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MLB spring training keeps hobby shops busy as card sales soar in Arizona, Florida
It’s a chaotic scene as kids and adults gather around one of baseball’s top prospects.
As the player signs an autograph, there are dozens of extended arms holding cards, baseballs and pictures to get signed. It’s spring training, a time when baseball players are most accessible to fans and collectors. They converge on Florida and Arizona spring training sites in droves to try and track down their favorite player or a rising star in the game.
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Those cards, baseballs and pictures being autographed are often purchased from local hobby shops near the teams’ facilities. These stores thrive every year during the five-week window of spring training.
There are 15 teams that participate in the Grapefruit League in Florida, and 15 teams in the Cactus League in Arizona.
John Gola purchased AZ Sports Cards in Phoenix nine years ago. He learned the ins and outs of preparing for spring training, along with his shop consultant, Don Drooker.
“It’s hard to even describe how busy it is during spring training,” Drooker said. “We’re only about a mile from the Dodgers facility at Camelback Ranch, and now that the Dodgers train here as opposed to decades in Florida, the access is so much easier for southern California fans. They can get in the car and be here in six hours.
“We are always deluged with Dodger fans, starting in mid-February. It started a little earlier this year, because of the Dodgers going to Japan for a couple of games, so they reported early. People were in the store and out at the ballpark the first day the Dodgers had a media day.”
Noah Blechman is newer to the spring training excitement. His shop, Valleywide Sports Cards in Scottsdale, Ariz., just marked its third spring training. He has put together what he hopes is an ideal atmosphere for collectors of all ages to gather.
“We’ve kind of created an environment where I like to call it the modern day barbershop,” Blechman said. “It’s where people just come in, players included, and it’s sort of a little hangout. They rip cards at our breaking table and just have fun. There’s a lot of fan interaction as well.”
WHAT COLLECTORS ARE BUYING
In Arizona, the team facilities aren’t very far apart. It’s just a 45- to 60-minute drive from the farthest southeast club, the Chicago Cubs in Mesa, to the farthest northwest clubs, the Texas Rangers and Kansas City Royals in Surprise, Ariz. That close proximity makes it easy for collectors to head to the hobby shops and then get to their games. Florida, on the other hand, has its spring training sites span just over 200 miles from the Toronto Blue Jays in Dunedin to the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins in Jupiter.
AZ Sports Cards makes sure it’s fully stocked for the rush of spring training.
“The key for us is having the materials that people want,” Drooker said. “There’s always going to be autograph hunters. They want to go out to the ballpark and go on the backfields and see if they can get an autograph of a prospect. We make sure we have all those materials. Then we have showcases all through the store; it’s a very inviting place.”
Valleywide Sports Cards, which has its shop closest to the Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies and Cubs facilities, makes sure it offers a variety of options for collectors.
“They’re looking for a lot of the Bowman product because of all the prospects,” Blechman said. “They’re more likely to obtain an autograph from a younger prospect. We’re getting not just kids, to be honest. They’re coming in, diving into our four-for-a-dollar boxes or even some lower-end stuff just to get signed.”
It’s not uncommon for kids to head to Blechman’s shop and ask if he has cards of lesser known players.
“I’m like, ‘Interesting. Why would you collect that guy?’” Blechman said. “And it’s because, ‘Well, I just met him for the first time at spring training.’ They’re attached to that player. It’s really interesting to see that.”
Traffic in Blechman’s shop really hasn’t slowed down since last year. January is normally a slower month, but Blechman had his best month ever at the beginning of 2025. Collectors come into Valleywide Sports Cards like clockwork during spring training.
“You can almost tell what time a game starts by the flow of the traffic in the store,” Blechman said. “The 1:05 games, after that first pitch, it dies down a little bit, at least until school gets out. Then it ramps up from all the kids. If you have a 7 o’clock game, we get that traffic as well.”
Jonathan Stone, who has opened two Blue Breaks LLC hobby shops in Sarasota and Venice, Fla. in the past three years, caters to his clientele during spring training by offering them great deals on cards that can be used for autographs.
“We are very good at our low value items,” Stone said. “We excel at the 1 cent to $5 range of baseball cards. Your average collector that goes to spring training wants to get in-person autos on your base cards—your Heritage, your older cards that they can’t necessarily find. We’re exceedingly good at that. We have about 400,000 cards under $5 on the shelf in Venice at any one time and about 110,000 on the shelf in Sarasota right now.
“I probably do $100K in cards under a dollar during spring training.”
Stone figures he sells between 2,000-3,000 singles per week—mostly to kids—during spring training.
“They are looking for anybody on each team’s roster, whether it would be stuff out of Pro Debut—we sell an absolute ton of base Pro Debut this time of year. Why? Because those players have only just made their debuts. Those Single-A, Double-A players are easily accessible to the average fan, and they are good cards to get in-person autos on,” said Stone, who has the Tampa Bay Rays, Baltimore Orioles, Pittsburgh Pirates and Atlanta Braves all training close to his two stores. “They’re 25 cents, a dollar; they’re cheap. If they get their in-person auto, great. If they don’t, no one really cares, because they only spent 25 cents or a dollar.”
Between his two locations, Stone sells between 20-30 dozen baseballs during spring training. He noted 90 percent of those are purchased by adults to get autographs. Kids are more apt to pick up cards to acquire in-person signatures.
“We sell baseballs by the dozens to folks that come in,” said Drooker of AZ Sports Cards. “We have the proper pens for them to use, so that if they get an autograph, it’s going to last and it’s going to look good. Then a lot of people come in just because they’re Dodger fans and they want to see what kind of Dodgers stuff we have—like Dodgers cards and Dodgers jerseys and autographed baseballs that we have in stock.”
At the Baseball Card Clubhouse in Tampa, shop owner Jason Weintraub has customers coming in for boxes of baseball cards. He sells more wax than singles during spring training.
“Some of them actually take the boxes and packs to the games to do it for their streaming or for their Instagram or their social media,” Weintraub said. “A lot of it too is people are bargain hunting and going through the boxes and they’ll get autographs.”
Baseball Card Clubhouse is a popular location for some big collectors. Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Matt Strahm, who is also host of the popular hobby show “The Card Life,” likes to come in to rip product, and the father and grandfather of New York Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe are regular customers each March.
Spring training is an extra special time of year for Weintraub. A sixth-round pick of the New York Mets in 2001, Weintraub spent five seasons in the club’s farm system. He signed plenty of autographs during his days under the sun.
Weintraub took over Baseball Card Clubhouse in 2010 after his dad ran it for over 20 years. He knows what to expect when it comes time for the spring training crowds.
“From what I got from the last couple of years, of course, it can change from year to year based on things, but our peak is the third week in spring training,” Weintraub said. “Usually, the first week in March, second week in March is real big. We get bombarded with tons of out-of-town people here to see the spring training games. We try to get as much Yankees, Phillies and Blue Jays stuff in our showcases.”
HOT PLAYERS, HOT TIMES
The best players from the Yankees, Phillies and Blue Jays are always top sellers at Baseball Card Clubhouse.
“Vlad Jr., Volpe, Judge. You go through the whole lineup of the Yankees and they’re almost all All-Stars anyway,” Weintraub said. “Any of the key guys from each team, they fly right off the shelves. We have our bargain boxes on the shelves. They’re not in order, but that’s OK, because people still go through there. They’ll sit down and they’re going to pull out a lot of the guys who they can get signed, that they’ll see.”
Just a couple weeks into spring training this year, Drooker had collectors coming in looking for cards of familiar faces.
“On the Dodgers side of it, it’s Ohtani,” Drooker said. “Everybody talks about him. Everybody wants to see him play. People like prospects, so the other two Japanese pitchers are very popular: the new guys Roki Sasaki and Yamamoto, who pitched last year. Of the Dodger veterans, I would say probably the most popular are Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman.”
As MLB veterans get into shape during the first two weeks of spring training, the third week of camp is when the highest number of fans are attending games to see their favorite players. That means big business for the hobby shops.
“In regards to physical number of transactions, week three of spring training eclipses every other week of my year, every single year,” Stone said. “Week three is where you generally find the most major league players starting.”
Spring training is an extremely busy time—and often stressful—but shop owners really enjoy welcoming in fans from all over the country.
“It’s off the charts,” Drooker said. “We just love talking baseball with everybody.”
