High School Sports Cards

On Monday I was talking about the Leaf company rising from the ashes, one of the new products they will be boasting is their US Army All American Football set.  It is scheduled to launch in Spring 2011. Prospecting has always been a big part of the hobby.  However with the advent of the Team USA baseball sets and now the All American football set, are we taking this too far?

Maybe I am being too cynical, but at what point did we care to start chasing prospects while they are in high school?  I know a lot of you are thinking, hey wait a minute, didn’t you go get Bryce Harper’s autograph when he was a sophomore in high school?  Yes I did. I got caught up in this craziness, but I have since stopped.  The hobby has revolved around the rookie card for so long, we don’t even know what a rookie card is anymore.

Is it the first card of a player (Razor, Just Minors, TRIStar)? Is it the player’s first major league card (Bowman, Bowman Chrome, or DPP)? Or is it when he cracks a major league roster and gets a card in the regular issue set with the neat little RC on the side of the card?  I have no idea anymore.  I have spoken about this so many times in the past.

Why is a Tim Tebow rookie autograph more than a John Elway autograph?  It’s not like there is a shortage of either.  Elway is a Hall of Famer, Tebow may never even start.  This is a terrible injustice in my mind.  It doesn’t even make sense.  Why is a Strasburg autograph worth more than Nolan Ryan’s, Pedro Martinez’s, Bob Feller’s, Johan Santana’s, and even a Cy Young cut autograph put together?  It doesn’t make sense.

In fact if I were holding two envelopes and envelope A contained a guaranteed Hall of Fame player’s autograph and envelope B contained an autograph of a minor league player of the year.  I would think most people would take envelope A.  So why do the cards in envelope B seem to be worth more?  It just makes no sense at all.  In fact let’s take a poll:

To get back to my original point though, high school football cards, might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  I just don’t understand the direction this hobby is taking.  Instead of celebrating players who have made it.  They glorified players who have done nothing.  From Topp’s and Upper Deck’s perspective I can understand spending less money for players who aren’t in the majors.  However from a collector’s perspective, when did we stop collecting the giants of the game and start shelling out huge money for unproven players?

Breaks my heart sometimes to even think about it.