Why are factory seals important? If you look for trading cards on eBay, you will find that factory sealed sets, packs, and boxes command a premium over anything that is open. If you’ve listened to any episode of EconTalk featuring Michael Munger, you’ll know that “the answer is transaction costs.”
You probably understand why: the factory seal proves that no one has tampered with the cards. That’s especially important for old wax packs that are easy to open, sort, and reassemble with the worst cards. Sets of cards are similar. An unscrupulous dealer could open a set, remove the best cards, and replace them with copies in worse shape. Unlike sealed sets, I’ve had to sell unsealed sets that I’ve sold on eBay because buyers can’t for sure I didn’t answer them—and I never will for sure the people I bought them from didn’t.
The 1989 Fleer Baseball set is a good example because it contains some very notable cards. You can find rookie hall of famers Ken Griffey, Jr., Craig Biggio, and Randy Johnson. The set also contains one of the most infamous error cards in the hobby, featuring Bill Ripken.
A photographer reportedly asked to take a picture of Ripken. He took the nearest bat and stopped. During the first production period, everyone learned that the curse was written on the knot of the bat and it was easy to read for anyone and everyone who got a copy of the card. Ripken says he wrote that on the bat to make it clear that it was his and not someone else’s.
After discovering the mistake, Fleer halted production of Ripken’s card and issued several corrections: one with the profanity written on it, one whited out, another with a black box over it. Even the modified cards cost a few dollars, although Bill Ripken’s career was nothing like that of his older brother, Hall of Fame shortstop Cal Ripken.
As should any good story involving a notable failure, conspiracy theories arise. What are the chancesasked the conspirators, that such an obvious error passed all of Fleer’s quality control staff unnoticed? Since Donruss’ 1990 set was a veritable comedy of errors featuring Juan Gonzalez’s wrong reverse card and Nolan Ryan’s switchback cards, I’m not surprised that Ripken’s card won. However, for conspiracy theorists, they either deliberately edited the card or let it pass as a publicity stunt. If it was a stunt, it worked: here we are 37 years later, still talking about it, and unopened boxes of Fleer’s 1989 cards are still more prized than their counterparts from Tops, Donruss, Score, and Bowman.
All this is happening regardless of the government. You don’t need to send cards to a government certifier or be part of a truck dealer association and trade in baseball cards and other collectibles. The price difference between closed and closed sets shows that healthy methods exist to reduce shenanigans. If it works so well for trivial things like baseball cards, why wouldn’t it work well for things that really matter?
