Opening Baseball Cards for All the World to See

By JOSHUA ROBINSON

TOMS RIVER, N.J. — The little baseball card shop off Route 37 checks off all the boxes a little baseball card shop should. Autographed jerseys line the walls above display cases full of Brooklyn Dodgers and aging Yankees. The shelves hang heavy with clear sleeves, signed baseballs and boxes of cards that span decades of obscure players.
But in the back of the room, beyond the cash register and another set of cases, the owner Rick Dalesandro squeezed in a makeshift recording studio — a folding table, a camera on a tripod, a microphone and a couple of mixers. And that is where he made himself into more than just another collector. Sitting at the white table in 2003, he first carved out a niche by inviting the world to join him as he opened packs of baseball cards.
Six years later, spurred on by the meteoric rise of YouTube, thousands of collectors are doing the same. From children who struggle to pronounce the names of all the players to serious experts looking to trade, people are cracking open packs and boxes in front of a camera and sharing the moment with anyone who will watch.
A YouTube search for “baseball card break” — most collectors refer to these openings as breaks — returned more than 8,000 results.
“When you’re in a card store and you’re opening up a box of cards, I don’t care who’s in the store, they’re all waiting to see what you’re going to get,” said Dalesandro, 45.
“They want to see, are you getting the big card, are you getting the rookie?”
Video seemed to be the logical next step. And soon, the practice grew some personality. At one end of the spectrum, teenagers open packs in front of a Webcam as they stammer through names — Jarrod Saltalamacchia was particularly troublesome for one fan who went by the YouTube handle balOs1234. At the other are people like Dalesandro, who created an Internet alter ego for his site, thebackstop.net.
Wearing a frizzy black wig, shades and zany tie-dye costumes, Dalesandro has branded himself as Dr. Wax Battle and invented a universe of characters and plotlines around him. He has more than 450 videos on YouTube, with several reaching 20,000 views, and each involves a box break.
The manufacturers are well aware of Dalesandro and others like him. Clay Luraschi, the director for product development at Topps, said the company embraced the trend.
“It’s free exposure,” Luraschi said. “Some people may be on the fence and then they make their decisions based on what they see. There’s some mystery with baseball cards — it’s the only product I can think of where you don’t know what you’re buying — and that translates very well to video.”
For Chris Palmieri in Minneapolis, YouTube radically changed what he called “group breaks,” in which several collectors pool their money to buy higher-end products and divide up the cards based on various team allegiances. Until video became an option, Palmieri went through the same time-consuming motions as thousands of other collectors, opening boxes and scanning the cards into his computer one by one.
But in the past year and a half, he has been able to record the breaks and involve collectors from as far as Japan and Sweden. Broadcasting from the “card room” in his house last week, he conducted a three-day break in which he opened 38 boxes of cards worth more than $9,000, while the dealings occurred on a parallel message board on his Boxbreakers Web site.
“It’s the same thing as a lottery ticket or a casino,” said Palmieri, 42, who works at an airline call center. “Everybody gets something, and more times than not, they won’t make their money back. But that’s not the point of it. It’s the possibility of what might be in there.”
Most of the regulars in Palmieri’s group are men between 30 and 60, and one woman. Although serious collecting has been priced out of reach of the children and teenagers who typically buy baseball cards, YouTube has allowed them to show some enthusiasm for the hobby, if only by sharing their collections and the thrill of opening a pack.
With cracking voices and blurry cameras, they take viewers through the entire experience of tearing open a pack, flipping over the cards and figuring out which ones belong in frames and how many will end up in a shoebox.
Those videos certainly have none of the production values of the Dr. Wax Battle show or, indeed, Robert Fourriel’s informational Rip and Pull show. Based in Los Angeles, Fourriel has produced 36 videos in the 10-minute range with the most popular episodes drawing more than 8,000 views. Each takes him as long as a week to make because of editing.
But his philosophy is neither about collecting nor sharing. He calls his videos a “product review show” in which he opens boxes, flashes the cards and discusses their merits to collectors. At one time, he owned more than a million cards.
“I just like to give back to the hobby that gave to me all these years,” Fourriel said.
Originally, he had to buy the cards with his own money, but with some boxes costing several hundred dollars — and only so many Robin Ventura cards for his personal collection — Fourriel had to reach out to sponsors. Now, with the help of a few charitable individuals and a couple of manufacturers, he is able to keep the show going.
As for the potential conflict of interest that comes with reviewing products supplied directly by the manufacturers, Fourriel said he had never suspected anyone of sending him a box loaded with better cards than normal.
“If you watch the show, you’ll see,” he said. “I get some serious bum boxes. But it’s like gambling. You put the money down and you see what you get out of it.”
Actually, everyone can see what you get out of it.

Opening Baseball....