Here’s the list:

• Pack Searching Experiment (It Should Not be this Easy)
• The Problem with Autograph Authentication
• How to Make a Custom McFarlane
• Blogs - How I Think the Card Industry Will Be Saved
• Tuff Stuff Misses the Point with Autograph Removal Article
• Proof That You Can Impact an Industry

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Does a down economy affect card values?
I think it has to. Cards are a commodity item, an unnecessary expense, and when faced with the choice of paying the bills or buying a box of cards, the bills will always win. The hobby has really evolved to rely on the collector who spends their disposable income on cards. We’re talking hundreds of dollars a month, not just a few packs here and there. Those same collectors also drive the secondary market. The ‘hot’ cards in the hobby, generally cost $50 or $100 or more. The demand is there because there’s someone willing to pay that much for a card pulled out of a pack. When those people diminish (as they likely will), values will definitely diminish as well. How much is anyone’s guess.

You can read the full interview over on CardScape.

Thanks again to Mike for the opportunity.  I’m planning on doing a full review of the CardScape software in the coming weeks.

It took a bit longer than I had hoped, but I’m happy to finally announce that the new SportsLizard.com is up and running!  There are so many new features that I’m not exactly sure where to start.  I’m planning a few more detailed posts where I’ll dive in to some of the more not-so-subtle changes, but here is an overview of what’s new:

• New design -  a cleaner, simpler, and more modern look and feel.
• Improved Price Guide -  unlimited searches for free with no account, improved accuracy with our “auto filter” feature, and item images for Premium Accounts so you are 100% sure that the card you have is the same as the one being factored into your price.
• New Collector’s Voice - the best place to read collectibles news, updated hourly with headlines from the best collectibles blogs.  Discover new sites, share articles that aren’t posted, comment on articles, and more.
• Improved Collectibles Search - easier browsing of your favorite teams/players, and search results now include results from eBay and Google Product Search.  The eBay widget is super cool, almost too cool for words.  Take a look at the LaDainian Tomlinson page for a great example.

Check out the new site if you have’t already and let me know what you think in the comments below.

Oh, and thank you to everyone who has emailed and commented over the past few months.  I tried to take everything I heard into account when building the new site.  Also - you may have noticed some prolonged site issues during the transition.  I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.  Everything should be all set now.

See how it says “To get the free pricing right now, click here.” Well, I clicked and was brought to this:

So I clicked again and was brought to the F+W Publications Tuff Stuff Back-Issue Store, where I could add new pricing to my cart for $4.99/set:

News flash Tuff Stuff - if it’s $4.99, it’s not free. Knowing them, this probably wasn’t intentional. Hell, they probably never even noticed it (or any of the other plethora of errors I notice in the 10 minutes a month I spend on their site). Still, it’s annoying and looks sloppy. Here I thought they might be offering something for free that collectors might find a tiny bit useful. I was wrong.

Aside from buying boxes of cards for things like my pack searching experiment, I don’t often buy cards anymore. My peak card collecting days were as a boy, from around 1987 to 1995, when I was ages 5 - 13. From there I moved on to SLUs, McFarlanes, and later custom McFarlanes. And while my fascination with this unique hobby has never ceased (which is why I started SportsLizard and why constantly read about it), I’ve always yearned for those days as a kid when collecting was a ton of fun.

Recently I was walking through Walmart and I picked up a pack of 2008 Donruss Threads Football. A funny thing happened: I had a ton of fun opening the pack. The anticipation from the time I left the register to the time I got to my car and opened the pack was awesome. It’s the same feeling I had back in 1988 when my dad would buy me a pack of Topps Baseball at the gas station. The wait from the time he left to go fill up to the time he got back to the car seemed like forever.

However, after I got done with the pack the feeling was completely different. Back in 1988 I would be excited for all of the new players I now had cards of. I couldn’t wait to get home and put them in my binder with the rest of my 1988 Topps. Instead, I felt disappointed. Disappointed because I didn’t get an autograph or a jersey card. Then I thought to myself “why?” The only answer I could come up with was that like everyone who collects cards these days I’ve been brainwashed by all of the parallels and relics and 1/1 auto’s that I’ve forgotten that an actual card can still be fun. Completing a base set can still be fun. Not because it’s “worth” anything, but because it’s fun to collect, just for the fun of collecting. Pulling a jersey card or an auto is awesome. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be. But the sentiment that the other cards are so meaningless that you might as well chuck them in the trash takes all the fun out of collecting.

Here’s the modern lie of card collecting: you can make a substantial amount of money by buying and selling cards. If you somehow do a better job of evaluating the card market and predicting the future of highly unpredictable athletic events, you might actually become rich. It’s a pretty ludicrous thought for anyone that’s actually been around the hobby, but it’s what card companies pitch to us. It’s why Beckett somehow still thrives. It not only takes the fun out of the hobby for the individual, but it kind of ruins trading because people are so caught up in getting “more value” in return.

If you only like auto or jersey cards, that’s fine. It’s not about whether the card is “worth” 2 cents or $2k to someone else. It’s about the fact that the card is worth something completely non monetary to you. Most collectors will never sell their collections. So instead of being able to say “I have $25k in baseball cards” isn’t it more appropriate to be able to say “I have all of the cards of my favorite player/team/rookie class”? As far as I know, there are essentially no collectors that have ever profited enough from buying and selling to make a living (I’ve never come across one, but people like CardCollectingRambler are close). Hell, most hobby shops these days close down because it’s almost impossible to run a card business period, even with the aid of UD and Topps.

In the meantime, I’m going to be retraining my brain. Every time I’m out I’m going to try to pick up a pack of cards. Sometimes at Walmart or Target, other times at a hobby shop (if I can find one). But every time I open a pack I’m going to do my best to enjoy the cards I get. Who knows, maybe I’ll even try to complete a base set the old school way, one pack at a time. All I know is that I’m going to have fun doing it. That’s what matters to me.

—-

Quick site update. I think I’m still about 2-3 weeks away from rolling out the new SportsLizard. Overall I couldn’t be happier with the progress, especially the huge leap in usability for the Price Guide. I think everyone will be pleasantly surprised at the overall dramatic improvement of our offerings for all types of collectors.

Note to Tuff Stuff - this is supposed to be gone before you launch the site. Way to raise the bar guys.

I’ve been diligently using my free time to work on revamping SportsLizard. This whole Beckett fiasco (the site sucking, not the fixed box breaks) has only made me put more emphasis on providing a product that’s free, easy to use, and helpful to collectors and to sellers. While the existing SportsLizard is certainly a solid site, the planned revamp with a new look will certainly be ten-fold upgrade in my opinion. With that, I’m pushing back the planned re-launch until mid/late September to give me time to significantly overhaul the price guide (soon to be called “pricing tool”) and to upgrade/improve everything else SportsLizard offers.

While I’m on the topic of Beckett’s new site: I see what they are trying to do. In theory, their approach isn’t a bad one. But in completely changing things around and making the site not very intuitive to it’s masses they pissed a lot of people off. You should never ever ever alienate your existing audience with an upgrade. Telling people to “give it time” or to “watch the tutorials” is retarded - a sports collectibles site shouldn’t need to a tutorial to navigate. If your customers are pushing back as much as the collecting community is, your best bet is to scratch the whole thing, call this “beta” a failure, and go back to the way it used to be. Clean up some of the mess but keep the core functionality the same. The longer you go on with this, the more you will piss people off. Trust me, it won’t get better.

Then again, maybe Beckett screwing up like this is just what the hobby needs to break away from them.

Oh, and if you’re craving a fresh perspective and more frequent updates, swing over to Sports Cards Uncensored - quickly becoming a “must read” for me.

From their press release:

“The name change complements our position as the largest dedicated exchange for sports collectibles. This is just the first step in a complete overhaul of our company’s online presence,” said SportsBuy.com’s new CEO Wesley Hein. “Over the next few months we will undergo a comprehensive technological upgrade involving new infrastructure, new features and a newly designed interface,” added Hein.

The company has released several large news stories over the past couple of months including the appointment of a new CEO, the repurchase of a majority of the company’s stock back from Landmark Communications (owner of The Weather Channel), the rollout of the Express Lister bulk upload system and a record-breaking sales quarter.

“Our name change reflects our promise to continue providing collectors and dealers with the best tools available for buying and selling sports cards and collectibles,” said SportsBuy.com’s VP/Marketing Bill Elder.

The company will retain NAXCOM Exchange, Inc. as its corporate name and continues to operate ThePit.com, which was acquired from Topps, Inc. in 2006.

Interesting. I understand their reasoning, but I think it’s a bad move. I almost always think it’s a bad idea to rename your business, the only exception being if your name has recently become associated with some negative event that’s in the media and you’re afraid of being associated with that bad company/person/organization.

NAXCOM has a brand name in the collectibles industry. People know NAXCOM for being a show promoter, online sports exchange, owner of ThePit.com, and more recently an auction site trying to go head to head with eBay. SportsBuy has none of that. You put in all of the hard work branding the NAXCOM name, only to change it to something that no one knows and open youselves up for the potential of total confusion over who you are? How many collectors had heard of SportsBuy prior to a few days ago? Zero. How many collectors had heard of NAXCOM? Hundreds of thousands, if not millions. You tell me which name is more valuable. I’ll take the non-descript name that everyone knows.

NAXCOM is synonymous with sports collectibles, even if it doesn’t mean sports collectibles. Just as - to a lesser extent - SportsLizard has become synonymous with the collectibles industry. Does Walmart or Target say “big gigantic discount super store” to you? Does eBay say “auction site” to you? Does Google say “internet search engine”? I think you get my point: while many businesses do describe what they do, I don’t believe you are at a distinct disadvantage by not having what you do in your name. And if you’ve already had a name for over 10 years, you’re crazy to think that changing it to something more associative to your industry will make up for the loss of a known brand.

Also - as a fellow online business owner - moving large sites to new domains must be done very carefully. You better 301 redirect EVERY SINGLE PAGE to the same corresponding page on SportsBuy.com. The obvious reason is that you don’t want someone visiting your site from a broken link or bookmark, but you also don’t want to kill your very strong search engine presence. Yahoo Site Explorer has NAXCOM.com down for 197,292 links pointing back to their domain. That’s almost 200,000 times that someone on the web has linked to a page on NAXCOM. Each one helps NAXCOM rank as high as they do in search results, likely bringing them a large portion of their online business. Screw up the 301 redirects and you’ll lose credit for all of those years of hard work. Obtaining 200k backlinks is no joke, so tread carefully (or just don’t change your name in the first place…).

Basically, the way I feel is that a name change is a total waste of resources that could be used towards directly capitalizing on all of the great things NAXCOM has done recently (they said themselves that they just had a record quarter). My hope is that this isn’t the new CEO’s attempt to put his “mark” on the company. I’m all for a “complete overhaul” of your company’s “online presence”, but just make sure that you don’t cannibalize all of the good work that NAXCOM has done over the years.

I promised to post updates on the planned site overhaul, so I figured I’d share the new logo that was designed over the weekend. I also got a long way on the web design side of things. The site follows the “modern” look of the logo and mimics a stack of sports cards with the information being displayed on various cards. I’ll post photos of that when it’s 100% done, but so far the feedback from my partners has been great. Hopefully all of that will be complete in the next week or so and I can move on to the more fun stuff like actually developing the new features and re-organizing all of the information that’s accrued here over the past four years.

Thanks to everyone who has commented/emailed with ideas and support! I’ll continue to post updates as I go.

There are a few star pitchers this season who have performed well (evident by their low ERA’s), but due to their team situations (for the most part), their records are relatively disappointing. One of the most high-profile pitchers that is falling victim to this phenomena is Johan Santana, who is currently 8-7 with a 2.84 ERA. Yes, his K’s/9IP are lower than usual (8.10 in ‘08 vs 9.50 over the last 4-1/2 years) and he IS adjusting to a new team (he had been with the Twins since ‘00), but collectors had high hopes, which, in their eyes, are not being delivered by Santana. As a result, his key rookie values have been falling.

His 00 Bowman’s Best RC #’d 2999 dropped to a monthly average TAC of $51.47 in June, down from $71.24 in May, and his 00 Finest RC #’d 3000 was at $66.51, down from $73.66.

Two other pitchers that have been in similar situations recently are Jake Peavy & Dan Haren. Peavy, last season’s NL Cy Young winner, is 6-5 with a 2.67 ERA and is averaging 8.83 K’s/9IP. He had 6 starts (out of a total 14) in which he allowed 3 or fewer ER, but received either a loss or no decision. His 01 Bowman Chrome Ref RC was averaging $54.96 TAC in April, and then fell to $37.96 in May, and $33.54 in June.

Haren is 8-5 with a 2.83 ERA and is averaging just 1.53 BB/9IP. He had 7 starts (out of a total 18) in which he allowed 3 or fewer ER, but received either a loss or no decision. His 03 Bowman’s Best Auto RC was averaging around $30 TAC right before the season started, and has since crept down to it’s July average of $15.29 (one sold on 7/9 for $10.50!).

See a pattern here? They all have a sub-3.00 ERA combined with a so-so to not-so-good record. This combination, in my opinion, clearly points to a lack of run support. The result: a buyer’s market for these players’ cards.

Please check out my blog, Break Open Another Box!, for more of my ramblings!