Putting All His Cards on the Table : Edward Labate would love to sell you baseball memorabilia, but he’s the first one to tell you to collect for fun, not profit.
Some people might balk at working in a store from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., but Edward Labate only works those hours a few days a year, such as Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Most other times he’s in from 6 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., manning the counter of his Edward’s Baseball Cards store.
While the black-bearded 37-year-old has a level-headed attitude about collecting baseball cards, one could argue that he’s downright obsessed with selling them. At a time when some other shops are closing, he says he did more than $70,000 additional business last year than in the year before. And he claims: “There are dealers today who could buy and sell me until they’re bored, but by this time next year this is going to be the largest card shop in the United States. I don’t think anyone has as much drive as I do in this business.”
It’s a business where collectors are willing to drop thousands of dollars for a little cardboard slat that smells faintly of chewing gum. Then they often store them away in safety-deposit boxes, where they’re rarely seen, much less sniffed. The Holy Grail of baseball cards, the 1909 Honus Wagner, is valued at $500,000, and its owners only display it under armed guard.
One advantage Labate feels he has over other dealers is he’s not a manic collector. Labate, who was born in Italy, lived in Youngstown, Ohio, for seven years as a child before moving to Orange County. The only cards he gets at all excited about collecting for himself are Cleveland Indians cards--”cheap ones,” he stresses--because his childhood memories make them fun for him, and the “cheap” qualification keeps them fun.
Though he’s glad to sell a card to anyone for any reason, he thinks fun should fit in there somewhere.
“Some parents came in here to buy a sealed $150 Upper Deck set for their 8-year-old kid. They said they were going to tell him, ‘This is going to be worth a lot in 10 years, so don’t open these up.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that? I could have let you have a different pack for $10 instead of $150. They said, ‘The same thing?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s the same weight . Since he’s not going to open it up, I’ll fill it with dirt and he’s not going to know the difference anyway.’ It’d be the same. I said, ‘He’s a kid . Let him open the box, let him destroy a few cards. Let him put them on his bicycle spokes.’ What the hell!” Labate exclaimed.
Labate gets a kick out of playing with baseball cards with his two young children. Setting son Andrew on his shoulders, with daughter Karly beside them, Labate flipped through a deck of cards on the store counter as they recited comical captions they’d made up for each, with Labate mimicking Stooge Curly Joe’s voice.
Shown one of a player on the phone in the dugout, they intoned, “I told you never to call me at work!” When he flipped up a card of Dodger spraying a hose at the crowd in the stands, they chorused, “So, you’re not Dodger fans, huh?”
During two hours in his store on New Year’s Eve, Labate made a $300 sale, two at around $150 each and sundry smaller transactions, including one in which a customer who walked in talking about spending $100 left an hour later with a $3 magazine. “You gave me too many choices to decide today,” was his explanation to Labate.
He had started off by asking, “I was wondering how to get into collecting.”
“You leave a blank check here and we’ll mail something to you. Trust me,” Labate responded, before turning serious and telling him, “You decide what’s collectible. What do you care about what I like? The No. 1 rule of collecting is collect what you like. Do it like a kid would. That’s when you’ll have fun.”
Though he probably could have more easily just sold the customer a $100 item--he claims “I can sell ice to an Eskimo”--Labate said, “I never will tell people what the best investment is because if you suggest to people what the future of a card is you’ve almost made the sale under false pretenses. I like to buy my kids things, and I’d hate to have them ever say, ‘Gee, did you buy this with the money you cheated that guy out of?’ ”
Along with the fun of collecting, Labate realizes it’s also an obsession with some people. He’s sold single cards for upward of $3,700. At the other end of the scale, many of his customers are “wax-pack junkies” who buy moderately priced sealed packs on the chance of finding a valued card or one needed to fill out a set. (Most new cards are actually wrapped in Mylar now. Wax paper wrappers seem to have gone the way of bubble gum, which Topps, the last holdout, stopped packing in 1991.)
“It’s like the Las Vegas fix for these people,” Labate said. “We have people who have spent $200 on packs hoping to find one card in there. But if they were to get something like the Frank Thomas gold card, they’d be in seventh heaven, because it’s a real tough card to find. What they’re doing is gambling.”
He’s no stranger to obsessive behavior. Labate may be surrounded by baseball cards 12 to 18 hours a day, but when he closes his eyes, he sees rooks, knights and black and white squares. He ran a chess shop in Anaheim for 10 years, where, he said, “I had to have everything on chess, and my buying habits bankrupted me eventually (He also says business was hurt by a dispute with the U.S. Chess Federation). I’m a national chess master, which you arrive at by playing tournaments after thousands of hours of study, of meditation on the game. I used to be able to play blindfolded.
“In my bedroom I have a bed, a desk and wall-to-wall bookcases with my chess library. I’ll wake up in the morning and look over at the books, London 1922, Berlin 1883, Moscow 1936, and I know what happened at every one of those tournaments, the moves they used. There are times when you study a chess game when you feel like you are on sacred ground. It’s not a feeling I can explain at all. If I didn’t have kids to take care of, I’d be living in a van, driving from tournament to tournament, like a surfer always after that one last wave.”
That’s where his passion lies, but, as he noted, “being a national chess master in the United States is like being a baseball card dealer in the Soviet Union. Who cares? It’s like being a tiddlywinks champion. Chess is a game that requires involvement, and the No. 1 problem in this country is you have too many followers, too many viewers, tag-alongers instead of leaders.”
Labate said his one philosophy behind what he does is “do it 100%.” Despite a sore throat that had left him voiceless the day before, Labate spoke emphatically and nearly nonstop to his customers and this visitor. He still holds the Villa Park High School record for shot put. He started playing chess much later than most masters--at 17, inspired by the 1972 Bobby Fischer/Boris Spassky match--and still plans to rise to the top in it someday. He didn’t know anything about baseball cards when he bought one on impulse in 1988 because he’d remembered having it as a kid.
“Then a couple of days later I bought some more, and then the next day bought the whole set. I went through this stage for about three months and was buying collections. I bought one collection for $125, a huge box, and sold just one card out of that box for $200. You don’t see profit margins like that in chess, or hardly any other business,” he said.
He opens his store at 6 a.m. because “I want to be here in case anybody drives by. People ask me, ‘Why? Kmart doesn’t open until 9.’ The difference is this is an impulse business. People don’t go ‘Oh, I’ve just got to go buy some underwear right now!’ ‘I need that garage-door opener!’ But baseball cards are a passion.”
Aside from being predominantly male, the store’s customers are a varied bunch. But you’ll see wool-suited professionals with beepers and flannel-clad grunge kids finding a common conversational ground over their gum card fixation. One customer is a criminal attorney who confessed, “I’m supposed to be at Harbor Court getting a guy out of jail right now.”
Particularly for Labate’s older customers, the cards can stir up strong memories. “Two people in here one day told me they’d had this big card of Mickey Mantle nailed to a tree for B.B. gun practice when they were kids. They remember shooting his eyes out. One of them said they were from Boston, and Mantle used to terrorize the Red Sox in Fenway Park. He said, ‘Our pitchers couldn’t take him, but we got that SOB out. Pow!’
“I asked him, ‘That card’s worth $33,000 today, would you like to trade those memories for $33,000?’ He said, ‘No way in heaven.’ That’s the part of this hobby I can understand, the memories,” Labate said.
It doesn’t strike him as odd that grown men still collect and play with the things they had as children.
“Women think men should grow up. Why? I’m 37 years old going on 12. If you want to know why men never grow up, I can help you there. It’s the same question as asking why men like the Three Stooges and women think they’re stupid. Why? Because men know a good thing when they see it, that’s why.”