Effect of Hockey Lockout and Baseball Strikes
The 1994 Major League Baseball strike and 1994-95 hockey lockout and the accompanying damage to the baseball card industry hit O-Pee-Chee particularly hard. The company announced that it would leave the card business and refocus its efforts on candy. However a number of changing circumstances have kept them in the card business as well as candy.
The 1994-95 hockey season would be the last for O-Pee-Chee as a full company, though the Topps marketing arrangement would keep the name alive. In 1996, O-Pee-Chee was bought by Nestlé Corporation. In 1995-96, Topps included O-Pee-Chee cards in its signature product as a parallel set. It would do the same in 1998-99 when it returned to the NHL market after a two-year hiatus. Later that year, O-Pee-Chee was re-introduced fully, as Topps used the company name for its Chrome set. One year later, O-Pee-Chee would once again have a base brand set.
O-Pee-Chee cards would continue to be produced through the 2003-04 hockey season. Prior to the start of what would have been the 2004-05 season, the NHL and NHLPA did not renew hockey-card licenses with the Topps Company (as well as In The Game or Pacific Trading Cards). Instead, the hockey market entered an exclusive five-year agreement with the Upper Deck Company to produced licensed NHL cards.
In 2006, Upper Deck entered into an agreement with O-Pee-Chee to revive the O-Pee-Chee brand. Upper Deck's initial O-Pee-Chee Hockey product was released during the 2006-07 season.
Vintage O-Pee-Chee cards are much sought-after today for their market value, and cards for popular players command high prices.
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Famous quotes containing the words effect of, effect, baseball and/or strikes:
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)