Revisiting the card market and its many changes

It’d been more than 25 years since I’d purchased a pack of Topps from the local 7-11, torn open the wax paper and rifled through the cards to see if I’d hit the jackpot. Whatever else baseball cards represented to me and my pre-adolescent peers (badges of loyalty to certain players or teams; crib sheets of our heroes’ stats; facilitators of social interaction; bicycle-spoke noisemakers), they were also very much about money.
By admin
NOV 4, 2010

(This story originally appeared on www.sfgate.com)

On the Tuesday morning before the start of the World Series, Jim Bernardin, co-owner of Lefty's Sports Collectibles in Burlingame, was busy, busy, busy.

"It's nuts," said Bernardin as he hustled around the shop in shorts and a bright orange San Francisco Giants T-shirt, pricing new inventory, fielding phone calls and assisting customers. He estimated his clothing sales had increased more than 50 percent since the Giants started the playoffs.

But I wasn't too interested in the Giants "Locker Room" T-shirts that Bernardin said were flying off the rack.

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