The Art of the Sports Collectible

0:04Marion Maneker:Congratulations! You made the varsity, the podcast. My name is John O 'Rand and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. And today, I am joined by my Puck colleague, Marion Maneker, who writes a must-read private email on the art business called Wallpower. Why, you may ask, am I having someone who writes about fine art on my sports business podcast? Well, it's because sports paraphernalia increasingly is entering Marion's world. Every auction house has a sports department now. Game-worn jerseys or cleats, what have you, are going up for auction and getting a lot of action. A Caitlin Clark rookie card just went for$660 ,000.

0:48Marion Maneker:You heard that right,$660 ,000. So I was eager to get Marion on to walk us through where this business is currently and where it's headed. But before I get to Marion, today is Wednesday, July 30th, and here's what I'm watching. I'm focused on Major League Baseball right now, and not really this season, even though teams like the Blue Jays, the Tigers, the Brewers have been surprisingly good and a lot of fun to watch. Instead, I'm focused on next year, November of 2026 to be exact. That's when the sport's current collective bargaining agreement is set to end, and all signs suggest that a lockout is in the offing.

1:28Marion Maneker:And look, I don't want to overstate this because we still have more than a year to go and a lot can happen in a year. But early warning signs suggest that any work stoppage is going to be long and painful for both sides. Now, two days ago, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and Phillies star Bryce Harper had a confrontation in the Phillies clubhouse that became public. Rob Manfred visits every team during the season, and on Monday, he held court with the Phillies team and staff. Harper, during this meeting, took exception to Manfred's suggestion that a salary cap would benefit everyone and, per ESPN, actually cursed out the commissioner.

2:10Marion Maneker:To me, this story shows how dug in both sides are on this issue. The players are going to fight a salary cap as long as they can. That's the third rail of labor negotiations for them. But owners, they're really tired of having some teams, like the Dodgers, spend so wildly. New Orioles owner David Rubenstein is one owner who has publicly endorsed the need for a cap. The truth is that the economics in baseball are changing. Baseball is more affected by the regional sports network crisis than any of the other leagues. and you are now seeing some of that pessimism reflected in team valuations. Take the Tampa Bay Rays.

2:52Marion Maneker:That team is about to be sold for$1.7 billion. That seems like a lot of money, but it's a lot less than the NBA's sons, which went for about$4 billion three years ago, or certainly the Lakers, which are going for$10 billion right now. The NFL's commanders, they went for$6 billion in 2023. So from where I sit, there's not a lot of middle ground here. And while there's still 15 months to bridge that gap, the Manfred Harper confrontation personifies just how hard that's going to be. Okay, now let's get to Marion Manneker. Marion, thank you so much for joining the pod. I never thought I would get you on a sports business pod because I view Wallpower and I view Marion Manneker as somebody that writes about like Picasso's going for, you know, what, eight figures, nine figures.

3:45But now increasingly, you're starting to write about sports collectibles.

3:50Marion Maneker:Like why? That seems too low rent to me. Why is that? Why are you getting into that market? it. Well, I certainly wouldn't call it low rent and some of the numbers are getting amazing and they go further than just the sports collectibles. There's a whole thing about collectibles, Hollywood collectibles, you know, other objects, you know, we call them in the art world, we call it cultural property. That's a kind of high minded way of saying it. That sounds better than collectibles. Yeah. Right. But it's really just a term you can use to get your arms around everything because that does encompass the big paintings all the way to the baseball cards, the comic books, those kinds of things.

4:32I actually think these things are driven by the exact same human motivations. So collecting, and people have written fairly interesting stuff about what the motivation is to collect. There's an emotional, there's a psychological aspect to it. But collecting is about gaining access to something that you have a connection to, an attachment to. In the Asian market, people love to buy things owned by an emperor. It makes you feel special. It's sitting on your desk. You have this vase that the Qinglong emperor commissioned, And that kind of makes you feel like, hey, I'm an emperor too. And even buying cars is often connected to, you grew up admiring Ferraris in the 50s and 60s, and finally you've made money and you're in your 60s and you think, what am I going to do?

5:36What has this money gotten me? Oh, I'll buy a Ferrari and I'll relive my youth. And it sounds silly to people who haven't done it, but once you've bought and had and educated your kids and all those other things, that's when people start spending money on art, on collectibles, and it's drawn by this emotional thing. On the sports side, there's the experience of having witnessed these events, these great games, the performance of stars. And you know better than I do, people are very attached to their sports heroes. And so the opportunity to own something with an autograph, with a game, a logo from a game-worn jersey, a jersey itself, boots from a football player, a European football player, you know, they sell.

6:27This game-worn thing has gotten very big. The cards are now connecting to the jerseys and the logos. I mean, I think it started as people, you know, our generation and older collecting baseball cards. And most of those cards were, you know, used to play the games we did as kids and disappeared. So the cards themselves became rare. That's how you get the, you know, what's it, Honus Wagner and, you know, all these other things. But my impression from having spent a little bit of time recently with Ken Golden, who has this Netflix TV show and this auction house, is that the card companies have gotten very smart about creating, sort of synthesizing objects that should be rare and collectible.

7:19That's where the logos come in from. It's the one of ones. It's the box breaks where they're seeding the boxes of cards with something rare, which encourages people to buy them in the hopes that they'll essentially get some sort of lottery ticket. and Ken Golden has done a very good job of being the person who helps you realize or cash in your lottery ticket that way. It's beginning to feed on itself. It grew in the pandemic. There's been some plateau, according to Ken, but I think it's grown to a different level. It's funny. They call it the hobby, which also makes it feel like a little bit of a cult out there, but there's a lot of trading that goes on in these sports collectibles, in events, in auctions, on eBay now, and that's Ken Golden is now part of eBay, to be kind of, you know, Golden is the very high end.

8:23He's the Sotheby's or Christie's of the sports collectible world. And the reason I wrote about it is, one, that it fits nicely with the rest that we do. And I hope it helps explain people why art is important by giving them something that they might find more relatable. But the real honest answer is that our mutual boss, John, has been watching the Netflix show and his son loves the show. And he said, you really should look into this guy. And the more I looked into it, the more fascinating it became. And then I happened to be going down to the Jersey Shore. So I stopped in. Their company is just outside Philadelphia.

9:10And I got a tour of the joint. And they're actually a very sophisticated media operation building content for Instagram and YouTube. Yeah.

9:21Marion Maneker:You got a look at the joint, the way you described the joint. It was in a nondescript, almost an industrial park, right? Oh, very much an industrial park. There was like a hospice next to it and loading docks. I mean, it's just a classic suburban sprawl. The trucks come in and they go out kind of place. Before we get into the actual market itself, I kind of want to delve into you and sort of when did covering collectibles become a part of your reporting? Has it always been? Because like you said, it's the same sort of human emotions there, or something happened recently where it's like, yeah, we got to get, we got to get into this.

10:00Well, well, yes to both. I mean, I think, um, so I have always, I've been covering the art market in one way or another for nearly 30 years. I mean, I started in the late nineties as the art market picked up, uh, again, after a, you know, sort of very, uh, uh, shocked fallow period right after the crash with Japanese and the impressionist market in the early 90s. There were some significant auctions, there were a number of big events. As it built, we realized that it was broader than just the people who were obsessed with painting. At the same time, the auction houses became much more of retail operations.

10:44Then over time, they switched from your grandmother's furniture and curios and all, used to be the lowest level, the entry point of the auction market. But there are people who still collect that stuff, but it was replaced about 10 years ago with luxury items, a secondary market and luxury items, handbags, wine, much more interest in the jewelry market in signed jewelry pieces by designers that were vintage and were trading. Rather than just going to Tiffany's to buy a new one, people really preferred the ones that were made in the 20s or the 30s or the 50s by name, jewelry designers. Then after that, the classic car market blew up.

11:34Again, it was always a significant market, but it really got big about 15 years ago when you started seeing Ferraris sell for tens, 30, 50,$60 million. We've finally recently had some cars sell for 100 or$150 million. The definition of this cultural property has expanded slowly, keeps pulling in new things. I've also, for 10 or 15 years, been following an auction house in Dallas that is really the third largest auction house. It's called Heritage. It in many ways pioneered some of these markets. It also picked up markets that the auction houses dropped because they didn't think they were valuable.

12:23And then Heritage was able to demonstrate how valuable they could be. They're on track to have about just under$2 billion in sales this year at Heritage. which would make them the third largest one and about a third of the size of Sotheby's or Christie's. And in many ways, they've been a very innovative auction house. There's this thing in the collectibles business called grading or slab grading. It actually comes out of the coin business, which Heritage started as a bunch of coin dealers in Dallas. A group of them pooled their businesses together. and in that process, someone grades the coin for you, says it's real, tells you what condition it's in, puts it in a bag, puts a barcode on the bag, and that makes it a lot easier to trade.

13:21Now you see the outcome of those Pokemon cards and the baseball cards, the sports cards, encased in plexiglass. That's the grading system at work with a number. This is a seven, this is an eight, this is a 10, makes it much easier to trade these things and have some confidence that the objects are authentic. So all of that's been happening in and around. And then I think the pandemic really gave the sports collectibles a big shot in the arm. And Sotheby's has been making, especially the game-worn jerseys, a real focal point for their trying to develop those markets too. To answer your question, it's happening in all these different places.

14:12One day I woke up and said, oh my God, I have to pay more attention to baseball cards. I did wake up or at least get a comment from John saying, hey, you should really look into this guy, Ken Golden, and it was not on my radar. The company that previously owned Golden Auctions, Collectors, was on my radar. I have been paying a lot of attention to that company. The people behind it are very interesting. It's a vertically integrated collectibles company. They do storage, finance. Golden was the auctions arm of it, but they do everything soup to nuts, and they're trying to compete with it. It was founded by someone who had previously created a cancer research app that he sold to one of the Swiss pharmaceutical companies for a billion dollars.

15:10And it's backed by some very significant hedge fund guys. So there's money paying attention to these markets. There's figures innovating in them. I mean, it's a great story. If anything, I feel like we're underreporting it and really need to catch up and make the connections, learn who the right people are. You know, the whole puck thing we do of creating main characters, this is a great world for main characters. And that was John's - A puck cinematic universe. Yes. Exactly. And so John's insight was, hey, this Ken Golden guy seems just like our kind of guy. Yeah.

15:53Marion Maneker:Your interview with him, his personality came out in spades with that, I thought. Oh, he's fascinating. I mean, I'm not sure. I think we cut out. One of the things he really went into is he's an intense guy, but even more than that, he talked about, look, we're the nerds that everyone thought was in our parents' basement, and we're bringing this out and making this cool. He's genuine in that way. He really is passionate about this stuff, and he's connecting with other people, and he's making markets in it. It's that, pardon the fancy word, but what's so interesting about all of this is the phenomenology of taste.

16:32We don't know what's valued until we see people spend money on it. And what's great about auctions are they'll put up five things for auction, and you'll often think the one that everyone points to will be the one that will get the most bidding. And then we'll discover some random object. Everyone's bidding on that, and it goes for a crazy price. And you can only find that out through this process because you can't just ask people, what would you spend the money on? You need the proof that it's really important to them that way.

17:05Marion Maneker:Marian, let me take a quick break, come back, and I just want to start to get into the market a little bit.

17:20Marion Maneker:Now, the thing I've noticed, admittedly, I have not been covering collectibles. I don't collect. But I have noticed that a lot of these auction houses do have sports departments. Is this a recent thing or have they always had that? No, this is definitely a recent thing. And it comes out of this whole theme we keep being told. Young people want experiences, not objects, not commodities, not things, right? They want to spend their money on experiences. I think one of the hidden stories of the art market is everyone's distracted by the money, and they think, oh, what's important is the money. But what they don't understand is almost every art trade, and then this extends into collectibles, is someone saying, I care less about the money than this thing.

18:19Why do they care about the thing? Because they want to have it in their possession and have the experience of seeing that on a regular basis under their control. You go to a museum, you go to a sports hall of fame where they might have some of these collectibles, you go on their schedule. When you own it, you can experience it anytime you like. Three o 'clock in the morning, you can't sleep. You go downstairs, you take the thing or go sit in front of what's on the wall. That is the joy of owning these things. The great collectors are people who want to be able to experience their art and show it to other people and explain to them why it's important.

19:00I mean, so much about the art market, and I think about the collectibles market too, is about validation. I think this player is underrated. And we do those jokes with top five this. Everyone has their way of having these kinds of conversations. Collecting is just a pretext to be able to make your case for something. I think this artist is more important than that one. I think this painting is more important than that one. My Rothko is better than so-and-so's Rothko, no matter what he says. This guy has a Honus Wagner that's a four. I have a Honus Wagner that's an eight. A lot of this stuff is about social competition, but it's really about that experience, about being able to feel connected to that sports figure or that event.

19:56And life is evanescent and we're all moving towards the inevitable. And collecting is a lot about freezing time and trying to hold an experience in a way that just can't really happen. And as other people come and say, wow, that's a great object. Oh, you have those boots that messy wore, or you have that jersey, it's a way of stopping time and re-experiencing something that you think is terribly important.

20:27Marion Maneker:You know what confuses me about the collectible market is that what I hear you talk about, though you haven't said the word, is like authenticity. You know, it's a game-worn jersey. It's the boots that messy wore. And so you have that sort of on one hand. And then on the other, you mentioned like, you know, the Honus Wagner card, you know, where if it's sealed in plastic, it's worth more than the kid that put it in his bicycle spokes back in, you know, where, in fact, I'll tell you a little bit more than I probably should let on about me. I happen to have in my childhood bedroom, even still today, every single Sports Illustrated from 1973 through the mid-90s categorized by cover, you know.

21:17Marion Maneker:And if I had put them all in plastic and entombed them, they might be worth something. But I read them. You can't dog your magazine, but they're well-worn magazines. And they're worth nothing, really. That doesn't necessarily mean they're worth nothing. I mean, this is the thing about markets is we never know. And tastes and valuation changes. You're absolutely right about authenticity. And look, your collection of Sports Illustrateds is different from a random kids collection, right? It's become the basis of your career. And so for many people, that might have additional value. And there's the furniture market and to some extent the car market.

22:08In the old days, people would restore furniture because you wanted it to be nice. Then it became very cool to have things in original condition. The more screwed up, the better. If the finish was checked or burned or whatever, people wanted that. And this is the same with, you often see this with cars. They've been restored to preserve the rust and wear on them. So it's not always that pristine is the right thing and the thing that is valued. And like I said, it changes over time. And this is, again, what's so fascinating about it is very few people, you didn't collect every Sports Illustrated because you wanted to someday sell them.

22:55You got them because you cared deeply about sports. and this was the only real way when you and I were kids, the only way to really follow it besides the newspaper pages, but to get any sort of long form, the drama, the characters, the heroics, all of that. I mean, there were so many great writers in Sports Illustrated because the subject matter lent itself to dramatic writing. But you kept all of that for other reasons. It may come to pass that having him there, someone might tell you this is worth a lot of money. And if I sold it as a set or if we put them in bags and graded them, there's money there.

23:37But you didn't do it for that reason. I think this comes across as one of the biggest problems we're having with art, with collectibles, is once you start collecting for the money, it kind of changes what's going on. I don't want to say it perverts it. There's nothing wrong with money. There's nothing wrong with the person who's like, oh, I missed out on all those years of reading Sports Illustrated. Here, let me write you a check just so I can have that and sort of feel like I'm re-experiencing. But it does, when people sort of intentionally collect things in the hopes that they'll be valuable, it becomes very risky and it sort of changes things.

24:16And this goes again to the sports cards are making these one-of-ones or limited runs and trying to synthesize value in a way that the Honus Wagner card didn't become valuable because the sports card company planned it. it's because of a couple of anomalies and how it was printed and distributed that made it rare. And the same thing with the Mickey Mantle cards. And I have a very limited knowledge of this world and I understand the difference between those two eras. So I just think it will be interesting to see this world develop with these companies trying to create value with Ken Golden actually achieving the value, will they continue to rise in value?

25:06And nobody knows. That's what makes it so interesting.

25:08Marion Maneker:Let me take one more quick break and come back. I want to continue on this topic of just sort of trends in the collectibles business.

25:26Marion Maneker:I think the first time that I had wall power in the varsity was when you had a story about Darren Revell. Most people that are listening to this pod know as a former sports business reporter with NBC and ESPN. And now he's knee deep in the collectibles business. And he was selling, I think it was a vest from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And he held on to it and he wanted to sell it right at the 40th anniversary mark because he thought that that would create even more value around the sweater vest. And it appeared to be a successful strategy. Is that something that I guess my question is like the idea of tying some of these sales around anniversaries, is that as old as the collectibles business or is this something that's sort of a new trend that's sort of coming out right now?

26:28I think it's a new trend in the sense that there is now a collectibles business and several people are actively. Ralph DeLuca, who just joined Sotheby's to run their collectibles business, who was involved in all of that, is an example of it. He spans the art and collectibles markets. He's an advisor to people. He's been a big, I think he started with movie posters. You know, he started earlier as a guy on Wall Street, you know, just hustling to make a buck. He's very much that kind of guy connecting people, trying to find out what people want and give it to them. So I think, yes, that's new. But also, look, I mean, what's so fascinating about all of these things is they're valuable to a few people until you educate more.

27:21and the more people you show that something could be valuable, the safer it is for someone on the edge to step in and say, oh, this thing's real, right? Because everyone else is interested and someone else is bidding on it who seems like a serious person. I'm more confident that this thing is real. And the auction houses also have a warranty that they provide that if something's sold through them. They'll give you your money back if you can prove that it's fake. So that adds a lot of value going through them. But there's also just the sense of everyone else participating. One of the ironies of all of these markets is people would rather pay more in competition against someone else than when offered something for much less, they'd be like, well, I don't know if this is really the right thing to buy.

28:14How do I know it's the right thing to buy. And so the whole purpose of an auction is to demonstrate that there are other buyers and what level they're willing to go. And there's this weird thing that happens, bad auctions where no one shows up and there's not a lot of bidding. People often walk out dejected. Then you'll see two or three really smart players in the market skipping out. Why? Because they bought something for a song and with no competition. And they're like, great. We didn't have to pay more for this. And look, it's hard. It's hard to know the right stuff and have the confidence of your opinions.