Baseball Cards

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

Not much of a hockey fan, but you can get a new one on eBay for $15.

I had a Gary Carter Mets Starting Lineup action figure back in the day and sad I don't still have it

Phil Neiko was born in ‘39 so he was probably 47 when that photo was taken assuming during the ‘86 Season. Awesome

Upper Deck ruined the baseball card industry

I found my old cards - i like the matter of fact-ness of the 80’s stuff. Ur right that upper deck ruined a lot of stuff (most specifically brands like score trying to do the photography that UD did but not as well). Also a pack of 89 topps was 40 fucking cents!!

That said having switched to a pack of baseball cards instead of eating ice cream when i’m stressed the topps archive line is pretty dope

For obvious reasons I never collected baseball cards but I have some cultural knowledge of what they mean to people who do; the sell-your-soul-for-it Sandy Koufax card that’s a notable Mcguffin in Needful Things and the Yaz card (“here you go, muttonchops Yaz”) that Milhouse is willing to pay $30 (in the 90s!) for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr7v7FBcKoI

Anyway at some point randomly last year I received a package in the post from the person who started this thread, with a collection of 2019(?) Portland Sea Dogs cards. That’s the Red Sox double A affiliate and the collection featured a number of guys now on the big team:
https://i.postimg.cc/SRtsyMbq/IMG-4735.jpg

Then clemenza offered to send me some old duplicate cards of his, which I accepted and they are pretty amazing.

https://i.postimg.cc/7Z46qDp5/IMG-4736.jpg

There’s some beautiful cards in this, like the Griffey one on the left, but the NOMAH card on the right might be my favourite of them all
https://i.postimg.cc/yd21tzmY/IMG-4737.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/NjbgYX6n/IMG-4739.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/x8HfSF5G/IMG-4740.jpg

As my message to TH says, they are in perfect condition!
https://i.postimg.cc/JhczsgCp/IMG-4743.jpg

So now I have a very small collection of cards, most of them not worth anything (not the point to me), I’m not sure if I’ll add to it massively but certainly I have been looking out for nice cards for my favourite players and such. Thank you so much to both Tracer Hand and clemenza for your generosity and sharing your love of the game with me!

I have a signed canseco dream team that makes me giggle

Baseball cards got exceedingly ugly for a time--"refractor" cards looked like the worst dollar-bin album cover art--but the Nomar card is a Topps Stadium Club, and they usually looked great in the '90s.

lol. I actually considered sending you a Roy Halladay refractor (but was prevented from doing so because it didn’t ship to Canada!)

I was really, really into baseball cards from about 1983 to the bubble burst in the '90s, which really killed my interest. I had a binder of my best cards that was at one point was valued (at least per the Beckett magazines I used to devour) at about $7,000 - $8,000. Hoping to use it to help pay college expenses, I held on too long and when I finally took in in it was worth about $150 total.

i've still got thousands of cards in my childhood home, gyac if you have a list of favorite players whose cards may be of negligible value from the years 1987-1991 i likely have them. plenty of Score and Donruss and Fleer and particulary ugly Topps lying around.