Comments on: Dealing With Those Piles Of Old Baseball Cards In Your Closet

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:26:51 +0000

If we get enough people to just throw them away, they might be worth .02 per card in 10 years!

By: joker55

joker55 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:52:24 +0000

All these good players and there cards gone to waste 80s and 90s. Over print run sucks

By: jerry

jerry — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:03:50 +0000

I took my whole collection from basically 86-90 and i had a ton. But like most say, these were all garbage. So i gathered them all up, approximately 30,000+ cards and took them to the local auction. I was hoping for alot, but knowing $100 would have been generous. Low and behold at the end of the auction i got a check for $280. I was like yeahhhh!! So i went home and got on ebay and bought a NICE 1975 topps set. I thought now thats a nice trade.

By: avy

avy — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:22:45 +0000

Thanks for the memories. I m from montreal, canada I collected 1980 opeeche sticker albums and cards from 1980 to 1989. Im 34 now and I remember playingknockdowns and collecting leaf in ts entirety because it was new to me. Travels to mew york and vermont, maine, I got to see fleer and topps making no connection and still no values. By 88 I saw a beckett and learned of store owners and the way they manipulate and remember the crash in 87. So I also collected and preached of a crash in baseball cards…why? because of score and upper deck and the later me too companies or spin offs (cards jumped the shark). Old cards will go up up up

By: ajay

ajay — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:11:26 +0000

nice topic…hit a note from the past I would love to share – I remember collecting cards in 81 I’m from montreal, 34 now and back then all i could get was o-pee-chee. In 1985 I collected a complete leaf set having no idea where it came from but it was a welcome. I travelled to vermont and new york state often and picked up these weird cards with names like topps and fleer. I had collected sticker albums in completion of both hockey and basebal, again o-pee-chee from 80-89. In 1986 for the first time a friend showed me a magazine called beckett and it listed values for cards! Something totally out of mind for me. I had either collected or played knock downs with these things and it was like living in the past in canada compared to the us because there really isnt much a sports craze in montreal except for hockey seeing as our expos are in your state capital now. So from 1987 – 1988, having played tee ball at age 4 and in baseball leagues then on to the age of 25, I was an avid fan of baseball cards. I went to shows I had common cards from 1909…complete sets, rookies, I even bought 1 pack of 1984 donruss hoping for mattingly and getting strawberry and the store owner (a rip off artist to kids and a lesson in guide values and real values) offered me guide value and I bought a 5$ Case watching it go up slowly. By 88 – score came out. I had by then understood the connection of all the comapanies and read about upper deck and then the amount of cards entering reminded me of the us stock market crash. The valuation was screwed up and even at 13 years old I got this. I sold everything and preached a crash and ever since I love someone who agrees…

By: Mara Cain

Mara Cain — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:09:58 +0000

I sent a question about this very thing a few weeks ago. I have decided to donate the thousands of cards my husband left when he passed away. Someone may get a kick out of them and a charity will benefit as well.
Thanks for a great article!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:50:42 +0000

I have a couple decent cards – Ozzie Smith rookie among them, but I should probably go your route and get rid of them. I think they’re at my parent’s house somewhere though, so that might take some digging. I remember trading and having “baseball card shows” in our garage as a kid.

I read an article once that said my Don Mattingly rookie would be worth enough by 2000 to buy a Porsche. Needless to say, I’m not driving a Porsche right now. Was there a baseball card bubble in the early 90s?

By: cha

cha — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:40:54 +0000

I have been reading all the posts and i am more depressed then before i read them it is about 1 yr later and I to have a 5000 count box and 1988 uncut sheet of baseball cards the or worthless. I started collecting them for my son when he was 2 yrs old. I dont have the heart to tell him that they are worthless now….ohhh the money i spent back then well maybe in another 20+ yrs they will be worth something for his kids

By: willie

willie — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:12:58 +0000

The card shows sell all these cards real cheap. If these dealers sold these cards more than book value, the cards would go up each month.The card shows are hurting the value of these cards. Get rid of all the card shows and sell on line. Then the cards would be worth money.

By: Amy

Amy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:21:17 +0000

My dad left me over prolly 2000 baseball cards when he passed away.well im trying to buy a house and i know he would rather see the money spent wisly. But i have no idea were to go or how to talk to ..i have some from my dads dad back in the 50’s i have no idea what they are worth ..SOMEONE PLEASE HELP

By: Angus

Angus — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:38:03 +0000

It was basketball for me, right in the middle of the Instant Superstar days of the early 90’s. I was looking through some of my cards the other day and saw tons of Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, Shawn Bradley, Jamal Mashburn…yeah, THAT worked out great. Even the Shaq cards aren’t worth that much.

By: Troy

Troy — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:56:15 +0000

I am trying to find out how much my baseball cards are worth, I have 3 huge boxes and don’t know where to start. Some have already been filed into a few card books… Where do I go that is honest????

By: Don

Don — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:20:05 +0000

Instead of throwing your cards out, you could contact a disabled sports league (such as the Buddy League in Garland Texas), or a hospital that takes care of children with debilitating illnesses (like Scottish Rite in Dallas Texas), and they may be happy to take some off your hands.

By: Abel

Abel — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:37:50 +0000

Same here i must have thousnds of cards from 1981 to 1992 and goin through them now , picking out all the Griffey”s Bonds, Clemens, Majic, Jordan,Gretsky and the probably donating the rest to the local Boys club, alott of work .

By: gloria

gloria — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:29:51 +0000

I remember my dad getting them for me and not letting me open them. I nver wanted them but he said when I turned about 20 they would be worth $$, 24 and no money. I just pulled them out earlier today and have no clue what to do with them

By: Rick

Rick — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:48:21 +0000

Will Clark was always my favorite as well (since he played at Mississippi State, my alma-mater). That 1987 Topps card is still my favorite! I have just a handful of cards that are worth keeping (again, for nostalgia), but the rest probably aren’t worth keeping.

By: Tammy

Tammy — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 16:14:04 +0000

The one collection I actually made good money off of was Disney videotapes. Way back when, when I used to be librarian, I always bought all the Disney movies when they came out on video – at library prices (usually about 30-50% of retail). I bought them thinking I’d keep them until the day my husband and I had kids… well, we never had kids, and I got tired of carting around all these videos. Many were unopened. Most hadn’t been watched more than once. All still in their nice pretty clamshells.

I sold them on eBay back in the late 90’s and made a BUNDLE – especially off some that were no longer available on video.

My husband used to be an avid collector of football cards. He’s spent far more than he ever made selling them. :-(
When he realized that most would end up worthless, he quit…

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:12:58 +0000

I still have all of my cards.For awhile my best friend and I went to a lot of ball games to get autographs. I’ve got 300 signed cards – some of them from Hall of Famers or future Hall of Famers.

I know the monetary value of my cards (also from the same era :)…) are not worth much. But one day I would love my children to have the opportunity to got through them and hold a Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken, or Greg Maddux card. I have kept all of my cards, and usually once or twice a year I will buy a pack of the newest Topps cards that come out. I don’t ever do it as an investment. I do it for the nostalgia. :)

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:31:35 +0000

I think there’s a larger lesson about collecting as a hobby or as an investment. I, too, collected baseball cards in the late 80s (both as a hobby and as an investment). When this hobby became “hot,” and it became clear that there was money in it, a lot of people started collecting and the card companies were cranking out the cards by the millions. Consequently, there are very few rare cards or sets from the mid-80s on, and thus they are not worth much.

Also, more card companies popped up (Upper Deck, Bowman, Sportflicks) in order to get in on the action, and the existing 3 major card companies (Topps, Donruss and Fleer) started making more and more sets in order to increase their sales, resulting in a completely saturated market. I remember looking in Beckett Monthly in the early 90s and counting over 100 sets for one year. It couldn’t even be a fun hobby anymore since the the goal of collecting a set (or the 3 different sets) was gone. If you liked a certain player, were you expected to collect 100 different cards of that player each year? It was ridiculous. So the hobby of collecting new cards was dead as far I was concerned, and the investment potential pretty much died with it.

Anyway, to get back to the lesson, this same thing seems to happen every few years. Remember when Beanie Babies were hot? It’s possible to make a few dollars on these fads in the short term, but treating them as a long-term investment just doesn’t work. Pretty soon the supply far exceeds the demand, and you end up with a closet full of baseball cards or Beanie Babies that nobody wants.

I learned to try to cash in on things when they become “hot.” For example, when Mark McGwire was going after the home run record, I sold a couple of his rookie cards for something like $50 each. I don’t know if it’s gone up or down since then, but I think I made a good move.

As far as the hobby side of things goes, it isn’t/wasn’t a waste of time or money if you enjoy it. I still like looking through my collection (most of which I still have) every once in a while. I recently started putting cards in display cases that I can hang on the wall. For example, I have every Mike Schmidt card in a nice display case, and I have every Brooks Robinson card (except the rookie) in another display case. They are nice to decorate a wall or act as conversation pieces. The cards themselves are still worth something (because some are older and scarcer), but I’d rather own them and enjoy displaying them than trade them for a few dollars.

By: Tubaman-Z

Tubaman-Z — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:14:28 +0000

I’ve got about 2,000 comics, bagged, boarded, and boxed. While quite a few date from the 60s and 70s (my dad was a mailman who would occasionally pick up a grocery sack full at a garage sale while walking his route), there really are few with much value. Every couple of years I get in a nostalgic mode and read through a bunch. Not too long ago my 13 year old daughter was watching “Teen Titans” and I dug out some Teen Titans comics from the 1970’s. She enjoyed seeing the TT in the “old days”. That alone made them worth keeping for me.