Baseball Cards: Help me restore my youth.

[Austiger]

I have a closet full of my old cards. Complete sets, etc. All from the 80s (although I bought older cards than that) I have like 9 Boggs rookies, etc. A couple of Ripken rookies. Is it worth selling them? Should I put them on Ebay as a set, or try selling them one at a time? Should I take them to a dealer? Have them appraised? What's the best way to move something like this?

[nolanfan34]

[ QUOTE ]
FWIW, I have thought about the whole grading thing a lot and for the most part the average collector or once collector whose cards are now worthless unless shipped off by the crate believe it has ruined card collecting. But we need to remember why there is grading in the first place. Much of the reason was to eliminate the big name cards that were being counterfeited, like the Jordan, Gretzky and Sanders rc's. Grading has eliminated counterfeiting but it has caused a hassle in the process. I blame the [censored] thiefs (cause) that make me hate the newer version of the [censored] thiefs, the graders (effect).

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Perfect explanation of what I feel as well. Grading unfortunately has become a necessary evil of collecting. But, the advantage is that barring some sort of catastrophic crash of the sports card market (which I do sometimes think about - it's only cardboard after all [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]), you're protecting your investment to a certain extent because you should always be able to resell graded cards without much difficulty.

[nolanfan34]

[ QUOTE ]
NolanFan, if/when I purchase a card or two off of e-bay would you mind if I posted them (or pm'd you) to see if I took a bath or not? I'll only do it for one or two just to make sure I feel comfortable w/ the process.

Thanks guys.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not a problem. Honestly, it will be hard to take a bath too badly unless you somehow end up with a reprinted card, or something like that.

That did remind me of one other suggestion I forgot to make. It's not the most intuitive thing to find on eBay, but for different search terms you can look at completed items, which is a good thing to do when researching the prices. It's an easy way to see what things have been selling for.

You have to sign in to see the results, so I can't link to an example.

I will also amend one of my previous comments too, I haven't seen book value on stuff for a while, but doing a quick search on Barry Sanders 1989 PSA shows that you can pick up a Score rookie PSA 8 for under $30. So in some cases you may even want to consider buying up 9's here or there where you can afford them.

[nolanfan34]

[ QUOTE ]
I have a closet full of my old cards. Complete sets, etc. All from the 80s (although I bought older cards than that) I have like 9 Boggs rookies, etc. A couple of Ripken rookies. Is it worth selling them? Should I put them on Ebay as a set, or try selling them one at a time? Should I take them to a dealer? Have them appraised? What's the best way to move something like this?

[/ QUOTE ]

Honestly you're stuck in a situation that thousands of people our age range are, which is a sucky Catch-22. To get true value from your collection you really have to pay to get things graded, but if you pay to get things graded then you'll spend so much that you aren't really getting full value from your collection. If that makes any sense at all.

I think it depends on your expectations. Do you need to sell the cards to make money, or expect to get full value from your sets? You're probably going to be disappointed. Do you not really care, and will just be happy with a clean closet and a few extra bucks based on whatever you can get? Then eBay can be a viable option.

It's just going to be impossible to get anything close to "book value" (which questions what book value really is these days) from non-graded stuff, unless it's super old. But mid-late 80s stuff, there isn't a huge market out there for it.

My recommendation if you don't need the money is to just hold onto it. Start thinking of it as something you can pass down to kids that should have some appreciation in value down the road.

Otherwise, you can probably try to sell full sets on eBay, and can look into getting some of your best condition singles graded. That's one other thing I noticed when I went back and looked at my childhood collection before I sold all of it - my cards weren't exactly mint like I had remembered, plenty of handling and sorting over the years took care of that. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[MEbenhoe]

[ QUOTE ]
NolanFan, if/when I purchase a card or two off of e-bay would you mind if I posted them (or pm'd you) to see if I took a bath or not? I'll only do it for one or two just to make sure I feel comfortable w/ the process.

Thanks guys.

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please do post this in this thread, i love this stuff.

[MicroBob]

I haven't heard about all this grading stuff.
Is this kind of a new thing?

Like many of you I have a bunch of 80's cards. Some complete and mostly complete sets in reasonable shape but certainly not mint.


My Dad bought 5-cent packs with his allowance growing up in backwoods West Virgina.
He was actually smart enough to keep them in decent shape and my Grandma was smart enough to not throw them out.

The whole collection is willed to me and was estimated to be worth $250k or more just by his description of it to dealers at card-shows and showing them a couple of examples of the condition of his cards.
It's probably not worth as much now though because these estimates came when prices were sky-high.
But I haven't followed this stuff at all in several years.

He has complete sets, usually duplicates or triples, of Topps 54 through 58.
Most of 52 and 53.
He doesn't have the Mantle rookie. But he does have the Mays Topps rookie which is his most valuable card.

I would get to finger through these cards still in the original shoe-boxes when I was a kid as long as I promised to be careful.
Eventually got a Beckett price-guide too and could see how much each of the 4 1955 Hank Aarons or 3 1957 Mickey Mantles or Yogi Berras I was holding were worth.

I was careful when I handled them. But obviously I was a kid who was thumbing through old cards that were still kept in some 1950's shoe-boxes in the top of his closet.
So they aren't exactly in perfect shape but he seemed to have card-show dealers drooling for his collection all the same.

[kevstreet]

Microbob,

I think I'd be more excited looking through your dad's (now your) collection and randomly coming across a 1960 Roberto Clemente card then searching through a bunch of psa graded cards.

I know times change, but I think the way your dad, and the way we, collected is how the hobby was meant to be.

It must be pretty neat to look through your dad's collection, the nostalgia has to be awesome.

[MaxxDaddy]

I'm in the same boat it would appear with a lot of you guys. I've got a bunch of stuff from the late 80s, throughout the 90s and early in this decade. I remember over 10 years ago, a bunch of my insert cards were really worth something, but now they've hit the crapper (like my Ken Griffey cards). I was considering getting a few things graded, but yeah it's a considerable investment. If I were to get cards graded, I'd definitely send in my 2001 Topps Gallery Ichiro and Pujols rookies. It's a damn shame I didn't collect more sets back in 2001.

As an aside, my father and great-uncle were also baseball card collectors, except they pasted theirs into marble notebooks. Nothing of much note from the 50s, but the really cool stuff is from the 1930s. Unfortunately, I'm missing my USB cable for my digital camera, so I can't show them to you. The highlight, baseball card-wise, is an autographed 1934 Batter-Up card of Mel Ott. The notebooks also have scattered autographs; on paper, photos, and postcards. I don't plan on selling them at all, but I think they're pretty cool and I'm wondering if anyone else has anything similar.

[nolanfan34]

Bob,

That is hot stuff. The funny thing is with the really early stuff from the 50s, you're almost better off NOT having them graded if you were to ever sell them, because if they're in good shape, the prospect of them grading out at 8s or 9s is enough to command top dollar.

You're a lucky guy.

[mattsey9]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't plan on selling them at all, but I think they're pretty cool and I'm wondering if anyone else has anything similar.

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When I was a kid, my dad gave me his cards. They were almost all from the 1959 Topps series, and he had about 200 unique cards. A few years ago I started buying 1959 Topps lots on Ebay to finish off the set. I sold my doubles back to buy more. After a few months of trading/selling/buying, I was down to one card: #510 Norm Cash. Buying that card was one of the greatest baseball card moments ever for me, topped only by my dad's reaction when I gave his completed set back to him for Christmas.

My favorite card in my collection is my 1953 Topps Satchel Paige. Back in 1986, I traded a stack of Sportflicks doubles about 8 inches high for a 84 Fleer Update Roger Clemens from the local card dealer. Once the Red Sox got hot, he asked me what I would take for it. I traded it for my Paige card. When I was just learning the game, my granddad had told me about seeing Paige pitch on a barnstorming tour. He told me that Paige had such pinpoint control that he could throw strikes using a matchbook for home plate. He made me practice pitching that way. Every time I look at that card, I remember pitching to him in the backyard.

As I got older, my tastes got a little more sophisticated. I started working on a 1954 Topps set, and got about 80% complete. I started buying T206 cards featuring players who played in the "Merkle Game". I've given up on it for the last year or so, but I'll get back into it eventually. One thing's for sure, my son is going to have one hell of a collection someday.