Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Beckett Baseball Card Monthly is dead. Long live the new price guide.

They've been saying for months that things were going to change in 2008. Well, I guess Beckett wasn't kidding around.


I'm sad to see the monthly mag go (especially since I've been a subscriber since '92). But the state of The Hobby no longer justifies a monthly single-sport price guide.

How does this effect current Beckett subscribers? I have no idea yet.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a helluva headline, bro!

As a monthly, you are correct, it's no longer as of April. It's now six times a year and now includes all of the mammoth pricing pages from Beckett Baseball PLUS.

dayf said...

So they killed off all the monthlies, turned them into Tuff Stuff and are going to charge two bucks more per issue than Tuff Stuff to Boot. Yeah, good luck with that.

I like that Baseball Plus will be every other month instead of quarterly, although I'll believe more editorial content when I see it. There's not a whole lot of articles in the monthlies to start with and a couple of recent issues read like a Donruss press release anyway.

The Baseball Card Snob said...

Well, I guess when my subscription is done it's done. I don't need all the extra crap, I only want BB. I pick up one plus a year, only because it lists many more cards and I do a lot of trading of cards you won't find in monthly.

No great loss, the monthly has been garbage for about 8 months now.

I get more information from the various websites (including you Chris) than I do from Beckett anyway.

Steve Gierman said...

I started subscribing in May 2007 after years of being out of collecting. I picked up an odd issue occasionally since 2006. I subscribed because I liked the content and the direction the magazine was headed in.

I have grave concerns about the direction the magazine is headed in now. The prospect of bi-monthly for something that changes frequently is disturbing to me. This seems like laziness to me. I always wondered why there were die-cast racing prices at the back of the Beckett Baseball, now I know why. It was a test run.

It may sound selfish, but I don't want to share a baseball magazine with other sports. It cheapens the magazine. I hope the online counterpart is updated more frequently than six times a year. Beckett should do away with the "New Release Pricing" and give that feature free.

I don't like what I'm hearing so far, but prove me wrong Beckett.

Anonymous said...

I would occasionally purchase a Beckett Baseball monthly, and have very little interst in the multisport edition. My concern is that very little changes from one issue to another, or from one year to another, other than the articles which are nothing but fluff. I believe the hobby will survive, but with Beckett for sale again I'm not sure they will.