By Marc Silvestrini, Waterbury Republican-American, Conn. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Aug. 7--There are plenty of things Richard Daponti misses about owning his own baseball card store, but mostly it's the conversation.
Like all those great 'Who was better?' arguments. Mays or Mantle? DiMaggio or Williams?
Or the burning baseball questions of the day: Have they messed up the strike zone enough? Who's the best of the Joneses? Chipper Jones? Andruw Jones? Catherine Zeta-Jones?
'Guys used to come in and just talk baseball. How can you beat that? Just sitting around the store with a couple of buddies talking baseball all day,' says Daponti, who closed Sports Cards & Memorabilia, his Frost Road store in Waterbury, about a year ago. At the time, he'd been in the business for 12 years at various locations in Waterbury and Naugatuck.
Despite the warm, fuzzy memories, Daponti was forced to close his store because of a hard, cold reality: Business, he says, was just too slow and he could no longer meet his overhead.
'There's just too much competition -- the Internet, Kmart, Toys 'R Us, the supermarkets,' he says. 'Too many new products to buy, too many other places for the collector to go and spend his money.'
Like the designated hitter rule, the demise of the friendly neighborhood baseball card store is a pervasive national phenomenon that appears to be here to stay, local store owners say. Increased competition from the Internet and giant retailers, a shrinking number of card collectors and a market that has become glutted with mass-produced yet expensive products have combined to make the stand-alone baseball card store as rare as championship banners at Fenway Park.
Dave Rock of Rock's Sports Cards in Bristol recalls a period in the early '90s when there were at least 15 other baseball card stores within a 20-minute drive of his own, including five apiece in both Bristol and Torrington. Now his is the only one left.
Daponti says there were nine stores operating in Waterbury in 1991. Bob Rzewuski, who owns The Dugout on Main Street in Oakville, says there were at least eight card stores in Greater Waterbury when he first opened his shop in 1992. Right now you would be hard-pressed to find a handful of stores devoted exclusively to baseball cards in the area.
It is difficult to create a definitive list of how many baseball card stores are operating in any given community because stores come and go virtually overnight, and routinely change owners and locations. Many are not listed in phone books or on chamber of commerce rosters and some are better known for a different line of products, like comic books, coins or toys.
'It's kind of a dying business, I guess,' says Ernie Russelli of Ernie's Baseball Cards & Stuff on Main Street in Southbury. 'It's getting harder and harder just to meet your expenses, never mind trying to make a decent living.'
Russelli opened a second store in Naugatuck last fall, but has since sold it. He will soon be closing his Southbury store and moving to Fort Mohave, Ariz., where he plans to open a yet another one. He says two factors have combined to drive most store owners out of business.
'Basically, the guys in this business have lost a ton of customers to the Internet while our expenses have gone through the roof,' he says. 'When you have fewer customers but you're paying five times as much for product as you were when you first opened up, you're definitely going to feel the pinch.'
Rock agrees the rapid growth of the Internet over the past 10 years has been the single biggest factor in the demise of both baseball card stores and the once-ubiquitous baseball card shows. It gives collectors the ability to purchase cards at online auction sites like Ebay and Yahoo -- often for a mere fraction of what they would have paid for the same item in a card store.
'A few years ago there were three or four card shows to choose from within an hour's drive of your home on just about any weekend,' says Rock, who has been in the business for 11 years. 'Nowadays, it's hard to find one.'
Rock says that approximately 40 percent of his business is conducted over the Internet now while Russelli notes that many of the card stores that have gone out of business were operated by a generation of shop owners that had neither the skills nor inclination to surf the Net.
'Most of the guys who were doing this were unable to adjust when the business changed and went high-tech on them,' Russelli says.
Another problem, Rock and Rzewuski say, is the rapidly disappearing baseball card collector.
'I think the card manufacturers have turned a lot of people off over the years by producing too many sets and too many cards and making things way too expensive for the average card collector,' Rzewuski says.
Back in the late '70s and early '80s, huge numbers of male Baby Boomers discovered that the hobby of their youth had suddenly become respectable enough to pursue as an adult. At that time, there were only three card manufacturers producing one annual set of cards apiece, Russelli explains. Then the number of manufacturers ballooned to six or seven, and each one of them started producing four or five different sets a year.
'Pretty soon it got ridiculous,' he says. 'All of a sudden there was something like a hundred sets being produced every year. And that's not even counting the other sports, like football and basketball.'
And it didn't help matters that while producing more cards than the market could absorb, manufacturers also began producing cards that were far too pricy for even adult collectors.
'Let's face it,' Rock asks, 'how many people can afford to pay $10 for a single pack of four or five baseball cards? Or $50 or $60 for a baseball card that just came out last week?'
Rising prices hit store owners just as hard. Russelli says at least one, and possibly two or three new baseball card sets are released every week from Christmas through early November.
'When I opened my first store (in 1978 in Chicago), I was spending maybe $1,000 to $1,500 for product every week,' says Russelli. 'Now, in order to assure yourself of getting a good cross-section of product, you're going to have to spend maybe four to five times as much.'
One last factor that has driven many collectors out of the hobby is the common perception that today's professional baseball player is an arrogant and greedy mercenary without the bandoleer. The feeling intensified during the infamous baseball strike of 1994 when the franchise owners, who many believe are equally arrogant and greedy, canceled the playoffs and World Series.
'Let's face it, that strike in '94 really killed us,' Rzewuski says. 'I think a lot of people got turned off back then and just never came back to the hobby.'
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(c) 2001, Waterbury Republican-American, Conn. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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