Baseball cards I think my generation (10-12 year olds) was the last generation that grew up with baseball cards or any sports trading cards of any sort. When I was that age you could go into virtually any store of any type and find baseball cards somewhere, usually sitting near the checkout aisles. (Other sports you'd see occasionally too, but baseball was by far the most prominent).
Then, around the mid-90's they started to slowly disappear, now you almost never see them at all. I could guess what happened, like with a number of things, was that the big card manufacturers saw the dollar signs and started ratcheting up the gimmicks (and the prices) thinking that people would follow. Either that, or they saw the downward trend in buying cards and decided that was the only way they could make money. Either way, the market became overpopulated with special-effects and gimmick cards that pretty much priced your average 10-year old out of the market, and your average 10-year old began not to care.
It's kind of a sad thing, really, since the tradition of baseball cards goes back to the early 20th century, and survived in its traditional state for a very long time, but like a lot of things just got squeezed out of the technological age. I'm sure I stil lhave a lot of my old cards, mostly from the early 90's, I have a lot of my brothers' cards from the 70s and 80s as well. Heck, I still remember the night my brother took me to buy the complete 1989 Topps set and we arranged them in a folder in alphabetical order.
"You can't go home, there's nothing left." Indeed.
12:11:53 AM 
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