Any Baseball Cards Fans Here?

[Amatino]

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/2317109051934674/

For those who don’t have FB,

38000 plus baseball, football, and basket ball cards including the rare 1991 Topps 40 years of baseball (desert shield) series with 3 of the top ten cards worth over $2000 if you have them graded, #5 Ken Griffy Jr, #270 Mark McGwire *error* card and #130 Ozzy Smith and many other valuable cards in this set. Majority of the cards are in tiffany condition

She’s asking $2,000

[Jay]

I always feel when people try to tell me what something they’re selling is worth, then it’s usually not as good as they say.

I dont trust this way of selling because if its so great, why doesnt she do it?

[Retro Treasures WV]

Yeah…a very quick check on ebay shows that this lady is full of crap.

The average for the Ken Griffey is $140 for a PSA 9 grade and it goes down from there. One 10 (which there is NO way this ladies poorly stored cards will get a 10) sold for $1360 but that is an anomaly.

The McGwire card – $70 if you are lucky.
The Ozzy smith got $491 for a PSA 10. In reality you’d get maybe $10-20 for it.

[MDC Galleries & Fine Art]

Dead on RTWV. No way to store cards at all. Those binder folder sleeves are bad to slide cards in and out of. They catch and flake-chip the paper and ink printed edges and create surface scuff marks by sliding them in and out, even if only done a few times. At a card show dealers will not look at most 3 ring binders or if they do, they flip through them real fast and try to spot a very old card, which they can do in a heart beat.Will mess up a cards grading in a heartbeat.

My neighbor solicited me to list a lot of cards for him years ago. He was a “professional collector” and brick and mortar store owner. He taught me to grade cards and with my printing back ground I taught him a few things also. Centering, too much ink on the printing plates, how the cards are cut with a die cutter [clam shell or roll] or guillotine cut [worst method]. How to check of color alignment, then the over all centering which is usually thrown off during the cutting process, front and back alignment to each other, paper content, fading [color brightness] and I could still add a few more.

Most cards after 1970 are worthless and doesn’t matter who they are.

Cards kept in “wax packs” and original boxes and cartons can have some added value.

Now comes the test. Most cards to hold a higher value in the real collector market place need to be graded, preferrably by PSA, slabbed [sealed in clear cases, and contain a PSA Grade of 7 or higher and many collectors only go for 9 to 10’s for the bigger dollards.

Anybody can have their cards graded and slabbed. BUT … PSA has a minimum amount they allow to be sent in, takes weeks for them to do it and they cost $5, $10 or $15 each to have done and less with larger quantities.

Most cards in albums are the $.99 each variety especially from 1980 forward.

AS RT says.. you may get lucky with a few in the $50 range, the others even lotting them together you won’t get more than a few bucks.

Mu friends professional advice is check to see when the next local trade card sports memorabelia show happens in your area. Then take everything down to the show, put them on a hand truck and go dealer to dealer and see who will give you the most for the whole, ding-dang lot.

I went with him a few times and and I saw attendees at the show doing exactly that. Pulling boxes of cards in binders and what they call penny sleeves around in wagons, grocery carts, up right dollies trying to dump what they thought was their retirement plan only to sell thousands of cards for a few hundred dollars.

Now slabbed, graded PSA and BCS cards in the grade 9 and ten, the dealers will put those out on their tables and take a look and may make an offer.

So good luck..

mike at MDCGFA in Atlanta

[Antique Frog]

Thanks Mike- I’m never likely to see one baseball card let alone a truck-full, but it’s good to learn!

I suppose there’s a miniature version of U-Haul, renting out carts to the retirees and divorcees.

[Amatino]

Wow! I’m so glad I shared the post instead of contacting the seller! I didn’t know it was so complicated. Thanks for the input!

Now, back to another topic we’ve had on this forum, do I go back to the lady and share this info, or just leave well alone? I think I’ll leave it alone. I don’t know her and she might not appreciate me “degrading” her sale price.

[Jay]

These kind of sellers arent looking for feedback IMHO. They think they’re giving you a good deal.

[Antique Frog]

Ha! I know the answer to that! Keep shtum.

[Steves Stuff]

If 3 of the cards are worth over $2K, she’d have them graded herself. I learned many years ago that sports cards are generally worthless. I see people struggling to get $10 a box for them all the time. Even $5 is a hard sell. Sure, there are some very rare examples worth a mint. But the odds of ever coming across one in the wild is like hitting the lottery.

Personally, I wouldn’t even consider it. You’ll be storing them for years to come. Shipping makes them impractical to sell online. And local buyers aren’t going to want them unless you’re about giving them away.

15-20 years ago, a guy I knew was spending thousands of dollars a month “investing in” sports cards. Now he looks at his room FULL of cards and his heart sinks. He threw away a fortune (a huge inheritance sum) on what is essentially paper Beanie Babies that he’ll never get remotely close to recovering, let alone make money off of.

[Steves Stuff]

I somehow missed that you posted a link. Wow, that’s a pretty “small” collection (compared to many I’ve seen for sale on Facebook for much less money. My gut tells me you’d have a hard time even getting $150 for it all unless there actually are some gems in there and you really know what you’re doing. Comic books and sports cards are 2 niches that you’ll almost always lose your butt on unless your really know the material and understand the subtleties of grading very well.

Even then, unless they’re professionally graded (which, in my opinion, is a money wasting racket in most cases), you’ll never get what they’re “worth”. If they’re worth anything at all. And I doubt there are many gems in the 1980’s – early 2000’s date range. But I know nothing about sports cards, so I may be wrong.

[craig rex]

Trading cards and memorabilia are one of my main niches, so I am really happy to see this thread. I want to offer some general knowledge that probably won’t be practically useful to most of you. It’s true that most 80s/90s cards (the stuff you see on FB and Craigslist) are usually worthless because card manufacturers cranked up the printing presses. This was the era of local card shops in every town and shop at home salesmen like Don West. The focus was on full sets and “investing” in the new, hot rookie card. While there are occasional rookies that have held their value (Michael Jordan’s iconic Fleer rookie card the most notable), you can buy most of the best rookies from the 80s and 90s — even well-known, Hall of Fame types — for the cost of a burger, maybe a burger and fries.

But there are still valuable cards from this period. Valuable 80s and 90s cards typically fit one of two categories: obscure sets (like those given out at minor league stadiums or redemeed through the mail) or rare error cards. For example, earlier this year, there was a brief surge in interest in a basketball card of Mark Jackson because the Menendez Brothers were in the background of the photo.

Starting in the mid-90s (roughly around 1995), card collecting became less focused around finding the hot rookie or collating the entire set and more like gambling. This was because of the introduction of unusual inserts, cards inserted 1 in every x packs. The longer your odds, the more interesting the card would be. The first embellishments in the late 90s included autographs, pieces of player’s jersey in the card, and foil designs, often with serial numbers.

Today, the “hot” insert cards contain a giant piece of uniform (the most desired? a piece of a shirt tag or the team’s logo) or a piece of lab-made diamond or hunk of silver. The more expensive boxes cost in the thousands and only contain a few cards — all the “junk” cards are gone, and it’s nothing but autographs and other special cards. It’s a strange, weird world where prices fluctuate, sometimes wildly, based on hype or an outstanding individual performance. Though there are a lot of speculators buying and selling cards today, most collectors are in the hobby because it reminds them of good childhood memories or helps them feel a kinship with the team they root for. I would say collectors have more money than sense (these are just pieces of cardboard after all), but you could say the same about almost anything we buy and sell.

All that aside, it’s an understatement to say that the best 90s insert cards are still in demand to certain collectors 20 years later. Look up ‘1997 precious metal gems’ sold listings on eBay and you’ll see what I mean. If you run that search, you might notice that many of the sold listings are not professionally graded, contrary to what conventional wisdom about cards might tell you. Grading has its own controversies. I could go on for another five paragraphs, but this NY Times article is a good summary.

For whatever it’s worth, I don’t even bother looking for cards on Craigslist, flea markets, etc. There’s more than enough cards to buy and sell on eBay and there are always new sets being released and sold and re-sold. Card shops may be all but dead, but the card industry is still very much thriving.

[Jay]

Thanks Craig Rex for the insight. I had no idea that this is how baseball cards worked. It is strange when collectibles just becomes about investment opportunities. Like all those commercials about the Franklin Mint back in the 1980s for the junk they sold.

[Author]

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