Baseball Cards

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?)

To reiterate my original point, though, this is No Country for 8-Year-Old Kids.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1986-Fleer-Karl-Malone-Rookie-RC-68-PSA-9-Mint-/353802025829?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49286&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0

Going up from there makes them increasingly rare but a 9.5 or 9.8 is probably more like $1500 as a realistic selling price.

Also I think the graders are just making shit up at that point. Like 1 out of 100 9s gets a bump just so some exist.

It's wild that '90s sealed crap is going for $$$ these days, although it seems like bulk loose cards from then are still relatively dirt cheap? Occasionally I'll see a Facebook marketplace ad with "1000 Cards for $30" or something.

totally picked through, i’m assuming.

(xpost) I've left it too late, but that's probably what I should have got him. I would hope they'd be in good shape, with at least the occasional star mid-career.

XP No doubt. I imagine these are the same people I'd see at antique/collectable shows in the before times with big vending bins of '80s-'90s commons for cheap.

It's wild that '90s sealed crap is going for $$$ these days, although it seems like bulk loose cards from then are still relatively dirt cheap?

Fun lottery ticket. Maybe your $200 purchase pulls a $3000 9.8 rookie card. If not you still got to open packs of cards and remember some guys.

Makes sense. Although the thought that something from say, overprint Kings Pro Set or Score* being ridiculously valuable is hmmmm to me.

*Aside from their early stuff, and whatever later limited things they had.

Still think the Pro Set saga would make a great 30 For 30.

The National Sports Collectors Convention was in Houston in '94, so I went on multiple days. Pro Set, despite literally being on the cusp of going under, had a huge corporate display, and in lieu of printing up exclusive freebies for the event (as was becoming the style at the time), they just had employees sitting at tables with loads of open wax boxes, tearing open packs and handing anyone who asked 30 loose cards.

Found an acceptable substitute for $15: a mini Funko Pop! Michael Jordan.

(And ordered a mini Julius Erving for myself!)

i knew kids who used to steam open the wax wrappers from card packs, pick out the good cards, replace with commons, and reseal the packs. we sure these ebay sellers aren’t doing that?

If you're going to pay big bucks you want the box with intact shrinkwrap with the manufacturer logo printed on it. My memories of my parents working card shows in the early-mid '90s are hazy but the Upper Decks and higher tiers of cards had unique shrinkwrap IIRC.

Magic is the worst about this. Early packs are real easy to sort without even opening.

I think it was easy to reseal vinyl records.

Iirc, foil and plastic packs were harder to reseal as well.

i have an entire topps 1987 baseball set in absolute mint condition -- the only baseball cards i ever bought. i mean i even resisted putting tony pena in my wallet ffs

can i buy a house with this yet?

purchased out of the back ads of the sporting news even! good god i'm old

that's a beautiful set imo. bonds rookie iirc!

Topps lives on, kind of.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fanatics-baseball-cards-topps-11641261997

Just uncovered a box of plastic protect sleeved cards from my childhood in our storage locker. This bundle is almost all early '90s inserts/chase cards with a handful of regular series exceptions (including three of the Upper Deck Michael Jordan baseball rookie card).

An amusing oddity are a few cards from a giveaway series from Church's Chicken, which weren't completely licensed, so the team logos were airbrushed off--I had totally forgotten that was a thing then.

Adding to the peak '90s of it all, that Church's set had REFRACTOR CHASE CARDS--I've got multiples of the Joe Carter one.

what do you want for the joe carter?

https://www.topps.com/cards-collectibles/topps-now/goose-on-the-loose-2022-mlb-topps-now-reg-card-1066.html

If the goose were clutching a bat with "fuckface" written on it, maybe, but I think I'll pass.

https://i.imgur.com/OfVoZo0.png

Hell yeah

Not a card, but I bought one of these for $4 in Dollarama today:

https://www.fairshop.ca/new/collectibles-c-1/zack-greinke-21-arizona-diamondbacks-player-replica-mlb-players-choice-p-64

(If you look down below, you can still get a Roughned Odor for $10 before there's a run on them when he retires.)

Starlin Castro!

I still want a Mike Richter starting lineup