Opinion: Keep regulators out of sports cards

As a kid growing up in Cleveland, trading baseball cards brought thrills and disappointments to my friends and me.The joy of ripping open a wax pack lasted only seconds before the groans started. A Yankees card—even a Mickey Mantle—typically elicited a “meh” in Cleveland and could end up clipped to a bike spoke—not because Mickey wasn’t great but because he wasn’t ours. We wanted Indians: “Sudden Sam” McDowell, Woodie Held, Tito Francona. Those were the names we were on the hunt for. The rest often landed in shoeboxes, discarded and forgotten long before nostalgia turned many of them into gold. Most of us lost our cardboard fortunes before we realized what they were worth.Nobody loses them anymore, though. Today, trading cards sit at the center of a multibillion-dollar marketplace. Packs that once cost a nickel now sell for several dollars, with premium boxes running into the hundreds. And at the heart of this evolution is a new collectors’ ritual known as card breaking — a modern twist on collecting, where participants pool money to buy boxes together and then divvy up the spoils based on the teams or players each collector in the group picked ahead of time. For a fraction of the cost of a full box, members of the pool secure a guaranteed slot for their favorite team or player.Read More