This is not what you think.  I’m not sending out another warning to be aware of counterfeit tickets being offered on places like eBay and Craig’s List. Although, to borrow a phrase from Hill Street Blues, and date myself in the process, “Be careful out there.” This is more a cautionary alert about ticket condition as the years tick by.
Many sports and concert tickets suffer from fading because they were printed using a “thermal” process. There are actually two types of thermal printing: direct thermal and thermal transfer. And, although, companies that use these processes claim that thermal printing can be “archival” in nature, I would be especially careful when displaying these items or when shopping for a particularly rare ticket item on the Internet.  Thermal printing is extremely vulnerable to bright light, contact with heat sources, and to a certain extent, age.  Ultraviolet rays from the sun, photo flashes, and even the overhead light in your home will, over time, cause the thermal printing on the face of the ticket to fade. In fact, thermal printing is doomed to some effects of fading over time regardless of your best efforts to protect the item. Remember how the old fax machine paper used to turn a muddled brown after a while? That’s one example of the downside of thermal printing.
Typically, thermal printing in the sports/concert ticket process involves so-called “point of sale” tickets. It’s designed to cut costs by not actually printing the date/section/row/seat information on the face of the ticket until it’s actually sold at the gate or by a third party vendor such as Ticketmaster or Ticketron. And, this includes Ticket Master-style tickets that carry full color team logos on the base paper; even if the paper portion is printed in the non-thermal “four-color” process, and even if special inks were used as part of the security process.  (FYI- you are less likely to run into thermal printing with a team’s “season” ticket booklets, but that’s not a guarantee.)
I mention all this because, in recent weeks, I have seen a number of tickets for sale on various Internet sites and auctions that clearly show the damaging effects of “thermal” fading of the ticket information.  A potential buyer needs to look very closely at any ticket he wishes to purchase for its keepsake value. It really helps if a buyer can make a visual comparison of the printing on two or more tickets on the web site. But, any obvious fading of the printed ticket information or browning of the paper should be a red flag to the buyer that this a ticket that has been negatively impacted by light or heat, or both.

Folks who shop around on eBay for baseball-related memorabilia are probably familiar with items in the so-called Topps Vault – the on-line auction sales arm of the Topps Company.

The “Vault” originated as a way for Topps to effectively clear out old photos, negatives, proofs for sports cards, and so on, from its six decades of existence. I imagine it has been fairly popular among the collector crowd and fairly lucrative for Topp$!!!

But, we’re concerned that once all the “old stuff” has been cleared out of the Vault, Topps will find a need to create “new stuff” to stuff the Vault to keep the cash cow alive. An example of this is now available on eBay: 2011 Topps Baseball 1/1 blank backs that have been created “exclusively” for Topps Vault/eBay auctions. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with Topps electing to manufacture a licensed MLB product and sell it in any legal manner it chooses. We have to assume these 2011 1/1′s are “licensed” because the licensing information is missing since these cards were purposely created with blank backs.

Naturally, we ask, where does it end?

The proof cards and all of the other Vault items from years past were of a truly limited variety. Former Topps executive, Sy Berger, has lamented on many occasions the decision to dump the now extremely rare and valuable 1952 Topps Baseball high number series cards in the trash to avoid a storage issue. This, of course, happened 30 years before the baseball card industry caught fire. Now, the folks at any card manufacturer are acutely aware of the potential value of any product they create; especially proofs, prototypes, samples, wrong backs, blank backs, etc. Unlike 60 years ago, there has to be strong temptation to create the prototypes knowing that there is a potentially large market out there for these “limited” editions; some of which would be best classified as printer’s scrap. Somehow, it doesn’t seem right for any licensed manufacturer to purposely create and sell cards that, in reality, should join the ’52 Topps high series in the New York City dump.

Insightful commentary about baseball cards and the ins and outs of sports memorabilia.