Why are factory seals important? If you look at trading cards on eBay, you’ll see that factory-sealed sets, packs, and boxes cost more than their opened counterparts. If you’ve ever listened to the EconTalk episode featuring Michael Munger, you know that the answer is transaction costs.
You can probably see why. The factory seal proves that no one has tampered with the card. This is especially important with older wax packs, which can be easily opened, sorted, and resealed for poor quality cards. The same goes for card sets. Unscrupulous sellers may open the set, remove the best cards, and replace them with cards in worse condition. Unlike the sealed sets, I had to discount the unsealed sets I sold on eBay. Because the buyer can’t be sure I’m not getting them. I also can’t be sure that the people I bought them from didn’t get them either.
The 1989 Fleer Baseball set is a great example of this, as it contains some particularly noteworthy cards. Get rookie cards for Hall of Famers Ken Griffey Jr., Craig Biggio, and Randy Johnson. This set also includes one of the hobby’s most infamous error cards, featuring Bill Ripken.
Perhaps a photographer asked him to take a photo of Ripken. He grabbed the nearest baseball bat and posed. In the first production run, everyone learned that the bat had an expletive written on its knob, easily readable by anyone who got a copy of the card. Ripken said he wrote that on the bat to make it clear that it belonged to him and no one else.
After discovering this mistake, Mr. Freer discontinued production of the Ripken cards and made several modifications. One had profanity scrawled on it, another was blanked out, and the other was covered with a black box. Even the modified cards are worth a few bucks, even though Bill Ripken’s career bore no resemblance to his older brother, Hall of Fame shortstop Cal Ripken.
Any good story with a notable failure always brings up conspiracy theories. What are the chances, conspiracy theorists ask, that such an obvious mistake could have gone unnoticed by all of Freer’s quality control personnel? The 1990 Donruss set was a true comedy of errors, including the famous Juan Gonzalez reverse negative card and the reversed Nolan Ryan card, so I’m not surprised that Ripken’s cards were successful. But for conspiracy theorists, they either planned this card intentionally or passed it off as a publicity stunt. Even if it was a stunt, it worked. Thirty-seven years later, we’re still talking about it, and unopened boxes of 1989 Fleer cards still command more value than Topps, Donruss, Score, and Bowman cards.
Of course, all of this is done without government oversight. You don’t need to submit your cards to a government certification agency or belong to a dealer’s guild to truck or barter baseball cards and other collectibles. The price difference between sealed and unsealed sets indicates that a healthy mechanism exists to curb fraud. Why does it work so well for trivial things like baseball cards, but not for the really important things?
