I have some old baseball cards, you interested?

I have some old baseball cards, you interested?

If you were a child in the late 1980’s then you were probably an avid baseball card collector such as
myself. You grew up hearing stories about how baseball cards were a solid investment, outperforming
even the stock market in some cases, because collectors before you were selling their vintage cards and
card collections from their childhood and making a decent amount of money off of them. Because of
these stories I would end up storing all of my cards and the sets I had put together in a safe place, only
to rediscover them decades later with the hope that they would be a great deal more valuable than they
were when I first bought them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately the baseball card industry got wise to the increased interest by baseball fans and
hobbyists alike, so they decided to start mass producing cards during this time period. The card
manufacturing companies were wise enough to never make public the actual number of cards they
produced each year during this period, but conservative estimates put the number well into the billions.
As a result of this mass-production the values of these cards produced between the late 1980’s and into
the early 1990’s plummeted, and are now barely worth the cardboard they are printed on.

This is the reason why we don’t even bother to buy 1980’s and early 1990’s (or most current day cards too) card collections from
anyone that brings them to us, because there’s simply no value to be had in them with the exception
of a few cards or certain complete sets in excellent condition. The value that these cards hold today is
nothing more than the nostalgia attached to them due to the memories that we associate with them, as
we collected them during our childhoods.

I’m sorry if this article is not the news you were looking for, but hey, take solace in the fact that I’ve got a few thousand cards sitting in the garage myself – I donate some every year to Goodwill since the write-off is worth more than trying to sell them   🙂