The baseball card also doesn't give you ownership of the baseball player, or over the photograph or stats of that player.
You can copy the photograph and stats as much as you want (the player not so much ;)), but the card still stays the card.
So conceptually: the NFT doesn't refer to the baseball card, it is the baseball card. Baseball card refers to something real, but doesn't take ownership of that thing. NFT refers to something real, but doesn't take ownership of that thing.
I think I might be close to getting it. But with a baseball card, I control the baseball card. Right? With the NFT, I have no control over the resource linked to from the NFT. If that server goes away, doesn't the thing that provided NFTs its value also go away? Its like if someone scratched off the photo from my baseball card, doesn't that baseball card become valueless at that point?
Continuing with the analogy you can own a rare baseball card of an all star player but many other people also own it. With NFT there is (usually) one and only one owner so it’s like there is only one card that have been produced. For instance check what they did with the NBA and dunks. They are selling short videos of every dunk. So there is only one possible owner of a dunk sold. That’s it. So only one guy own the one of the best dunk of Michael Jordan.
That feels like these websites that have a list of stars with names associated with them. Sure, people do pay to be in those lists, but it feels a bit scamy.
NFT and baseball cards are both pointers: they point to something you don't control. You control the pointer, not the thing they point to.
So if we can agree that the card has value because "it's about Honus Wagner", and not really about the picture on the card, then NFT's and those cards are very similar.
But on the other hand, you could indeed claim that the card has value because of the picture itself.
But I still feel the picture on the card is really to act as a pointer, and not about providing value in itself. Because I would think that in that case, a real picture, or a bigger picture, or the original photographic film would be worth more.
So in the end, the baseball card also doesn't become valueless when the player dies.
That is just a bad implementation of NFTs. Take a look at the Flow blockchain for example, which is probably the most famous NFT blockchain out there. They store all metadata in the token itself.
It's not fair to discuss NFT's by only looking at a bad implementation. Metadata is stored on-chain.
You can copy the photograph and stats as much as you want (the player not so much ;)), but the card still stays the card.
So conceptually: the NFT doesn't refer to the baseball card, it is the baseball card. Baseball card refers to something real, but doesn't take ownership of that thing. NFT refers to something real, but doesn't take ownership of that thing.