Beckett Baseball Card Monthly : The King of Baseball Cards
Written: Jun 14 '01 (Updated Jun 03 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: very informed, trusted, informational on all aspects of the hobby
Cons: shows only the superstars for older cards
The Bottom Line: The best baseball card magazine out there. Very influential on the hobby, and trusted by most everyone in the hobby.
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| three_ster's Full Review: Beckett Baseball Card Magazine |
In 1987, I went to one of my friends houses, and saw that he had amassed a vast collection of baseball cards. He said that they were not very expensive, and that he was trying to collect the whole set. It seemed like a cool thing to do, so I had my Mother take me to the local Safeway to pick up a few packs. Back then, all the grocery stores carried Sportscards, because they were an impulse buy for parents to get their children. But, this was back in the days when packs of cards only costed 35 cents to 40 cents each. As soon as I opened my first pack, I was hooked.
Merely opening a pack of cards has an affect on you that makes you want more. The only thing I could compare it to, is the feeling you get as you start to scratch off a lottery ticket. The difference here, is that you have fulfillment everytime you open a pack. Even if you may not get the one card you are looking for, it is still an experience just to open the pack. Soon, I was into it big-time, and of course I wanted to know if any of the cards I had were worth the big bucks. So, I got a copy of Becketts Price Guide where I was able to determine how much they were worth.
A couple of years after that, the magazine "Beckett Baseball Card Monthly" hit the newstands. It has not changed much over the years, and I have started to get back into the hobby a little bit now, and it has been the helpful hand in getting me involved again. Beckett is the stand-out, knock-down favorite of the Baseball Card collecting hobby. It is by far the most trusted of any of the price-guides that come out. I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that they were first on the scene, but the magazine also has a lot to offer that makes it stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Since it is a price-guide, of course it shows how much a lot of the baseball cards are worth. They show the cards all the way back to 1948 when Bowman came out with their set. Every set that is in the mainstream up to the present is shown with how much a completed set is worth, and how much the factory set from that year is worth as well. For each of these sets through the years, the superstars have their cards listed in there. This is partly to save space, and also because there just is not much business for someone who is just a utility player in the leagues. For complete lists of players, Beckett sells a huge volume of the baseball cards at many book-stores.
Besides just showing prices, Beckett shows a picture of a selected card from the sets right above the listed set. This is to help the reader determine what year their cards might be, if they do not have the cards in front of them while they are reading it. I find this helpful, because it may show a set that I have not collected in, and it may entice me to start into that one. The magazine also updates the prices monthly as cards become more popular. If a card is in high demand, it goes up in price, and if a card is no longer wanted by anyone it will go down in price. This is denoted by either an up, or a down arrow beside the card's prices.
The magazine goes a lot farther than just showing how much the cards are worth. In addition to the pricing, they so many storied on Baseball, and the hobby itself. They usually do interviews with people that are really hot in the hobby, and they also interview people who work in the manufacturing companies of the cards themselves. What this does is give the reader a lot of insight to the sport which we may not find in a normal sports magazine or on ESPN. They also do frequent stories on what the card companies are planning on doing in the future, and whether or not they will be having new sets coming out in the near future.
My favorite new thing that the magazine does, is they go out and buy a box of a newer brand of cards. Then, they open it up, and see exactly what they can get out of a single box. The magazine then does a breakdown of what they were able to pull out of that box. This includes how close they were to getting a full set, how many subset cards they got, and how many of the star cards that they were able to pull out. Because these boxes are just randomly selected, it shows the reader just what they can expect if they were to go out and buy a box of that brand. I find this helpful, because I like to get my money's worth if I am going to buy a box, and this lets me know which companies are being nice to their customers.
The magazine sells for $4.99 on the shelf, and is trusted by most every card collector. If you go into a card-shop now the odds are very good, that they have priced their cards straight out of a Beckett. So, I highly recommend this magazine to anyone that is serious about the hobby, or even to people who are just starting out in it. This is a great magazine to have when you are jumping into the hobby, because it gives you all the knowledge necessary to become a well informed collector.
Recommended:
Yes
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