Going, Going, Gone
For fans of defunct major league baseball teams, the future ain’t what it used to be.
Written by Filed under History, Sports
If nothing else, concessions to age are being felt in the sports memorabilia market. Mike Heffner, president of Lelands—a Bohemia, New York-based sports memorabilia auction house—says the 1980s and ’90s were the boom years for memorabilia of defunct clubs. “In the past few years, we’ve noticed a slowdown. People who were following teams in the 1940s and ’50s are mostly retired,” he says, “while others have passed away and their collections have been sold.”
Yet some items remain valuable not because of the passion of fans but because of their scarcity. The Seattle Pilots, for instance, played one season in Seattle (1969) before being reincarnated as the Milwaukee Brewers. “The Pilots didn’t have a huge fan base. And there aren’t a tremendous amount of devotees out there,” begins Heffner. “But a uniform patch or a team-signed ball is rare, so it’s tremendously collectible.“
Similarly, the Houston Colt .45s (re-named the Astros in 1965), “were a terrible team, but they had really neat uniforms with a pistol on the front so the uniforms are highly collectible,” advises Heffner.
For better or worse, the latest franchise to join the brotherhood of bygone teams—the Montreal Expos—doesn’t show the same kind of promise in terms of memorabilia. “Canada and baseball don’t go together,” opines Heffner, highlighting the fact that the Expos moved to Washington D.C. in 2005, and now operate as the Nationals.
Of course, for fans like Gabriel, Kent and Jordan, their lifelong devotion has never been about money or memorabilia. Their teams may not be in the box scores and the ballparks long gone, but their boys of summer never grow old.
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