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Business & Tech

A Business Built on a House of Cards

Sports Dugout caters to collectors with a large variety of of trading cards and sports memorabilia.

For more than 20 years, , tucked into a busy shopping center on Watson Road, has served as an unchanging outpost for a once-common hobby.

Cards, collectibles and memorabilia from a variety of sports line the walls and fill cases in the small shop. Stacks of boxes rise behind the counter and march off toward the back of the store, each marked with the year and set within. The ruler of this empire of sports fandom is 44-year-old Randy Fauth.

“I was just an avid collector as a kid, and I started working at a store when I was 15 years old,” Fauth said, dating that initial gig to late 1981. He worked there for nine years before opening his own shop in 1990.

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“I am closing in on 30 years doing this…It’s a passion I have had for a long time,” he said, explaining that he is drawn to the connection you can make to the cards and the players on them.

“If you are a baseball fan, you can watch the games and follow the players or read about the players if you collect vintage cards,” he said.

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In his 30-year career, Fauth said he has seen the industry go through several sea changes. There was a boom of speculation in the late 1980s and early 1990s that inevitably led to a bust. The industry then stabilized, only to be shaken loose again by the Internet and its profound effects on commerce.

“Almost overnight, the Internet turned shoeboxes full of cards into stuff for sale,” Fauth said.

This influx turned once-rare cards into easy finds and caused prices to fluctuate. As an example, Fauth pointed to the 1975 rookie card for Kansas City Royals slugger George Brett. He explained that 20 years ago, the number of places where one could hope to find such a card were fairly limited.

“You can go home tonight and go on Ebay and buy 30 or 40 George Brett rookie cards,” Fauth said. “The scarcity is gone to a big extent.”

Fauth said the majority of his customers now are people who are into collecting as a hobby, not a business. It’s a first-name-basis kind of place with a lot of regular patrons.

Fauth's knowledge is encyclepidic. Whether he's explaining the story behind the scarcity of baseball's rarest card—the Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card from 1952—or talking about what drives price fluctuations, it's clear he is in his element.

And he hasn’t stopped collecting, either. Despite the Internet, cards from the early 1970s or earlier, so-called “vintage cards,” are still rare. He’s completed baseball sets from 1963 and 1965 and is currently focused on finishing up one from 1960.

The sense of reward when you find that final card, Fauth said, is part of what he enjoys about the hobby. So what will he do when he completes 1960?

“I’ll focus on my ’64 set,” he said.

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