But even after filling his CV with accomplishments in academia, he still finds reasons to be fascinated by his longtime hobby. John List has been collecting since his childhood. List, who by 1988 was a self-described "intensive dealer," was also drawn to the pastime's academic possibilities: Hobbyists monitored and collected athletes they favored values fluctuated with players' hype and performance with enough money and a little strategy, a collector could single-handedly corner and control markets. "There were more card shops than there are Starbucks," List says. Sports cards had become a billion-dollar industry - morphing from nostalgia-dredging totems of a post-World War II America to genuine livelihoods. Soon List was studying economics at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, moonlighting as a convention dealer at the peak of collecting. He lived for weekends in Chicago and Milwaukee, blazing through the convention circuit. Mowed lawns and shoveled driveways were a means to the same end. THE STORY OF the past 40 years of baseball cards in America is, in many ways, the story of John List.īorn in 1968 in Madison, Wisconsin, List was relentlessly focused on the Green Bay Packers and baseball cards by the early '80s. "Outside the white whale," Probstein says, gesturing to the Mantles, "I'm just like, 'Whatever.'" He exalts, turns and plops down the coup de grâce: a 1-kilogram Swiss gold bar. A Honus Wagner? A Sporting News Babe Ruth rookie? A 1951 Bowman Willie Mays? Probstein's pride and joy, then, must be Smithsonian-worthy. On inventory alone, his base of operations in the shadow of MetLife Stadium might be worth $10 million at any given time. Instead, he's focused on finding his favorite item. But nowadays, contemporary players are drawing big numbers. Honus Wagner, Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron - these cards have been showstoppers for decades. Which might be why Probstein isn't concerned. And even as a class-action lawsuit against him lingers and an FBI investigation into some of the industry's biggest players ramps up, the money pours in. Probstein, a former Wall Street headhunter who ditched Manhattan for northeastern Jersey when the dot-com bubble burst, is at the center of the gold rush. And somehow, during a year that included the sharpest GDP quarterly contraction in American history, card sales have demolished all-time records, dumbfounding investors and collectors alike. What is new and hard to fathom: Over the past half-decade, even now amid a pandemic that's decimated the American economy, contemporary sports cards have attracted gargantuan sums from high-rolling investors.
In 2018, one went for almost $3 million at auction.
B & b sports cards Patch#
Probstein retrieves from the vault plywood-thick cards, autographed and embedded with game-used jersey swatches - one of them, a LeBron-Jordan dual patch autograph, will soon fetch $35,000 - and two graded 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles. Atop the vault sits a Babe Ruth autographed baseball, acknowledged with a halfhearted nod as Probstein rummages below. It's a month before the coronavirus will upend civilization, and Probstein is in a collector's paradise: One room spills over with racks of signed jerseys being prepped for shipping in another, two dozen employees, sardined at workstations, painstakingly monitor auctions in Probstein's office, columns of cards on folding tables test gravity with mini helmets littering his desk. EBay's preeminent sports memorabilia proprietor reportedly racked up $50 million in global sales last year. With wire-rim glasses and incandescent red hair, Probstein oversees his dimly lit five-room unit like Richard Branson on "MTV Cribs." He's earned it. IN AN ANONYMOUS office complex amid the Meadowland sprawl of northern New Jersey, Rick Probstein tears through a standing vault in search of his most prized treasure.
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