Thanks.
I've been perusing some recent Red Sox stars and the variety of 1st year cards and rookie year cards is mind-boggling at first, then it's mind-numbing, and then I truly realized that it's actually hobby-dooming. Card collecting's emotional engine for a couple of generations was the common pursuit of a star's rookie card. Not a rookie card, but the rookie card for that player. Even in the Donruss/Fleer 80s, there was usually one obvious winner each year out of the three companies, and if not then it still wasn't very hard to collect all three. There were the few scattered "parallels" of their day, but those were afterthoughts. Now there's sometimes literally 2,000+ different rookie cards for a player. Yes, most of them are endless variations and 1/1 short prints and soooo many autos and relics and whatnot, so "they don't count", and yet they do count, because those are the most sought after rookies, even if they're not official rookies, due to artificial scarcity and "specialness"...but how special is a card when there are about 1,999 other more or less equally special cards for that player that year? It's absurd. There are "true rookies", but most of those are base paper cards that are usurped in value by the "special" cards, which are insanely expensive relative to the base and/or they're so "unique" that it's laughably silly, like a Commemorative Flag Day Orange Platinum Chrome Refractor or whatever. So a rookie-chasing kid today is in a no-win situation. There are cards to unite his friends in a joint quest, but nobody really values them; and there are cards that are really valued, but nobody can find them or afford them or recognize them as The Card in order to generate the mimetic envy that lit the fire for the boom that gave birth to the hobby. And so there goes the primary fuel for sustaining the hobby. Flicker, flicker, and whoosh, it's just a niche industry for ultra-completist nerds. Then POOF, the interest dwindles and vanishes, and soon the market crashes and the light goes out, not because the companies overproduced the quantity of cards this time but because they overproduced the quantity of variations.
I almost invariably go for the cheapest "true" rookie, and I just pretend that it was the only rookie card produced that year, like back when companies and collectors were...well, normal. The state of cards now is definitely NOT NORMAL, nor is it GOOD. It's circling the top of a death spiral. I'm farrrrrr from an expert, but my hunch is that everybody will be dumping their 21st century cards for vintage soon, even the "special" cards. That said, with Wright, I had a choice between a base paper and an auto, the latter only being a dollar more. So I bought the latter, the only auto in my collection now, and the only one I'll ever get. It's a reminder of how bad things have got, with the robotic mass autographing and the psychotic amount of variety. This will be known as something like the Junk Variety Era or the Junk Rarity Era. Next time you browse the checklist for a recent star, gaze upon the page after page after page after page after page...20 pages later...after page of variations for that player's rookie year, 50 to a page. Behold the madness, feel the nausea of staring into the abyss like those hobby shop owners who caught a glimpse of a random warehouse with a mountain of unopened 1989 Donruss cases, and slowly back away from the horror.
