As 2001 winds down, the time has come to take another hard look at where the hobby is today and where it might be heading in the future.

Certainly, some things need to get some serious attention pretty soon.

I got a phone call the other day from a man wondering if I could help him sell his sports-card collection. I get those calls and e-mails all the time and the news I usually provide in response isn't very encouraging, especially if the card holdings were purchased in the last two decades.

The caller had cards mostly from the 1990s. He told me the "book value" was close to $1,000 and he was hoping to get at least half that when he sold them. He had turned to me because the hobby shop where he bought most of the cards is out of business and only a few dealers at a recent major area show would even look at what he had to sell.

"I don't understand why they won't buy the cards from me," he said. "When I bought them everyone said what a great investment they were."

And boy, did he nail it. He bought the cards because they were a "great investment" and yet common sense would ask how something produced in extremely generous numbers could be considered an investment. The truth is they couldn't, and now everyone who bought into that premise is standing around with a lot of cards they can't sell.

In no particular order, then, here are the problems as this longtime hobbyist sees them:

* At one time there seemed to be a hobby shop in every town, now they are few and far between.

When I joined Fleer in January 1992, we had a hobby dealer list of 18,000 names. When I left in 1997, it was 3,000. That list has probably gotten smaller since and, worst of all, many of the survivors are glorified junk shops with poor inventory, bad lighting and disinterested sales people.

* Ditto for hobby shows. There used to be too many, now few exist and even the big shows have dealers whom the promoters wouldn't have allowed in as a paying customer, let alone as a dealer, five years ago.

* The Internet is wall-to-wall card offerings, with most of them listed well below book value. Hobby dealers use the Internet as a dumping ground, quickly selling new products at cost or below as soon as they come out unless the product, somehow, "takes off."

* A few years ago the manufacturers decided the best way to distribute their product was through dealers, rather than directly to the hobby shops. It was a decent idea, but it did lead to inflation as product got marked up by the middleman. Worst of all, however, some of the distributors still sell hobby-only product to anyone with a buck.

* High-end products are created to help pay staggering licensing fees. Those products result in obscene pack prices ($10 or more). And while the scrap- and fragment-insert-card mania (shards of bats, shreds of uniforms) is rampant, I can't believe those cards are really as valuable as the manufacturers would like you to believe. I mean, what good is a little sliver of wood that might or might not have come from Rico Carty's bat?

* The proliferation of brands has so watered down the market that no one is quite sure what brand from which manufacturer is the correct one. Add in the fact they are starting to look alike and the graphics have all but cleansed the backgrounds from most card sets and you have a real budding problem - and if I get one more Rick Ankiel card this year I will scream.

* Graded cards are not good for the hobby. There I've said it again. They are not collector friendly, and they drive up the cost of collecting to the point where even well-heeled collectors are taking a pass. Yes, some graded cards bring big money in auctions but, mostly, longtime collectors, like me, think they are an expensive nuisance.

Next week we'll look at how the hobby has forgotten the future - the kids - and what it is doing about its own reputation. *

Send e-mail to mrhmerun@aol.com