Five and 5: Part 2

I came across an interesting poll just after the July 4th holiday on Twitter, and have been mulling a response for about a week now.

The tweet was from Ivan who runs the @WatchTheBreaks twitter account.  His poll asked the following question.

Has #TheHobby gotten better or worse in the past FIVE years?

The results were interesting.  317 people voted, and Worse got 51% of the vote while Better received 49%.  With the amount of bitching I see on twitter about cards and monopolies and all kinds of things, I thought the vote would have been more on the line of a 75-25 split.

I guess it depends on how you look at the question.  Do you look at it from the hobby as a whole perspective, or look at it from an individual perspective.

I tend to be more of a positive person, so I looked at it from the positive aspect.  The hobby is better for me now than it was 5 years ago.

Collecting modern cards has evolved to a point where I haven't bothered to put together any sets from 2018.  The only cards that I've bought from this year were for Blue Jays team sets or any of my player collections.

Panini didn't need to airbrush the Jays logo, pine tar took care of that chore

With fewer distractions, I have been focusing on putting together vintage sets more, which works out better because I can put more of my card budget towards vintage. 

Forget me for a minute, there's still a lot of positive things going on in the hobby.  People are chasing rookie cards now like they did 20 years ago.  Mike Trout RCs and Mookie Betts RCs are a couple of the hottest cards in the hobby now.   Don't forget Otani as well.   I see all kinds of people asking for LeBron James RCs, Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews in hockey, Saquon Barkley in football.  Since I started writing almost 7 years ago I don't remember a time during that period where RCs were as hot as they are now.

I also see a lot more generosity out there as well.  People donating cards to charities (Commons 4 Kids is one example).   People seem to be trading even more now for trading sake, not just matching dollar values to complete a deal.

I see people selling cards all over the place, twitter, ebay, sportlots, COMC and on message boards as well.  I'm sure that there are other avenues as well for a collector to buy a card.  For as much as people lament that the brick and mortar card shops are going the way of the dinosaur, there are plenty of avenues for collectors to get their hands on cards now. 

I'm sure that there have been plenty of podcasts and discussions so far during 2018 about how monopolies are ruining the hobby as a whole.  Do I think monopolies are good for collectors?  Absolutely not.  Are we as collectors going to be able to change that anytime soon?  Probably not.

But for me, there's only one thing I can do to protest what the monopolies are doing to the hobby.

Spend my money elsewhere.  

Lately, I've done that quite a bit.   I'm sure I'll keep on doing it for the foreseeable future.

I just choose to look at it from the positive side instead of the negative.

Thanks for reading, Robert