Baseball Cards

guys. The Met is closed, of course. But they have posted images of all the exhibited cards online. Looks like the collector had a keen interest in Chief Bender. And apparently he never attended a game in person!

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2020/burdick-collection-january-rotation

Sweet.

I had only a brief flirtation with buying baseball cards as a kid. My best card was a 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson rookie card, which I sold for $18 (iirc) in 1987. It wasn't in NM or anything but this card is still worth a decent amount of money these days in good condition.

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496218742/

this looks interesting, might scoop it up soon. guy opens up a random pack of 80s cards and then tries to track down all the players in the pack.

Sounds like a good podcast :)

Here’s a bit of background on the Burdick collection and the notion of “printed ephemera”:

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ball/hd_ball.htm

I'll show off my new T-shirt here.

http://phildellio.tripod.com/bubblegum.jpg

I scrolled through the Burdick collection quickly--was there a Wagner and I missed it?

1952 store display.

http://phildellio.tripod.com/1952.jpg

How much are all the Mantle rookie cards in there worth (or at least how much three months ago...)?

^ partially colorized for your viewing pleasure

btw, I never quite understood the love for Mickey Mantle, who was just a big strong yokel who could hit the curveball, plus he played for the Yankees, so you couldn't very well pitch around him to the weak parts of the lineup. Willie Mays was twice the player Mantle was.

I'm a Mays guy too, but I would concede that Mantle's prime, at least offensively, was superior. And Mays had McCovey and Cepeda alongside him, so he wasn't on his own.

5 cards in those topps packs, hm. so a 1 in 5 chance that your mantle rookie card will be ruined by the stick of gum laying on it for 68 years?

IIRC mantle was #1 in the set and so few of them exist in good condition BC kids would wrap rubber bands around their collections

I thought so too, but it was #311--just looked at a checklist. (Andy Pafko was #1.) I wouldn't want that pack today, no...There are supposedly a few perfect Mantles out there.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidseideman/2018/04/29/forget-the-2-9-million-mickey-mantle-card-there-are-three-worth-10-million/#70a24a853a99

I'd happily settle for a Mays. (No Williams in the set.)

http://images.psacard.com/s3/cu-psa/cardfacts/1952-topps-261-willie-mays-mint-9-87181.jpg?h=1000&format=png&s.roundcorners=10

just a big strong yokel who could hit the curveball

insanity

I just dug out my cards, the ones I have in hard plastic, for the first time in maybe ten years.

I have a '54 Topps Hank Aaron rookie in excellent condition, and my heart just went into my throat seeing what it's going for on eBay. Three months' rent.

I just assumed there was this major depreciation in the last decade. I need to sell this card. Anyone have any tips?

you guys I am freaking out

I just found another card that I had no idea was worth anything remotely near this—way more than the Aaron.

It makes me nervous. HOW DO I SELL THESE?

Whoa!!

I have no idea but that is awesome!!!!

I can't believe it.

I'm okay selling a record or whatever online but I don't trust myself to grade these out or trust them to the mail or whatever

for context I am living month to month and my lease has expired

Sell them on eBay? Or alternatively contact a card shop (if any of those still exist) or professional reseller (ditto) and solicit a bid privately?

yeah I think so, I would happily give someone a commision to take them off my hands

looking at ebay it seems like the fall-off from M to EX/M is precipitious and makes all the difference, but both of these are in amazing shape, centered w/ good corners

yeah, i was going to say, if you're trying to sell them relatively quickly and without much hassle, i'm sure someone would be willing to do it all for you and take a decent cut. i'd be in the same boat as you - i would never want to make a call on the difference between M and EX/M and then make a bunch of money off of it, i'd be freaking out!

That's great. (Very intrigued about the non-Aaron card.) I could put you in touch with someone I met through a card show a few years ago--I bought hundreds and hundreds of media guides from him. I trust he'd give you sound advice.

still can’t find my yaz rookie after years of searching in my parents’ attic etc :/

i’m also v intrigued about the non-aaron card :)

xxp yes Clemenza that would be great, dm me!

so the other card is (to my eye) a near-mint Bench rookie...and I saw it selling for basically the down payment on a mortgage, which is probably an outlier but still

I do have a ton of other valuable rookie cards that I'd like to bundle off

I sent you some board e-mail, Hadrian.

I have a phone number, Hadrian, where you can message my friend. Send me board e-mail, or if you go to my user profile and click on my site, you can get my regular e-mail address.

terrific, thanks

Hope your Bench is as good as you say--you could really cash in on that one.

http://www.psacard.com/cardfacts/baseball-cards/1968-topps/reds-rookies-johnny-bench-ron-tompkins-247/31850

$33,000 for the 10 on there; the 9s run $2-3000, and even an 8 clears $1,000. (Dmitri Young owns one.)

well it's good by my lapsed collector standards...the corners all look pretty sharp, maybe a couple are just very slightly soft? It doesn't look fresh out of the pack I guess but neither are there any flaws that I can detect. Same with the Aaron card.

I'll report back!

I'm surprised looking some of these rookie cards up—Ryan, Palmer, Kaline, Brett mini, Morgan (signed) among others—that the Rickey, which is def mint, evidently goes for a lot more that those older cards

I could never quite figure out why certain rookie cards were valuable but others weren't. Not at the extremes--Mantle, Seaver, etc.--and I can even understand why PED rookie cards took a hit. But Pedro Martinez or Randy Johnson; you can get at least one of their rookie cards very cheap (under $5). It might not be the card to have--once there were numerous companies, one card would always end up being the most valuable--but that still seems comparatively low next to lesser players worth more.

my guess is the PED aspect just depreciated demand for those players.

@Topps 2009 Bowman Chrome Superfractor @MikeTrout graded @beckett_grading 9.5 sells for $3.93 million at goldin auctions “ goldin elite” tonight. Session 2 ends Sunday night at 10pm ...highest priced ever for ANY trading card.. pic.twitter.com/axV4sXjMcC

— Goldin Auctions (@GoldinAuctions) August 23, 2020

Saw that yesterday. Personally, I find refractor cards garish and ugly, although that one's not too bad.

I didn't know you could do this, buy shares in sports cards like they're stocks:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/12/investing/baseball-cards-markets/index.html

Very tempting to a self-deluded blowhard like me who has a gift for picking out HOF'ers a decade out. I have dozens of Juan Gonzalez and Albert Belle cards to prove it.

Hey, Belle should have made the Hall!

The amount of time I spent as a kid searching my grandparents' house for tobacco cards...

He was headed there, although I'm guessing he would have been stopped by PED allegations eventually. Even without PEDs, his career just ended too soon--didn't reach either 400 HR or 2,000 hits. He was awesome for a few years, though, and should have won the MVP in 1995.

No thread for basketball cards...Wanted to buy a box for my friend's eight-year-old son; preferably something discounted from the '90s, the era when they were over-producing everything. Forget it. A kid that age has about the same chance of starting a card collection as a young married couple does of buying a house.

i used to have a karl malone rookie. i sold it for 60 bucks when i needed money for weed.

plant that weed in the ground and grow some more, and the next 2 ounces will be free

thank you based karl 🙏

lol

so wait 90s cards are still dumb cheap right? i sold off mine for peanuts a few years ago. The new ones are pricey?

I looked around for a '90s set online--an overproduced Hoops set, something like that--and they were all around $150 a box. As far as new cards go, here's a Toronto store I looked at:

https://totalsportcards.com/collections/sports-cards-basketball-cards

Insane. (Your rookie card, Karl, seems to be selling for $500-1000 on eBay, depending upon shape/grading.)

It's impossible to get sports cards right now we tried to add them as a product line at work but can't get enough stock to bother. Very weird boom because the individuals usually aren't worth much, like 1993 all over again it's based on a set being laced with 5 signed Mike Trout holographic cards. The only difference is how they've wised up on making them actual rarities.

and they're all difficult to sell unless graded and the major grading houses for comics and cards have a 12+ month backlog

ffs this is a lot of weed

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1986-87-FLEER-68-Karl-Malone-Rookie-RC-BGS-9-5/264648683368

mine was probably more like a 7 though, it was just loose.

a loosie, if you will

I saw one that was supposed to be a 9 and selling for ~$800. (I always view these prices as purely hypothetical, meant for the one person insane--or rich--enough to pay what they're asking. Surely a lot of these get resposted eventually at a drastically reduced price?)