By: Liz Farmer

In case you haven’t seen it, the National Sports Collectors Convention at the Baltimore Convention Center, which I wrote about on Tuesday,  had a little visitor. For the third year in a row FBI investigators used the industry’s largest annual event to further their investigation into claims of fraud, counterfeiting and shill bidding.

I stopped by the convention center Friday afternoon to check out how business was going for dealers and to see if the FBI dampened interest at all.

In a nutshell, the response was “FB-what?” None of the attendees I talked to had heard of the years-long investigation into the hobby industry (I’ll admit, neither had I until I saw the news story) and just about every booth I passed had at least three or four people sifting through products. Bill Huggins, of Huggins & Scott Auctions in Silver Spring, said business has been steady and that he’d bought and sold several select items already that day.

In response to the FBI investigation, he said one thing the industry could use is a national association. Since the first convention 30 years ago, he said sports collecting has gone from a hobby to a full-blown industry with no national oversight. He said forming a national association has been tried twice in the past but that coordinating thousands of dealers and collectors was no simple feat.

Huggins added it was likely a national association could be set up for auction houses, as it’s much easier to get the dozen or so across the country to agree on terms than it is to get thousands of dealers to reach a majority.

On another note, these dealers definitely know their audience. Much of the memorabilia is baseball-related and heavily favors the American League East teams. So if you’re looking for Orioles memorabilia, look no further. Dealers have everything from World Series collectibles to Cal Ripken Jr. minor league baseball cards.

Speaking of Ripken, he’ll be at the convention on Saturday and his autograph session is scheduled for noon. Of course if you wanted to skip the line and save some money you can just buy an autographed (and authenticated) baseball from a dealer for about $30 to $40 less.

But where’s the fun in that?