Memphis director's 'The Hobby' looks at million-dollar trading card frenzy

During his career with the Yankees, baseball great Mickey Mantle earned roughly $1.128 million. That equals about $9 million, in today's dollars.

In 2022, a 1952 Topps baseball card featuring Mantle sold at auction for $12.6 million, setting a sports memorabilia record. This means that, even adjusted for inflation, a less-than-4-inch high cardboard portrait of the 16-time All Star earned more in a day than the flesh-and-blood power slugger did in 18 seasons in New York.

"Starting during the pandemic, a hundred-year-old hobby skyrocketed beyond belief," said Morgan Jon Fox, director of "The Hobby," a new feature documentary about the commerce and culture of trading cards.

"People were making fortunes," Fox said. "But also people were going into Target and getting into fights over cards. Literally, guns were pulled."

Produced by XTR, a Los Angeles studio that specializes in what it calls "nonfiction entertainment," "The Hobby" became available on demand on Friday, Feb. 16, via Amazon, Apple, Google Play and other streaming platforms.

The movie represents the most high-profile project yet from the Memphis-born and now Chicago-based Fox, who for many years was a beloved fixture of the local independent filmmaking scene, crafting his own highly personal narrative features (notably 2003's "Blue Citrus Hearts") and compassionate documentaries (2011's "This Is What Love in Action Looks Like") while functioning as a mentor for up-and-coming artists and promoting do-it-yourself cinema in a nascent era of digital video and community film festivals.

Shot from the winter of 2021 to the spring of 2022 in New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, Memphis and eight other cities, "The Hobby" chronicles the evolution of card collecting, from pastime to frenzy, from Ty Cobb to the Garbage Pail Kids — from an amusement for kids to an investment for those speculators and obsessive collectors who are willing to pay $5.9 million for a "rookie card" featuring NBA star Steph Curry (that happened in 2021) or $5.3 million for a "Pikachu Illustrator" Pokémon card (that happened in 2022).

Veteran Memphis filmmaker Jordan Danelz was Fox's director of photography for the movie, which includes shots from inside TNC Sports, a "sports fan" store in Bartlett, and a brief appearance by Grind City Media/Memphis Grizzlies broadcast host Chris Vernon (who posted on social media: "If I don't win an Oscar there needs to be an investigation").

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The rest of the cast of real-life characters consists of card collectors, podcasters, auction house managers, "graders" (experts who determine a card's condition and thus its value) and other card aficionados and industry professionals representing various levels of knowledge, wealth and celebrity. The notables include Rob "The Cardfather" Veres, whose Burbank facility houses 42 million cards, and Gary "King Pokémon" Haase, whose longtime enthusiasm for the Japanese trading card game makes him, according to one commenter, "the ambassador of goodwill for Pokémon in our country."

Meanwhile, some of those featured in the film have job titles that sound like they were pulled from a fantasy card game. Sneaker collector Josh Lubin, for example, is "chief vision officer" for the sports/entertainment-licensing company, Fanatics, while Dani Sanchez, known as "SuperDuperDani," is a "Pokémon content creator."

Fox, 44 — who collected cards as a teenager at Comics & Collectibles in East Memphis and at the old Nostalgia World shop on Summer — has remained busy in various aspects of film and commercial production since his move to Chicago. He said he was working in Los Angeles on another XTR project when he was hired to do "The Hobby."

He said the movie was influenced in large part by the reporting of Paul Sullivan, former "Wealth Matters" columnist for The New York Times, who in 2018 wrote a story with the headline: "Trading Cards: A Hobby That Became a Multimillion-Dollar Investment."

According to Sullivan's influential report, certain trading cards offered a better return than the top companies on the stock market. Wrote Sullivan: "Over the past decade, as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has roared back from the 2008 crash, an index of the top 500 baseball cards has done even better — beating it by more than double."

Already rapidly expanding due to such promotion, the card boom exploded like a game of "52 pickup" during the COVID shutdown, when people stuck at home began trading and speculating in cards online. Meanwhile, interest in non-sports trading cards — Marvel, "Star Wars," pop music, and so on — expanded.

There's a downside to this explosion, as Sullivan points out in the movie. "The market for nostalgia's been distorted by adults," he said, as the obsession with value over fun "filters down to the kids."

Inevitably, frauds and fake cards enter the market. Said Fox: "In any hobby that becomes hot, it becomes dicey when folks realize they can make some money."

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And sometimes more than dicey: In 2021, Target stores pulled sports and Pokémon cards from stores nationwide after a man drew his gun while being assaulted by four men in a melee over cards in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Such skirmishes had become more frequent, as speculators vied to be the first to grab the newest card sets off shelves, in hopes of finding cards likely to increase in value.

Despite these problems, "The Hobby," overall, celebrates card culture. The movie is at its most appealing when Danelz' camera glides appreciatively over sequences of cards in their clear protective plastic sleeves, the faces of Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan and Batman arrayed like portraits in a gallery. The images are as old as 1869 (the Cincinnati Redstockings) and as current as today (Taylor Swift).

A collector himself, Vernon said he believes Fox's enthusiasm for card culture comes through in the movie.

"I'm thrilled that Morgan made this, because he's legitimately passionate about the hobby," he said. "He's not coming at it from an outsider's point of view, he understands what's truly interesting about it."

Fox said the documentary is intended to be "comprehensive" and "a deep dive" into its subject, but also more than that. "I am a collector, I have a history with it," he said. "So, ultimately, I hope that this is also a love letter to a hobby I care about."

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: New documentaries: 'The Hobby' looks at trading card culture, commerce