Baseball Cards

Congratulations, you're five dollars richer.

i remember those upper deck cards. man, they seemed so expensive at the time. i had that griffey at one point but sold it. i think i sold all my valuable cards. the most valuable ones were the '89 upper decks and the '90 leafs. unfortunately i didn't sell them at peak value, but fortunately i sold them before i lost money. i got some dece drinking money out of david justice and big hurt rookie cards. like i said upthread, it's high comedy to see how much people were willing to pay for certain cards. i'm pretty sure the kevin maas rookie cards peaked at $25. i know the doc gooden fleer rookie was $500 at one point.

impressive that the card is even worth more than it was (the Leaf FT) considering you can now get Upper Deck FT rookies for like $2. I think they were valued at $30 or $40 back in the day, which to me seemed like a shitload of money.

i think the OG upper deck series is regarded as the legit collector's choice one, i remember the 1990 set being really sought after initially but quickly declining. maybe it was just more common and the novelty had worn off a bit. i think it also has to do with the leaf set being more sought after. and after that, everyone was putting out premium cards and the market got flooded and basically destroyed. i know cards are still worth money but i feel like literally every kid i knew back in '88-'90 was into baseball cards, it was a huge peak era, basically as long as the card wasn't dented or creased you were cool. then it turned into shit you'd frame and grade out with a pitchfork score and if it was a millimeter off center, fuck you get out of my store.

Yeah, that $75 seems a little far-fetched.

I've got a whole bunch of rookie cards dating back to that time that I collected for a short time in the mid-'90s, after the bottom dropped out: Griffey, Thomas, Bonds, Bagwell, I-Rod, Maddux, Alomar, Piazza, Jeter, etc. Never the key rookie card, though, always the secondary ones.

every kid of my generation grew up hearing stories about how their dads' moms threw away all their baseball cards, which would now be worth so much money, so they never threw away theirs, and hence they're worth nothing.

I still have all mine!!! I'd sell them all for $5.

yeah got mine too, just got them out the other day. 88-94

I think mine are still under my childhood bed. I had a few notables. It looks from eBay like even my 1940 Lefty Gomez is not worth what it once was, and I would think that one is not super common.

yeah mine are in my room at my moms place, i wonder how much i could get for them (and my pokemon) cards

did anyone ever actually strike gold, i.e. find a valuable card in a pack instead of buying or trading for it? I think my Will Clark rookie was the one example of that.

I think I have all of Garbage Pail Kids Series 3 too -- I actually put the entire set together from packs and trading.

yeah i got a few good ones in normal packs but can't remember specifics.

I have an Iván Calderón rookie card. And then he was MURDERED.

close thread

i bought so many packs that i found a lot of gold in them thar hills. the griffey upper deck rookie was my best score and i had a lot of good cards from my early days of buying (when i was 7 or 8, before i knew they were worth anything.) i had ripken's topps rookie somewhere, sandberg's rookie card, a few others.

Same - got a lot of decent cards through collecting. Recently went through all my old cards and found Jeter and Rivera rookies I had no idea I had!
I still buy the occasional pack and have managed to score a Bumgarner and a few Bundy rookies.

I should probably try to sell my FT Leaf RC, but to hell with getting it gem-rated or whatever.

If you have a Leaf Mariano, Thermo, that's good--just learned he was the rare player who only had one rookie card issued. His first Topps card wasn't until 1995, shared with Lyle Mouton (who, glancing at his career stats, didn't seem to get a fair shake).

http://espngrantland.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/14674983388_2be6f53941_o.jpg?w=700&h=934

Oh my god does that dude live in Brooklyn? I think he goes to my Starbuck's

My cards, around 4,000 plus, were never in great condition so never that valuable, but some perverse part of me likes that there is no longer this crazy market. Did the market go south because everyone growing up in the 70s and 80s saved their cards thinking they would be valuable one day? I have a lot of 50s-60s cards that I never gave back to a lifeguard who lent me them one summer but their condition is highly variable

I finally threw out most of my '90s cards last week. What a heartbreaker — the hours and dollars I dumped into this crazy habit, everything meticulously sleeved and filed.

The mixture of lottery and "investment" and sports obsession were irresistible to 15-year-old me. I remember a friend in 1989 when we'd both just bought the Upper Deck Griffey set telling me with this self-assured grin, "Now we just sit back and watch it grow [in value]."

There's a chance that in another 20 years, the market might turn again once everyone my age has dumped their collections in the trash; but I can't keep carting these 500-count boxes around with me from home to home.

My best card is either my Patrick Roy or Guy Lafleur rookies (I'm Canadian). Of course, I'd trade the lot for a Gretzky, though that card's iconic up here, maybe the only one whose value has kept rising.

Yes everyone please start throwing your cards away / burning them

Mine are just in the closet at my parents. I assume they will stay there for eternity.

my instincts for cards are still there, i was in a thrift shop and there were a few cards lying around and i found a GEM MINT CENTERED 10.0 gregg jefferies DONRUSS RATED ROOKIE. could have had it for a nickel but i didn't want to make the investment.

i think the best part about cards were the statistics and learning about stats through them and i always thought it was awesome that there was a stat devoted to SLUGGING

Truthfully, dinnerboat, I think the hockey-card market is still pretty strong up here. Whenever I go to the big card show at the International Centre in Toronto, it's like 95% hockey-card vendors--no interest for me, but I don't think it imploded like the baseball market did.

xpost I definitely knew more about sports when I had the financial incentive of card values.

clemeza, Maybe for historical cards, but I think those early '90s glossy vomit collections (Pro Set, Score, etc.) tanked across the board. At least judging by ebay auctions.

that really what i loved most about them. loved looking at the careers of guys like Ryan or Rice and getting the card of a guy towards the end of a great career was so much more exciting than some flavour-of-the-month rookie card.

anyways - it was my mother moving into a much smaller space that caused me to toss most of my 90's cards (also is how i discovered the Jeter and Rivera cards i was unaware of)!

um – Clem, i would totally love to go to a card convention again. used to go all the time when i was a kid!

(xpost) True--but I think Lafleur and Roy rookies would be worth something if they're in good shape.

Let's catch the next one in the spring, Thermo. Last time I went, I ended up buying almost a thousand dollars' worth of baseball media guides from a guy over the next several months. These contain secret information available nowhere else except six or seven different internet sites.

my gooden rookie is worth less now than it was in 1989 :(

My Juan Gonzalez and Albert Belle rookies are worth less than a George Pataki endorsement.

mine were in my parent's storage since 2001 or so, presumably for eternity, and then about a year ago their basement flooded and they were all absolutely ruined. i had a lot of cards, not many of them good.

https://static.simpsonswiki.com/images/thumb/1/14/Omar_Vizquel.png/250px-Omar_Vizquel.png

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/03/family-rare-ty-cobb-valuable-baseball-cards-in-house

Had no idea Toronto's biggest card shop, Legends of the Game (long ago--they changed their name at one point), closed down a few months ago. Very quietly--don't remember anybody posting anything on Facebook like when the World's Biggest Bookstore or Queen Video or various other local landmarks closed. When I shrewdly started buying baseball cards in '94, the year of the strike, they had a huge space. Tim Horton's took over about 2/3 of it a few years later, but they managed to limp along for another decade.

Saw this trailer yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0GsVS2gSAE

There's a great documentary to be made about the history and eventual collapse of the baseball-card industry, but not sure that this is it--seems to be hooked around some father-son reunion story.

Best-looking Topps card of each year according to a panel:

http://www.mlb.com/cut4/the-coolest-topps-baseball-card-from-every-year/c-289614258

Ten best:

http://www.mlb.com/cut4/coolest-topps-baseball-cards-ever-made/c-289734612

I own two of them. The wrong two.

Links aren’t working for me

yeah, same here. and the link to a video you posted the other day also didn't work - might just be a thing with accessing the site from canada? i'm not sure.

Weird--I took both of the MLB site. Maybe taking off the 's' from 'https' messed it up. Let me try again.

https://www.mlb.com/cut4/the-coolest-topps-baseball-card-from-every-year/c-289614258
https://www.mlb.com/cut4/coolest-topps-baseball-cards-ever-made/c-289734612

Those work for me.

oh yep! those work, thanks

rad thanks.

marilyn manson was nice with it
https://img.playbuzz.com/image/upload/q_auto:good,f_auto,fl_lossy,w_640,c_limit/v1533673835/e4eaukgk650okjtxsjde.jpg

That '88 Fleer Tekulve they talk about is great too...

https://www.tradingcarddb.com/Images/Cards/Baseball/121/121-318Fr.jpg

haha!