Article: Baseball cards billion-dollar business

Any kid lucky enough to have a Frank Thomas baseball card from the White Sox player's rookie season knows he's sitting on a gold mine. And kids as young as 8 will be ripping open millions of packages of new cards this spring hoping they'll discover '92's hottest rookie inside.

It's no longer just the simple rite of passage for American boys, who collected and traded baseball cards - and put them on the spokes of their bikes to make them sound like motorcycles. Now cards are big business.

The top four names - Topps, Upper Deck, Donruss and Fleer - in trading cards dominate a market worth $1.6 billion in annual retail sales. That's just the simple packs of cards that sell for 55 cents to ...

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