The Biggest Room in the Hobby
For five days at the end of July, the whole hobby crowds into a convention hall outside Chicago. The 46th National Sports Collectors Convention ran July 29 through August 2 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois — by the organizers’ own accounting the largest one yet: more than 500,000 square feet of floor, north of 600 dealer booths, and well over a hundred thousand people through the doors across the week.
It is the closest thing the hobby has to a family reunion. Auction houses build their summer catalogs around it, the grading companies put up booths the size of small banks, and somewhere in the middle of it a nine-year-old trades three commons for the one he actually wanted. A few things off this year’s floor are worth carrying home.
One of Three
At the Robert Edward Auctions booth sat eight unopened packs of 1952 Topps baseball — a “brick,” in the trade — and it is one of only three such bricks known to still exist. The hoard turned up near Seattle in the early 1990s: roughly eighty-four packs, most long since torn open, with three intact bricks the survivors. They’re in REA’s summer catalog, which runs until August 16.
Here is the wrinkle that makes them a lesson and not just a curiosity. These are low-series packs, numbers 1 through 310 — which means the card everyone would want isn’t in them. The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle is #311, the first card of the high series, and that high series is the whole reason the card is a grail. Topps issued it late that summer, football was already pulling kids away, and it sold poorly enough that, as the story goes, a warehouse of unsold high numbers was later trucked out and dumped into the Atlantic. What the ocean didn’t take became the most important post-war card there is, and one of the twenty-five at the center of this index. The best name a lucky ripper would find in one of these low-series packs is Willie Mays — which is its own kind of consolation.
We won’t put a number on the brick. It’s still on the block, and a live estimate isn’t a result. But eight packs, one of three, seventy-odd years unopened, is the sort of thing that doesn’t need a price to be worth walking across a hall for.
The market has, at least once, put a public number near it. The last time one of these bricks sold in the open — at Morphy Auctions in February 2023 — it realized $873,000, buyer’s premium included. That is a result anyone can point to, not an estimate. It doesn’t price the REA brick, which is a different survivor and still unsold, and a sale three years back is a benchmark, not a verdict on today. But it is the nearest thing to a number the market has said aloud, and it was not said quietly.
The Hall on the Floor
Away from the glass cases, the TRISTAR autograph pavilion had a Hall of Famer at nearly every table. Cal Ripken Jr. posed for photos with kids; Mike Schmidt fist-bumped a young collector; David Ortiz, Johnny Bench, and Ozzie Smith signed a few feet apart, and the football side of the room filled with lines for Emmitt Smith, Lawrence Taylor, and Jim Kelly. Both Ripken and Schmidt sit on our roster, and there is something plain and good about watching the men on the cards sign for the children who’ll keep them.
That’s the half of the National the headline figures miss. The seven-figure sales are real, and they were here too. But the floor itself is families walking the aisles, a kid holding a card he pulled that morning, a retiree finally shaking the hand of the shortstop he watched in 1983.
What Gets Kept
Strip away the square footage and the auction previews and a National is a hundred thousand people who decided the same small objects were worth keeping. That’s the whole thesis of this index, held up once a year in a room you can walk through: a great name, a genuinely scarce card, and someone who chose to hold it rather than trade it away. The Mantle nobody found in those 1952 packs is worth millions because it was rare and beloved at once. Most of what changed hands in Rosemont this week was only the second thing — just loved. Both belong in the same room, and for five days a year, they get one.