They have been a part of sports since the turn of the century, adorning bedroom walls, college dorms, and locker room hallways in such a spirited fashion that when a team captures a championship, it's called winning the pennant. But the recent volatility of the memorabilia market has taken such a toll on pennant collecting that the 1997 world champion Florida Marlins didn't have a commemorative wool flag made. The folks at WinCraft, which holds licenses with all the major sports for producing pennants, had so little retail interest in the Marlins' championship that even a limited production run of just 1,500 pennants would have been a difficult sell. This is not to say collecting pennants is good, bad, or indifferent. But there's likely never been a better time to jump into that aspect of memorabilia because prices are low, product availability high, and the novelty of the hobby still extreme.
Pennants are a curious element of sports memorabilia.
Pennants suffer from natural imperfections that would make other collectibles damaged, like having pinholes for hanging the pennant. The condition of any collectible is important. All older pennants are somewhat dirty and fading. Most actually should have pinholes where they've been displayed, and should have some paint cracking. A good older pennant would almost be expected to have some of these 'character' marks.