Above is a collection of sports cards for sale by owner Joe Van Auken, an antique dealer at the Lawrence Antique Mall, 830 Mass.

If you are looking for baseball cards in Lawrence — and odds are you’re not — good luck.

Calls to toy stores and hobby lobbies looking for the elusive deck of names and faces and the occasional piece of stale gum are fruitless.

Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the only places selling them in town is the Lawrence Antique Mall — antique being the operative word.

The great age of baseball collecting may be definitely over. You are much more likely to find a group of adolescents discussing their latest Wii purchase rather than who got a rookie card in their box this week.

There are still collectors around, but according to craigslist.com, most in the Kansas City metro area are seeking to sell rather than buy. The prices range from $1 per card to $7,500 for an entire collection.

Antiques dealer Bethany Willetts, 76, has warnings for those hoping to make big profits with their baseball card sales. She sells cards at the antique mall, 830 Mass.

“It’s not something you’re going to get rich at,” Willetts says.

Baseball cards are just one of the items you will find at her booth, but they are one of the cheapest considering they typically sell for 10 to 25 cents. Her more expensive cards are kept locked away in a case, and they range from $3 to $20.

In the past, she would sell a dozen per week, but now she might not move any cards for two weeks or more. She says while most serious collectors these days are older, children notice her cards the most.

“The younger kids (want the cards), but generally, their parents say no,” she says. “It’s the college kids and younger adults, and I have some people that buy that are older. I would say it runs a gamut from teenagers to older people.”

Joseph Cool, 58, has collected cards for about 25 years. However, his interest began to wane starting with the infamous baseball strike of 1994.

His collection is now up for trade on craigslist. Rather than selling the cards, he has offered to trade them for old U.S. coins.

Cool originally started collecting with his son. He says they would even participate in card shows with other card collectors.

All of his baseball card buddies have since stopped collecting. Cool blames the strike as the beginning of the downfall of the American pastime. But he says the card-making companies themselves, such as Topps and Upper Deck, also contributed to the waning interest in the hobby.

“My opinion is that they made too many cards to easy to get,” he says. “It used to be you couldn’t get rare cards. They weren’t easy to get. They were probably one in 10 boxes or so, and now they’re like three to a box. It’s not as interesting — not as fun trying to get one now.”

There are, however, a few collectors out there trying to create a new hype for card collecting. It all has to do with the most exciting part of the whole process — opening a new box of cards for the first time or box breaking.

Rick Dalesandro, the owner of a card shop in New Jersey, has helped revolutionize the art of box breaking through his Web site www.theBackstop.net and YouTube channel featuring the Doctor Wax Battle Show.

Dr. Wax Battle is Dalesandro’s wig-, tie-dye-shirt and sunglasses-wearing alter-ego who hosts the live box break shows. His channel proves there are still collectors out there as it currently has more than 240,000 views. A year ago Dr. Wax Battle gave his “State of the Hobby Address” discussing the new trends in collecting.

“It won’t be long before a collector in Tokyo, one in Canada, Jersey, New York, Florida, anywhere — they’ll be able to open boxes simultaneously with each other and trade in real time as if they were on that stoop like in old times,” he says.

With video chatting programs like Skype, that time is now.

Brad Wilson, who works at Sports Dome, 1000 Mass., has noticed another Internet tie-in.

The younger generation is being targeted by new card Web sites with a social networking feel.

One such is UpperDeckU.com. Registration is free, but in order to get “inside access,” you have to buy packs of Upper Deck Sports Cards for “exclusive Insider Access Codes.”

This Internet marketing tool could mark a turn around for the fading hobby — maybe it’s not over after all.