My hobby is going well, I'm adding lots of cards to my player collections, constantly researching oddball issues and enjoying interacting with other collectors via blogs and message boards.
The sports card hobby as a whole, I think is in a slow death spiral due to the lack of new collectors coming on board (all my comments are about the hobby in the US/Canada). If you could poll all active collectors, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the average age was over 26 years old (maybe closer to 30). Add to that the industry leading companies (Beckett, Topps, UD, Panini) seem to exist in an ever shrinking vaccuum, with little attention paid to the casual or prospective collector.
The Sports Collector's Digest has almost ceased to be a factor in the hobby, with the Standard Catalog being stuck in the 1990s-2000s as far as format goes. They are eliminating all modern cards from their latest release of the catalog, and somehow they completely missed the digital boat, and never had any real online presence and now they're devolving into a vintage-only publication. As the hobby expands in the larger world, everything in the US is shrinking as the parent companies have completely lost site of their customer base and are focused solely on their share holders dividends. What is the point of increasing your share holders short term profits if you're ultimately putting yourself out of business?
Beckett is in the same boat. Since being bought out, they trashed their website, fired most of their staff, decimated their publications and with every successive "loaded" box break, their credibility as a hobby leader drains away.
The bright spots I see are solely in the way collectors have taken it upon themselves to fill in the gaps left by all the other industry giants of the 80s & 90s.
-- You'll get more and better writing on a daily basis by cruising the Sports Card Blog Roll than you'll ever find in any of the current publications. The online communitities, both for buy/sell/trade, casual and deeply involved conversations have really grown and multiple sites like SCF (with their Inventory Manager), Uncatalogued Baseball Cards, Paul's Random Stuff, Japanese Baseball Card Blog, Bob Lemke's Blog, etc, are handling the ongoing efforts of researching and documenting previously unknown cards and sets that Beckett and SCD have abandoned.
-- Online shops like Sportlots, Check Out My Cards, eBay and the Beckett Marketplace (one of the few positive continuing contributions by a fading brand) have done a lot to help fill in the loss of the frequent local sports card shows we all used to love so much.
-- All of the online trading forums have really helped reconnect collectors with each other in the absence of the old school yard trading sessions.
That's my take. The "hobby" (meaning the actual people who collect) are fine and will continue to flourish as long as we have each other. The industry can die a slow and painful death and the "hobby" will survive and come out the other side, starting from scratch.
so i finally got smart and decided instead of buying boxes and boxes, i now use that money to buy specific cards for my PC either on ebay or now checkoutmycards.com(comc) i look at it this way for the $75-80 i use to spend on boxes, i can now take that same $75-80 and buy some really nice cards for my PC. sure beats buying a box of cards hoping to get a strasburg or harper auto and end up with an aaron boone or otis nixon gu!
