It was 30 years ago today.
August 19, 1994.
I remember the day vividly.
Well, sort of vividly.
I remember sitting at my desk as the editor of Canadian Sportscard Collector magazine. I was kind of distracted as I was mentally getting ready to play in a semi-pro football game the next day for the Lockport (NY) Invaders at Outwater Park in Lockport, a city located east of Niagara Falls, between Buffalo and Rochester.
I had listened to Annie Lennox on my Sony Walkman – remember when we used cassettes and CDs before there was digital music? – and the radio station we listened to at work was cranking out Lisa Loeb, Coolio’s Fantastic Voyage, and Boyz II Men. I was the only Canadian on our semi-pro team and I used to play pop-culture-ignorance just for fun. Right around that time I came into the locker room and approached a group of teammates and excitedly said, “Hey guys, I got this amazing new CD. It’s called Boyz Eleven Men!”
“You idiot Canadian! It’s Boyz Toooo Men. Not Boyz Eleven Men.”
“Oh,” I would say. “I don’t know that stuff. I’m Canadian. All our music is French.”
Some of them believed me, the others just shook their heads and laughed.
I also remember we were commenting that it was President Bill Clinton’s birthday that day, which meant whipping everyone in the office with my horrible Clinton impersonation.
On my desk, there was an assortment of promo cards and packs, along with a couple of wax boxes and autographed 8x10s I had brought back from the National in Houston just two weeks earlier.
The discussion we had at work that day was about the baseball strike. We were one week into the strike and it looked like we were going to be in for a long one. The strike was going to be catastrophic for the hobby.
At the National that year, I had some discussions with several other hobby reporters. We all got along very well, as we all ended up at different events and corporate junkets together. Plus, we were all card geeks.
We were all concerned about what the strike would do to the industry, but we all thought that play would resume around Labor Day.
At the National, no one from the league or players association seemed to make themselves available for any discussions of any kind. They made their obligatory appearances and then bailed. They both knew the strike was going to be a long one, and that many of the dealers, distributors, manufacturers and suppliers in the room would be collateral damage. They did not want to have that discussion with anyone.
The Perfect Storm
By the time the 1994 strike was about to happen, the hobby was in rough shape. A survey conducted by Action Packed in 1993 found that trading card sales had fallen to $943 million from a peak of $1.3 billion in 1991. The same survey found that there were 15.1 million collectors in 1991, but only 11.1 million in 1993.
The proliferation in the industry had finally started to destroy the market. There were too many products, too many companies, and the royalties charged to the companies that were based on 1990 and 1991 sales figures were putting everyone in financial trouble.
The one thing I will remember about the National in Houston, as well as the Expo in Toronto, was the crazy number of products that could be had for $10 or even $5. These were the same boxes that were selling for $75-100 just two years earlier.
That was the birth of the junk wax era. They were wax boxes that were grossly overproduced from 1989-94. They were being dumped on the market by anyone and everyone who was in possession of them.
As someone who loves ripping packs and opening boxes, it was heaven. Obviously, there were no million dollar cards to be hunted down. There weren’t even any $100 cards up for grabs. It was just fun to sit on a plane and bust open a box of whatever.
While baseball has always driven the market, the collecting environment in the other sports was not good. The NHL was about to have a lockout that would shut down the league for a few months.
The NBA had just lost Michael Jordan, who was the sole reason that people began collecting basketball cards. The league had other stars like David Robinson, Karl Malone, Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley, as well as rookies Jason Kidd and Grant Hill, but none of those players drive interest in the hobby the way Jordan did.
In football, there were way too many products and it was the middle of an awkward period in time where there were no superstar rookies. The popular players like Steve Young, John Elway, Dan Marino and Brett Favre were all veterans. The football promo cards on my desk featured Trent Dilfer and Heath Shuler. There were some Marshall Faulk cards too.
From the time Brett Favre was drafted in 1991 to the Peyton Manning-Ryan Leaf draft of 1998, collectors lived in a world of quarterback rookie cards featuring David Klingler, Rick Mirer, Tommy and Maddox. Even Favre, who was picked by Atlanta in the second round of the 1991 NFL Draft, was picked behind first rounders Dan McGwire and Todd Marinovich and one pick ahead of Browning Nagle. The exception of this time frame was Drew Bledsoe, who went first overall in 1993 and was the New England Patriots’ franchise QB until an injury in 2001 opened the door for him to be Wally Pipped by Tom Brady.
I remember a discussion I had with Pacific President Mike Cramer when I worked for him a few years later regarding the collapse of the market around the time of the strike.
“The problem is that the players associations and the leagues don’t understand collectors, and they don’t understand the market,” he said. “Collectors want everything. That’s what collecting is. If they have no chance of getting everything, they walk away. That’s what we saw before the baseball strike. There were too many products, so the big collectors just threw their hands in the air and walked away.”
After the 1994 strike was over, I was able to have a conversation with then-Upper Deck President Brian Burr.
“Sales are down for everyone compared to what they were at the beginning of the decade,” he said. “Why is that? That’s what we all have to examine.”
“Looking back, it’s pretty easy to figure out. But back then, the hobby executives lived in a world where none of us could accept the realities of what was going on around us. No one wanted to admit that collectors were leaving because the hobby became too expensive. No one wanted to admit that collecting wasn’t cool anymore. No one wanted to admit that overproduction and product proliferation had destroyed the industry, as boxes of cards that people bought for $75 as investments were now worth $5 in the bargain bins of the shrinking number of hobby shops that were surviving.
“I would say that our baseball sales between 1994 and 1995 went down by 50 per cent,” Burr said. “The baseball strike cast a chilling effect on the other sports. Having hockey experience a work stoppage added to the problem.”
During the baseball strike, Upper Deck boasted that they had no employee layoffs. They had increases in basketball and football sales, and hockey rebounded strongly when the league resumed in January, 1995. The company was also doing well with its NASCAR products, and it had just entered the soccer market with a successful product centered around the 1994 World Cup, which was in the United States.
Topps was not so fortunate, as they laid off 200 employees. A New York Times article from April 13, 1995 stated that “the strike sent production plummeting to its lowest levels in 30 years, a time before the introduction of competition in the market in 1981. For the three months ended Feb. 25, Topps’s net income tumbled 77 percent, to $1.02 million. For the past year, net income fell 68 percent.”
The article also stated that Fleer’s revenues went down by 70 per cent. The company, which was owned by Marvel, saw sales go from $100 million to $30 million.
When I went to work full time for Pinnacle in Dallas, I tried to find out how much sales had decreased by for no other reason than pure curiosity. No one would give me an answer, and I imagine it was because the company was hoping to go public and they did not want information like that in anyone’s hands.
I do, however, know that the number of direct accounts was much smaller, and the orders from distributors per product were smaller. If I were to guess their decrease in sales, I would set the over/under at 40 per cent.
If there is one telling story about how the baseball card strike affected the hobby and how the market went from boom to disarray, it was told to me by a fellow Pinnacle employee. The story he told me from a show at a hotel convention room summed up the entire state of the industry and what the baseball strike had done to the hobby.
“It was the Sunday afternoon of the weekend show, and someone tripped the fire alarm and the sprinklers went off,” he said. “There was a kid about 15 years old manning one of the booths. His father came rushing back to the booth and the kid said, ‘Don’t worry Dad, I moved all of our boxes under the sprinkler to make sure they got ruined.’ The Dad told him ‘Great job, son!’ Everyone was doing the same thing. The dealers would get full value for the unsold product from their insurance.”
It certainly beat selling off $75 boxes to guys like me for $5.
Writing this story and recalling these memories makes want to put some Boyz II Men on and open up a box of Pro Set Platinum Hockey. The only difference between then and now is that Boyz II Men will be on Spotify instead of a CD or cassette.
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