First off, apologies on the lack of posts lately, my life has changed so dramatically this year that my priorities have shifted away from blogging as a whole. New job, new baby, and new just about everything has changed the way I have been a participant in the hobby and a participant in the blogger community. Although I cant promise to be as engaged as I used to be, one of my goals for the coming year is to post more on here.

This blog has been going for over 10 years now, and I still value having this as an outlet to share my thoughts when needed. Hopefully you can be patient with my lack of posts here, or follow on social media, where I am much more active in bite sized pieces. My twitter handle is @SCUncensored and my Instagram handle is @skolgellman – check out both to keep up.

As for 2018, what a fucking crazy year. For just about every one of the major sports, a craze took hold that didnt really let up, even with set backs on the field. I absolutely love seeing people hop on bandwagons, as a rising tide usually floats all boats. Whether it was Ohtani or Mahomes, shit was going down, and it was fun to watch.

Baseball is a weird sport, because it doesnt take much to set off a nuclear weapon, especially if the player has an international market behind them. Honestly, I wasnt as enthralled with Ohtani or the MLB this year, unlike last year where the Judge and Bellinger race for Hobby ROY was historic. Although Ohtani did live up to some of the hype, injury and nightmare reflections of Masahiro Tanaka, Yu Darvish, and Kenta Maeda rung like bells in my ears.

Funny enough, that didnt stop the Superfractor from setting some records when it was sold, and a 180k plus sale does not happen regularly. Coming on the heels of a Trout Bowman RC parallel selling for more than double that, the growing gap between the extreme high end collector base and everyone else continues to get wider. 

Baseball is such a different beast because of this dual persona that exists within the population. There is a staunch but vocal minority of collectors who long for the 80s and 90s to make a comeback, collecting and collating sets, and really not liking the new direction. They are quite in contrast to the growing group of higher end MLB collectors, which for many years was always a market Topps struggled to communicate with.

With another exclusive now in place for Topps leading into the next decade and likely beyond, the experimental nature of the high end go to market strategy continues to be a huge focus for the company. We are now through another year of Transcendent, which brings the most expensive hobby box ever built back to the fold for a third year, selling out as quickly as it did in its previous iterations. Adding in a Japanese version for Ohtani collectors was a big deal, and similarly successful.

Being that these products can co-exist in within a collecting base of people that are so drastically different is refreshing to see. With their legacy firmly entrenched for another long run as the MLB exclusive trading card partner, this could end up being a defining moment for Topps’ long run in baseball cards. It takes a lot for a sport to be non-dependent on rookies to prosper in a bad year, and surprisingly baseball might be reaching that plateau. They arent there yet, but with Trout playing HOF level ball, and a growing crop of young players that are hugely valuable to collectors year after year, Topps picked the right exclusive to invest in.

If I had to guess, baseball cards will further showcase how crazy things can get, and hopefully Topps really goes and takes some risks. We have already seen club specific sets take hold, as well as a growing following for their online exclusive products. That’s no easy feat to get over with a crowd like collectors have shown to be, and I cannot wait to see what happens this coming year.

The only real disappointment I have with 2018 is how much of a drop in momentum we have seen with their digital brands. Something I once believed was the next big thing in sports cards turned into a bit of a dud this past year. The team went through MASSIVE turnover, and the apps felt that lack of stability like I have never seen before. Topps continues to focus on digital collectors as an extension of physical collectors, and that is such a terrible way to go about their business, that I cant even put it into words.

Right now, bringing new collectors to the market has been a direct correlation to attention siphoned from incredible performances on the respective fields of play. Digital offers a completely different access point, as well as a way to capture the long lost young crowd that people have looked to reclaim since the late 1990s.

If you have read this blog for any real length of time, you know my feelings of luring kids back to the hobby. I think they are not going to participate in any real way comparable to that previous timeframe, and will never and should never be the focus of any product calendar. With digital, its a much different perspective, mainly because digital shouldnt be about crossover traffic. Turning digital collectors into physical collectors should be a nice benefit, but never the point. The point should be using the apps to gain access to a gaming population and insane stream of revenue that cards would never have access to and likely WILL never have access to any other way.

The apps should be games first and collecting second, and any residual traffic to physical products should be a happy accident. Topps, and Panini for that matter, are card manufacturers first and game designers maybe 15th out of 16 things they do, so that should say something about how I feel about 2019 for Topps and Panini Digital.

As for Football Cards, this was the first year where I saw a real palpable excitement similar to what we would see in the NBA or MLB, when a hot rookie really gets going. Patrick Mahomes was already a top value rookie in the 2017 class coming out of last season, but when September hit and he blew up, he was white hot unlike anything in the NFL. In fact, he was so hot, he may have hurt the value spectrum for the 2018 rookie class, where 5 QBs hit the field for the first time in a long time.

Panini has made strides in their football production, but not enough to turn me loose the way it would be if UD or Topps were back in the fold. I spent a lot of money ripping wax this year, and I feel like things would be that much more insane if the products were as consistently good as they were back with Topps and UD in 2009 and 2014-2015.

Hopefully 2019 has big things in store, because unlike the offensive firepower of 2018, 2019 has almost none of that. It would be scary to think another 2013 NFL rookie class was coming through the pipes, but it could end up being that way with a huge crop of defense being the focus of the upper part of the draft. The big QB names all came out last year, and this year, the biggest names seem to be going back to school or are not eligible yet.

Panini will need to stave off bored NFL collectors who only care about one position, something I have railed on the hobby for perpetuating over the last few years. Bottom line, the NFL collection base is dwindling, with a league that seems to have issues promoting enough career longevity to perpetuate higher values for non-QBs. Mediocre NBA players can last decades in the league, where 75% of NFL draft picks never make an impact, and 95% dont make it to a second contract. QBs also used to be stable, but we see teams moving on in shorter periods of time due to the rookie wage scale.

Sales may be steady and respectable for my favorite sport, but I fear what happens when the weight of injuries in the league take their ultimate toll.

Hopefully magic happens this year, because I think fun things have been brewing for a while. We are starting to see some gradual momentum take energy to maintain, but slowly pick up, and that’s a very good thing. The advent of online tools like COMC and Group Breaks have shown to be a catalyst worth our notice. There will be more innovation on the peripheral support, but I have really yet to see that innovation where it so terribly needed in the manufacturing side itself. We still see a lot of same player, same auto, different design taking hold with over 40 products per sport per year. Many rookies can sign 20-30k autos a year, and even then there are still redemptions.

Im sincerely hoping that someone finds a fresh take on things and offers a new direction we havent seen before. I would absolutely revel at the opportunity to see what the ad wizards can come up with. Over the last 5-10 years, very little of that has happened, though. The only real innovation is direct consumer engagement, either through digital apps, or direct to consumer purchases like FOTL. I do enjoy these changes, but they arent what sustainability looks like.

Really, for me, its just about having fun now. Being the white knight I saw myself as prior isnt really my thing now. I hope to stay as passionate and involved as I was previously, all while finding new ways to enjoy the landscape. Ill be in Chicago this year for the National Convention, hopefully Ill get to reconnect with some of the readers as I always do.

Enjoy the year everyone!