TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Maintenance technician Jonathan Gregory, spends his afternoon putting together doors and cabinets. However, as a young kid he collected baseball cards. He started at age 10, but by 21 he was done collecting.
"Life starts to get in the way first of all," Gregory said. "At another point in time it becomes financial. Chasing cards that were losing value was not becoming a valuable hobby."
Gregory has more than 10,000 cards now. He believes the hobby wasn't valuable anymore because of simple economics. Too many cards were produced in the late 1980s and 1990s. An overabundance of supply plummeted card values. Tom Fackender, a part-time work at Collector's Attic, a sports memorabilia store in Tallahassee, agrees.
"Cards were simply over-produced and as a result it drove down value." Fackender said. "There was Topps, there was Donruss, there was Fleer, there was Upper Deck and each one of those manufacturers was producing 15 or 20 more products a year and the collector base just got confused and they got overwhelmed and they stopped."
Card values increased after the professional sports leagues limited how many manufacturers could produce their cards. For example, Topps is the official manufacturer of Major League Baseball cards. Fackender believes encouraging kids to collect cards can help the hobby recover even more.
"We have alot of cards here that are star cards both baseball and football." Fackender said. "We have a cabinet with basketball. Some of the kids will come here and they'll spend 30 or 40 minutes going through the boxes looking for players that they like and we really encourage that."
