What to do with baseballs cards?

[ryan paulsen]

Ok, this question may be out there for a woodworking forum, but there is a lotta people who know stuff here, so here goes...

I have a ton of baseball cards from the card collecting hey days of the late 80's to early 90's. Factory sealed sets, popular individual cards, etc. The problem is, so does everyone else who grew up in my generation. What to do with these things? I would hate to just throw them away, but there doesn't seem to be any value here. Anyone know somewhere that will take them?

[Steve Peterson]

I am curious also. My wife put a raffle ticket into a sports basket at school and won a few thousand unopened baseball card packets. My son was around 6 years old so he really had no use for the cards. They are sitting in a box somewhere.

It also had a box of Wheaties with Mark McGuire on it. It looked like it was brand new so we opened it and started pouring it into a bowl. Then we noticed the best if used by date had expired by around 20 years. EBay shows unopened boxes selling for $10 and opened boxes are $5, so we don't feel too bad about the diminished value.

Steve

[Brian Henderson]

Baseball cards are essentially worthless today unless they are from the 70s or earlier, with few exceptions. Topps and the other companies produced them in such ridiculous quantities that there just isn't any real rarity to them. I have boxes and boxes of them just sitting on a shelf that I got from a friend when he died, I tried looking to see if they were worth anything and they're just not. So they just sit and rot.

[Jim Koepke]

Do you have kids or grandkids who ride bicycles?

A few clothespins and the kids will love you.

I had a bunch of baseball cards from the 50s and 60s. They were stored in my fathers garage. He was cleaning up one day and gave them to one of my nephews.

I bought some cards for my son back in the '80s. Maybe a rookie card for Ken Griffy Jr. may be worth something. Maybe not enough to buy a Snickers bar.

jtk

[john snowdon]

Similar story. I had a lot of baseball cards from the late 50's early 60's. I always traded for Mays, Koufax, Berra and Mantle. While I was in college my mom tossed them. When I went ballistic she felt bad and gave me a "I would have been rich but my mother threw out my baseball cards" t-shirt...Oddly, I still love that ol' gal.

[Steve Peterson]

If you look at EBay and sort by price, you get the feeling that there are quite a few valuable cards out there. Two cards are over $300K, another dozen are over 100K, and 1000 cards down the list is still asking $5700. Most of them are "buy it now" prices. I can't imagine that very many of them are actually selling.

Steve

[Brian Henderson]

If you look at EBay and sort by price, you get the feeling that there are quite a few valuable cards out there. Two cards are over $300K, another dozen are over 100K, and 1000 cards down the list is still asking $5700. Most of them are "buy it now" prices. I can't imagine that very many of them are actually selling.

Steve

Valuable, yes. Recent and valuable, no.

[Yonak Hawkins]

They may be valuable in 100 years, or maybe not. Your distant heirs may get a surprise windfall.

[Brian Henderson]

They may be valuable in 100 years, or maybe not. Your distant heirs may get a surprise windfall.

They won't be. Two things determine value, supply and demand. There is way too much supply and not much demand at all. I guess if something catastrophic happens and 99.999% of them get destroyed in some way, they might pick up some value, but with the millions of cards out there, I find that very unlikely. Rarity matters and these things just aren't rare. It's like stamps. The post office issues millions of them, dealers can't sell modern issues for more than face value because they have zero collector worth.

[ryan paulsen]

I realize there isn't much value there, and the time involved to do any inventory would make trying to sell anything a losing proposition. I'm just looking for an alternative to throwing them away (or making my bike sound like a motorcycle!)

[Mel Fulks]

I would ditch gum and wrappers and keep the cards. Ephemera market is not easy to predict but your cards are sure to be worth more because many are dumping theirs. Check the prices on the comic books that survived the nutty book burnings of 1950s.