That question is right up there with, “Are we there yet?” and “How long until the weekend?” as among the most compelling queries in the typical card collector’s life.

And, while we can’t do much to reassure your kids that the wait is almost over or help you get to Friday sooner, we can start to pick away at the issue of card values.

The bad news is that your old cards may not be worth what you once thought they would be.

The good news is that there is still plenty of valuable cardboard floating around out there.

So how do you figure out what your baseball cards are worth?

Luckily, the Internet gives us a ton of tools to help with that task.

Let’s take a look at six of the best.

(NOTE: This post contains affiliate links to eBay listings for the baseball cards discussed.)

eBay “Sold” Listings

When I started collecting cards in the 1980s, it didn’t take long before I was spouting off the value of my cards to my dad, based on what I was seeing the yearly Beckett price guide (affiliate link).

Suffice to say, Dad wasn’t impressed.

“It’s only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it,” was Dad’s motto when it came to assessing the monetary value of anything, and it was good advice.

That’s why eBay is my go-to method for finding card prices. Not only can you find just about any card you might want for sale, you can also see much those same issues actually sold for in recent listings.

So let’s say you’ve heard that the 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe is a rare and valuable card (it’s not) and want to check on just how valuable it is.

Go to eBay and type in “1990 Fleer Jose Uribe” and you’ll see the usual ridiculous claims and asking prices for this dirt-common hunk of cardboard:

But remember, those are just the asking prices. To find out what the Jose card is selling for — what it’s “worth” — on eBay, you can check the “Sold listings” box:

And there you can see what folks are actually paying for the 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe baseball card:

Still too much for this card if you ask me, but it’s what the market bears at this point in time.

Vintage Card Prices

Vintage Card Prices takes the idea of searching eBay for graded card prices to the next level by aggregating sale prices from several online auction sites (eBay, Huggins & Scott, etc.) into a single database. The result is a sort of one-stop shop that gives an overview of recent card sales and lets you compare your buying and selling options.

Here is what the listing for our 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe dreamboat looks like:

As you might expect, this added functionality comes with a cost, and you need to subscribe in order to see historical pricing information. The free membership is still valuable, though, as you can track your want list against the thousands of cards that Vintage Card Prices tracks.

Beckett Online

Of course, “Beckett” has been the big name in sports cards price guides for more than 40 years, stretching all the way back to those yearly tomes that my dad didn’t really trust. Not surprisingly, the pricing giant has kept up with the times and offers an online subscription to their pricing information.

However, they also offer The Beckett Marketplace, where collectors can buy and sell cards. Here, you can browse categories or perform targeted searches to find current listings of cards available for purchase. Here is what I found going on with our old friend, the 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe baseball card:

Not as extensive as the eBay listings, maybe, but the prices look more realistic to me in this case. And you can click “COMPARE SELLERS” to see what others have available.

At the very least, Beckett provides another data point (or several) in determining the value of your baseball cards.

PSA Sports Market Report Price Guide

Over the last couple of decades, PSA has grown into the premier grading and certification company in the hobby. As a result of the millions of card submissions they’ve handled over that time, they have grown a huge database of card-condition populations (see their Population Report).

In itself, the pop report is a valuable resource for trying to figure out which cards might hold some value based on relative availability, but PSA has also been tracking the sales prices of the cards they grade. Using those data, they have built a rich set of pricing information that they present through their Sports Market Report (SMR) Price Guide.

There, you can drill down into individual sets and then pick out the specific cards you’re interested in.

Note that you won’t find every set and every card in the SMR listing — only cards with a certain amount of collector interest and buying activity make the cut.

As a result, we can’t add another 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe data point to our arsenal, but we can check out some of the big cards from the proximal 1990 Topps set:

PriceRealized

If you’re into really esoteric cards or really high-end stuff, eBay is going to be hit-or-miss at best.

The truly top-of-the-line memorabilia and cards nearly always make their way to one of the big, prestigious hobby or antiques auction houses when someone is looking to cash out. So, to find out how much your 1954 Bowman Ted Williams card is worth, you could wait for one to show up at auction and then check back on the auction house website to see how much the treasure sold for.

Or …

You could just got to PriceRealized and do some searching.

PriceRealized does the auction-combing for you, watching out for awesome cards and other goodies that come up for bid, and then recording those prices in their ever-growing database.

For instance, when I search for that Splendid Splinter card, I see that PriceRealized has recorded 15 sales:

The caveat here is that there may be a decent gap between the last sales result and the time you perform your search, so the market might be quite different.

Still, PriceRealized is an awesome resource for getting a handle on the hobby’s top end.

(As an added caveat, you may get sucked into the site for hours if you visit — it’s addictive!)

Check Out My Cards

Finally, we come to Check Out My Cards, or COMC.com.

Like the Beckett Marketplace or current eBay listings, COMC is intended to be a place to buy and sell cards rather than a pricing tool, per se.

Still, COMC draws buyers and sellers from all walks of life, and that diversity helps to normalize the market. All of that makes it a great place to go if you want to know what folks are asking for their cards.

And since COMC is an active, competitive market, you can bet that asking prices are adjusted all the time to make sure that cards are actually selling.

Here is what’s offered today on the 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe front:

Probably a lot closer to what folks will actually pay for the card than what we saw in the eBay listings, right?

And as a wise man once told me …

A baseball card is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

Thanks, Dad.

But a lot has happened since those halcyon hobby heydays, and the general impression now is that those old baseball cards aren’t worth the pulp they’re printed on.

And we agree with that in a lot of ways — even did a quick study on the phenomenon of deflated baseball card values.

Still, the truth is that plenty of baseball cards are still highly desirable, and they sell for actual money (or PayPal bucks or BitCoin or whatever your digital currency of choice is).

Sure, you’re going to have trouble unloading your investment lot of Kurt Stillwell rookie cards, but that doesn’t mean every old card is a stinking pile of horse … um … cardboard.

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

Check prices on Amazon (affiliate link)

When it comes to which baseball cards are still worth money deep into the 21st century, you can pretty much lump them into four categories.

(NOTE: This post contains affiliate links to eBay listings for the baseball cards discussed.)

Baseball Cards Issued Before 1981

This is somewhat of an arbitrary cutoff, but we know some things for sure …

• In 1981, Fleer and Donruss joined Topps in the baseball card market, and all three manufacturers produced sets of 600+ cards.
• None of those cards were produced in small quantities.
• With just a few exceptions, none of the hundreds of other sets produced between 1982 and about 1994 were produced in small quantities, either.
• You can find just about any card you want from 1981 forward on eBay for less than you would have paid 30 years ago.

So 1981 might rightly be considered the seed of the junk-wax era, even if things weren’t quite as out of control as they would later become.

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

Check prices on Amazon (affiliate link)

There were far fewer different baseball cards available in 1980 than in 1981, and if you look at sold listings on eBay, you start to see some price hardening — several minor stars selling for $1 or more, as an example.

And if you walk that back to 1973, the last year Topps issued cards in series (until they did it again later on), you actually see some lower prices BUT you also see commons selling individually. That’s a pretty good indication there is a market for those cards.

The star prices, even for ungraded copies, step upward as you step backward through the years on eBay, too.

The bottom line is that most of the card rot started with the stuff issued during the junk years of the 1980s, and much of what came before retains a decent bit of value.

Baseball Cards of Hall of Famers

Back in the early-to-mid 1980s before speculation ran rampant in the hobby, we were most interested in making long-term investments.

In the vernacular of the day, that meant buying into the cards of players who we thought would be causing some sort of stir, preferably over and over, for decades to come.

That kind of long-lived popularity generally only comes through one route — enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

And, while even the cards of Cooperstown denizens have felt the strain of massive supply over the last 30 years, the truth is there is always some sort of market for HOF cardboard.

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

Check prices on Amazon (affiliate link)

As an example, take a look at the eBay listings for Jim Rice baseball cards.

While it’s true there are some downright bargains for Big Jim’s early-career issues, you’ll also find mass-produced specimens like 1984 Topps and 1986 Donruss bringing a buck or more on occasion.

And if you look into old cards of Hall of Famers, like Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, some of the prices realized might make you think the hobby bust never happened.

High-Grade Baseball Cards

Even as card manufacturers were losing their minds with the number of sets and size of print runs they glutted down collector throats every year through the 1990s, another trend was emerging.

Not satisfied to take the local dealer’s word about the condition of the cards they bought and sold, collectors began to seek out less biased, third-party opinions.

Before long, this push for standardization led to the formation of several card grading companies. In the last 20 years or so, it has become common practice for just about every “big” card to be sent off for slabbing and grading by the likes of PSA and BGS.

And that trend eventually bled over into the lower-level cards, too.

So, not only does just about every 1968 Topps Nolan Ryan rookie card get graded these days, but you can find plenty of lesser lights slabbed and graded for your enjoyment.

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

Check prices on Amazon (affiliate link)

You just haven’t lived until you’ve held a graded 1988 Donruss Geno Petralli in your hands!

Seriously, though, the reason folks send in even less desirable cards for grading is because they think they’ve found a condition rarity.

Ther are about a billion 1988 Fleer Edgar Martinez rookie cards out there, and you can usually find one for dollar or so. Dig up one that grades a PSA 10, though, and you might be looking at a $50+ hunk of cardboard.

And that’s just the beginning, because the older, more condition-sensitive, and/or scarce a card is to begin with, the higher the multiplier when you snag a nice one.

Baseball Cards with Limited Print Runs

In the beginning of the baseball card boom, demand wasn’t much of a problem. Heck, there were millions of boys (and girls) of all ages who decided we had to have one of everything.

That’s why the boom happened in the first place.

The real problem came when companies overestimated the ability of our hobby desires to keep up with their hyper-efficient production lines.

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

Check prices on Amazon (affiliate link)

We tried hard for several years, but we eventually just drowned in all the cardboard.

The funny thing is, though, if you frequent blogs like this one or Twitter communities or local card shows today, you’ll see that there is still plenty of demand for baseball cards.

But collectors are smarter, more discriminating now.

We want to know that there isn’t an infinite supply of whatever cards we latch onto.

And so, we’re still happy to buy all sorts of different cards, provided there is some limit to their print runs.

That’s (partly) why we like the old stuff. There’s not all that much of it left.

And it’s why folks like the high-grade, slabbed stuff — there is demonstrably lesser of that than of the mid-grade or ungraded stuff (see the PSA Population report).

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

Check prices on Amazon (affiliate link)

That phenomenon bleeds over into other issues, too. Specifically, those sets and cards that were issued in limited numbers — and have some proof behind that claim — tend to hold decent value over the years.

So those Topps Tiffany sets from the 1980s that had “only” 5000 or 10,000 or 25,000 of each card produced still sell for more than peanuts on eBay and through other outlets.

And all those special inserts that started with the 1990 Upper Deck Baseball Heroes Reggie Jackson autographs and continued with refractors and relic cards and buy-backs — most of those hold some value year after year.

Because we know (or believe, at least) that there aren’t kajillions of them sitting out there in a warehouse somewhere.

—

So there you have it … when it comes to what baseball cards are worth money today, it all comes down to supply and demand. 

Isn’t that how it was supposed to work all along, anyway?

Yeah, seems like a long time ago doesn’t it?

Fact is, back in the 1980s and even into the 1990s, most of us were hybrid collectors. Sure, we got into the hobby because we loved the game and loved the cards, but we also thought there’d be some gold at the end of our cardboard rainbow if we just held on to our stash long enough.

It’s evident now that most of our childhood cards are, if not worthless, at least unlikely to put our kids through college. A fancy drink at Starbucks, maybe, but tuition to the local tech school?

As unlikely as a Kevin Maas sighting at Cooperstown.

And we all know what the problem is — simple supply and demand.

As in, there is are enough 1988 Donruss cards floating around out there to fill several landfills with Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, and everyone who wants one long ago scratched that itch.

It’s an ugly truth that slaps us in the face every time we uncover stack after stack of 1987 Topps or 1991 Upper Deck — probably in our own closets — but sometimes it’s at least interesting to look at the thing from a different angle.

And that’s what I decided to do here with some cold hard numbers that will help us see that our perception is not so far off and that we’re not alone.

The Methodology

“Methodology” is a pretty stuffy word for how this post came about, but it’s a holdover from my grad school days and I’m not quite ready to let it go.

So …

I decided to come up with a rough estimate of the supply of baseball cards and a rough estimate of demand for baseball cards and then compare the two.

For this exercise, supply is simply the number of different baseball cards issued during a given decade, roughly calculated from the PSA Population Report.

Demand is the total number of cards from a given decade that have been submitted to PSA for grading, again based on the Population Report.

For a simple barometer of demand v. supply, I divided the number of submissions by the number of different cards issued to arrive at the average number of submissions per card issued.

The higher this ratio, the greater the demand relative to available supply, and, at least theoretically, the more active the market might be for cards from that decade.

The Results

I ran these number for each decade from the 1950s through the 1990s.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the 1950s wins the ratio wars by a handy margin, coming in at about 154 submissions for every different card issued during the decade.

But when you look at the trend from beginning to end, the stark dropoff in later decades — to 37 average submissions in the 80s and just 18 in the 90s — is a strong reminder of just why so many of us are sitting on so many cards from the junk wax era.

You can see the whole sordid story in the graphic below …

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</p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p><strong>Please include attribution to WaxPackGods.com with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p><a href=’ http://staging.waxpackgods.com/baseball-cards-not-worth-money/ ‎’><img src=’http://staging.waxpackgods.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Why-Your-Baseball-Cards-are-Worthless.png’ alt=’The Real Reason Your Childhood Baseball Cards are Worthless Today’ width=’800px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p>

So are all those beautiful swaths of cardboard really worthless?

Of course not … I mean, you really can’t put a price on your memories.

It’s just that, if you tried to put a price on them, you probably wouldn’t have many takers anyway.

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