore area of Tampa that read, “Card Show Today.” It was late on a Friday night, so I popped in for about an hour as they were winding down for the evening, and I hit it again quickly on Saturday morning on my way to Dunedin to catch the Blue Jays and Orioles in action. I wasn’t there for long, but it was enough time to tell you that it was a good show. And, yes, I did come out of there with some cards. I even ran into some friends I knew from other shows around the country.
In Spartanburg, S.C., Travis Collins is one of those guys I would call the heartbeat of the industry. He has a brick-and-mortar shop, Boiling Springs Sports Cards, in nearby Inman. This is his fourth year putting on shows in Spartanburg, and in that short period of time, he has seen much growth and success with his shows at the Piedmont Interstate Fairgrounds. He started off with a couple of shows, had success, and soon expanded to four.
“This coming year I am going to six,” he told me on a Saturday morning in December as he greeted and checked in vendors for that day’s event. “I’ve settled on 140 tables, and sell them out each time, and I have some guys on a waiting list to get in when someone else falls out. You have a few tables turn over each show, but not many. I also don’t charge admission.”
Collins went with 160 tables last spring but felt that made things a little too crowded.
“I listen to my dealers and the customers who come through the door,” he said. “If I take care of them, which is my goal, everything should work out. 2023 has been my most successful year to date, by far. My shop is doing well also. We had former Atlanta Braves fan favorite Charlie Culberson in for a signing on a Saturday and that was a huge success for us as well. I’m working now on getting another player.”
Collins now has one of the largest shows in South Carolina. He opened that morning at 9 a.m., and by 10, the floor was packed.
The Atlanta Collectables Shows are held twice a month by Jim Daley. His shows are on Sundays at The Hilton Garden Inn on Windy Hill Road, just a few miles from Truist Park, home of the Atlanta Braves. If you want to make a weekend of it, you can catch a game on Saturday, go to his show on Sunday morning, and get back over to the park by that afternoon. He has been at it for several years but told me that things really took off for him when Covid hit.
“Georgia was one of the few states that never shut down, so we had dealers from all over the country wanting to come at that point,” he said. “We even had to move across the street a few times so as not to turn down table requests. But 2023 has been my best year so far.”
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Daley goes out on the road once or twice a month on weekends when he doesn’t host a show.
“Everywhere I go, usually in Alabama or the Carolinas, the shows just seem to keep growing,” he said.
BUCKET-LIST SHOWS
I’ve had a couple of shows on my bucket list, and I was able to hit one of them last year—The Chantilly Show in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. I was not disappointed. You always seem to be able to find things in the northeast corridor of the country that you don’t find anywhere else. The show had many longtime dealers, with lots of older cards available.
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Jim Ryan, one of the promoters of the show and also part of the group taking over the National Sports Collectors Convention in 2024, said he was very happy with how well the Chantilly show is doing.
“We are excited, looking ahead to what our group can do going forward,” he said.
I came away from Chantilly with a large Philadelphia Phillies 1997 ticket poster promoting interleague play, and it was done by famed baseball artist Dick Perez. It features the paintings of several players, including Cal Ripken Jr., Bernie Williams, and Curt Schilling. A huge Perez collector, this made the trip worthwhile. It was not something that I had seen before.
The Chantilly Show has long been known for its large number of players available for autographs. The April 2023 show was no exception, with a huge number of current and former NFL stars on hand. One of the more popular was former Dallas Cowboys star Bob Lilly, even though he was appearing in the land of his biggest rival, the Washington Redskins, now known as the Commanders.
The second show on my bucket list is the Philly Show. I wasn’t able to make it in 2023, so I reached out to longtime dealer and collector Ellis Anmuth of Philadelphia. Many of you probably know him as a longtime advertiser in SCD and know that his specialty is older cards. He buys from and sells to collectors all over the country.
“All three Philly Shows [last] year were extraordinary for me,” Anmuth said. “All weekend, even Fridays, which used to be a lot of sales going on between dealers getting ready for the weekend, have picked up. I would say that the last five or six shows here are the best shows I have ever done.”
He has long been a staple at the Philly Show, going back to the early 1990s.
“I think they have really concentrated on Philadelphia-related signers, and this has increased the number of Philly team-related collectors who show up,” he said. I have a number of regulars who come looking for me, and now there are even more Phillies, Eagles, and Sixers fans coming. I had gotten a large collection of autographed Phillies cards from a long-time collector, and they went really fast.
“I love what I do, I love the hobby and being able to help people find what they need. These shows have a lot of longtime dealers with lots of good, older cards available. I also sold a lot of unopened packs, rack packs, and boxes [last] year as well.”
Jeff Roberts is one of the most successful card show promoters in the United States. What started several years ago as a twice-monthly gathering in Nashville for like-minded dealers just continues to grow.
“I started in a little school gym with 30 tables that we sat up, hoping just to be able to fill them all up,” he says with a smile.
He still has his shows twice every month, having moved into a larger gym that holds 125 tables.
“I turned dealers away every show this past year,” he said. “I could have easily sold 150-160 tables each time, I just didn’t have the room, and I really don’t want to move away from where we are, not these shows.”
Three times a year he moves to The Nashville Fairgrounds to be able to put on bigger shows. His last one in October had 300 dealers and 800 tables, which included a trade night that was a huge success as well.
“Biggest show we have ever had,” he said. “This past year has been great and people are really spending money, more than I have ever seen. In December, a guy came into our regular show and paid $70,000 for a 1952 Mickey Mantle. It was graded 3.5 by SGC. This is a small show, and the whole floor was quickly buzzing about it. That’s a lot of money to be spent on one card at a show this size.”
His shows are all about the cards, and he rarely has autograph guests.
“I just haven’t needed to do that,” he said. “People come here to spend their money on the cards, which is what my dealers want.”
Another guy who has been very successful at running shows is Wes Starkey of Inside Pitch promotions from Floyd, Va. He has been promoting shows all around North Carolina for several years and has built up a huge following in cities like Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, Hickory, Winston-Salem, and Salisbury. He announced early last year that he was retiring from show promoting at the end of his 2023 schedule. He is back coaching softball at Floyd County High School, where last season, they named the field after him.
“It is time for me to hang it up as a promoter, but I will still be around as a dealer,” he said. “You’ll still be seeing me around. This year has been outstanding, everything has just really taken off when we came out of the COVID years, and it just continues to grow. The economy hasn’t been the best the last half of this year, but it hasn’t slowed our shows down.”
His Hickory show has long been one of my favorites. In the last two years, he has more than tripled the floor space he used for his shows at the Hickory Metro Convention Center. Where he once split the space with his toy show, the card show now stands alone on its own weekend. He has had a lot of dealers who have been with him for a long time, many of whom deal strictly in vintage cards. But he also has the younger guys, with lots of graded cards and box breaks.
And then there was The National in Chicago, which had record space, record crowds, and lots of new vendors and concepts while still respecting the things that have made it a great show.
The National now features fun, popular trade nights breaking out in hotel lobbies all around Rosemont, Ill. Topps 2023 Chrome Baseball was all the rage at the time and I came away with several cards of my favorite players. I’m not sure how you would ever put a number to it, but the total amount of money that changed hands in Chicago that week had to be an all-time high.
Let’s carry it over into 2024 and keep enjoying it. Hope to see you out there!
— Barry Blair is an author/writer from Jonesborough, Tenn. You can reach out to him at barryblair54@gmail.com or check out his website, rightfieldpress.com
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