My name is Michael Roche and I collect baseball cards. My introduction to the hobby came in 1998 when my aunt gave me my first three packs and a binder to keep them in for my birthday. As I stuffed my cardboard into the plastic pages my dad told me, “One day you’re going to be arranging those in more specific ways.” He’s probably never been more right about anything else. Baseball card collecting has been a big part of my life ever since then.
I’m fortunate now to join Prospects1500 to write about my passion. Specifically, I will be covering prospect collecting. For those unfamiliar with it, “prospecting” is buying cards of minor league players before their MLB debut in anticipation of those card values rising if they perform well in the majors. In a way, it can be described as buying stock in a player. With so many players coming up through the minors every year though, it can be difficult to determine who to buy cards of and what a fair value is. That’s where I come in.
To determine what players deserve to be tracked, I collect and compare several top 100 lists. Pitchers and catchers are removed due to the volatility of pitching prospects and general hobby apathy towards catchers. From there, I use a variety of sites to collect the eBay sales prices of the ungraded first Bowman Chrome base autograph card of the remaining players. My goal in doing this is to provide a clear market value for the top minor league players and eliminate uncertainty for prospect collectors.
I look forward to joining the Prospects1500 team and want to thank Scott Greene for this opportunity. I can’t wait to bring useful content to readers and collectors alike. If you’d like to dive deeper into my process you can follow along at my own site, MJRsportscards.com, and follow me on Twitter, @MJRsportscards. Happy collecting!
Great idea!!