OT: Shameless plug: I started a free baseball card blog!
I beg you not to send me to Bolivia for this... I've been active on MGoBlog for 12+ years, graduated in 2013, spend way too much time here, and game day threads feel like a packed Rick's with a bunch of familiar faces and old friends.
In that spirit... I wanted to share with my old friends that I've started a baseball card blog called Stealing Home! It will focus on card investing, collecting, grading, crazy collectables stories, trending prospects and more. It is a free blog, with no intention of making it paid.
Just hoping to build a community around baseball cards as rich as the one that we've built here! If that is of interest to you, please give us a follow! https://www.stealinghome.co
Bonus: we are raffling off a 2021 Bowman Chrome Hobby Pack to a lucky subscriber on May 7th.
Kenny Rogers showing off his most prized baseball cards in 1978
April 23rd, 2023 at 11:37 AM ^
Good luck with the blog, but don't trust anything in Kenny Roger's hands....
That was the only Tigers playoff game I’ve ever attended.
I'm gonna take cuts here since there is no softball thread to say that once again, the B1G refs suck and are dogshit fucking assholes!
We're down 3-0 in bottom of 7th thanks to 5 big calls all going against us and all were dogshit wrong calls.
Fucking bullshit!!!
And now, back to regularly scheduled programming…
Does he know when to hold them; when to fold them?
From what I know, you don't ever want to fold baseball cards. They're worth a lot less when you do.
April 23rd, 2023 at 11:38 AM ^
Thanks for sharing this. My husband is a baseball car fanatic. I will pass this on to him. I also am in possession of my father's collection of baseball autographs from the 1940's -- he was also a fanatic and has pages of entire teams' autographs. I'm not really sure what to do with it, or whether it's worth anything at all but it is pretty cool, if anyone out there has any ideas.
April 23rd, 2023 at 11:42 AM ^
Depends on your plans for them. If you wish to keep them, you can find display frames online. If you wish to sell them, you can contact services to have them authenticated. Once authenticated, the values grow.
Do you happen to know any reputable organizations who would do this authentication?
I have a ton of cards from my childhood (both football and baseball), and can't seem to find anyplace to take them anymore in Toledo.
My era of collections was perhaps the absolute worst in the history of baseball cards…1985-1990.
The internet exposed crazy mass overproduction. Then steroids ruined cards like Bonds, Clemmons and McGuire. I had thousands of cards that ended up being worthless.
Also, “Investments” in Greg Jeffries, Walt Weiss, McGuire Olympic card and Gary Sheffield all ended up like stock in Enron.
Luckily, I got into the hobby as a kid in the 1970s and saved a lot of sets before the printing presses exploded in the mid 1980s. Also, worked back in time to fill (mostly completed) sets back into 50s and 60s.
Yes, I have a TON of 85-91 era cards downstairs in boxes. Other than perhaps a few cards, the rest are good for kindling someday. Even the "premium" sets like 90 Leaf, 91 Stadium Club, 92 Bowman, etc. can be had for less than 50% of what people paid a year or two after they came out - and that's not even adjusting for inflation.
Should have known something was up around 1987-88 when you could go to 7-11 and even Shell gas stations and buy packs but the cards prices in Becketts were going up every month.
The push to premium in 91-92 finally drove me away from buying newer cards.
Also, “Investments” in Greg Jeffries, Walt Weiss, McGuire Olympic card and Gary Sheffield all ended up like stock in Enron
Are you telling me my Kevin Maas rookie cards didn't appreciate in value?
I understand Gary Sheffield but were Jeffries and Weiss ever considered "investing" in? GSheff collector here. If you have any worthless cards of his, I'd be happy to send you nothing in return for them.
Does your baseball fanatic husband know about these cards? I'd start there. My wife better not be sitting on some gold from my father in law. Great, now I'm questioning everything.
April 23rd, 2023 at 11:54 AM ^
Good luck and thanks for sharing!
April 23rd, 2023 at 12:13 PM ^
As far as collecting/trading cards...
You got to know when to hold 'em.
April 23rd, 2023 at 12:19 PM ^
And never fold 'em.
I've heard that really hurts their value.
April 23rd, 2023 at 12:22 PM ^
Also, when bidding on them...
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
That's bad.
There'll be time enough for countin', when the bidding's done.
April 23rd, 2023 at 12:32 PM ^
Many years ago, long before his premature death in January 2017, I met Alan "Mr. Mint" Rosen, the man who's often credited with sparking the baseball-card-trading boom in the late 1970s.
I'm of the "need 'im, need 'im, got 'im" generation who collected, flipped and traded baseball cards in the 1950s and kept our collections in shoe boxes until our mothers found the boxes of cards and tossed them in the garbage. There are many times when I wish that my mom hadn't thrown out all my baseball, football and basketball cards when we were moving from an apartment to a house. If only she'd known then that (a) one day those cards would be much more valuable than the nickel-a-pack I paid for them and (b) there would've been more than enough room in our new house to store those cards and all the comic books that she also threw out.
Thanks to "Mr. Mint", my sons were encouraging me to take them to monthly card shows at local hotels during the 1980s and 1990s. Now, my basement is filled with dozens of boxes of sports trading cards and containers filled with Starting Lineup figurines and other sports collectibles and I only wonder whether they're worth even half as much as I paid for them.
Oh man, rough move mom, but what a wonderful end to the story!!
I can identify with your experiences. Especially the card and coin shows at hotels and other venues in the 70's. I also lost a bunch of stuff when my parents moved from Michigan in 1980 while I was working for the summer in Houston. Every so often I think of some long lost possession that probably vanished in "the great moving purge".
As a child learning to collect I read Mr. Mint’s book in the early 1990s and made it a point to find his booth at the Dearborn Hyatt Regency shows. He was never nice to me despite the fact that as a 9-10 yo I was basically a fan of his.
I suspect that my experience in meeting "Mr. Mint" and speaking with him a few times might've been better than yours because I was about the same age as him and once when I was speaking with him, one of my sons was with me and he treated my son pretty well after learning that my son was the same age as his own son.
Still, as I recall the time when I was a young autograph seeker at the New York Football Giants training camp at Fairfield University in Connecticut and was ignored by several players, some of whom I'd idolized as a 10-year old, it would've been far better for Alan Rosen to have treated you well.
I also met him as an adult at the same shows. I had heard he was cranky, at least not interested in small talk. It helped that a friend of mine happened to be a dealer right next to his booth in the show and had developed a good relationship with Al through shows. He did chat with me nicely but I didn't carry around the kind of cash to buy his high end 50s stuff, nor did I have that era in his high standards.
He at least found the 1952 Topps Baseball high numbers that are worth a ton (someone wisely bought them before the prices really exploded in the late 80s).
Pretty much, you need nice conditioned cards no later than the early 1980s to have any chance of getting back some real money.
Some of the starting lineups still sealed in the pack might be worth something. Check EBAY "sold" items to get an idea what might be worth selling off.
My mom made a point of putting our cards in a grocery bag at the end of the season because they were just cluttering up the bedroom. Off to the curb they went. Thankfully, started saving my cards around 1975 so some of my sets are still OK in value.
April 23rd, 2023 at 12:37 PM ^
I’m a collector…love the hobby. I’ll check it out!
Thank you!
April 23rd, 2023 at 12:49 PM ^
My parents emptied out the last of my old things from their house a while back, including my baseball card collection that I had mostly forgot about. I was excited for a bit to see if perhaps I had anything of value in it, and my hopes were quickly dashed when I learned that almost all of my collection falls into something literally called the "Junk Wax Era" and is basically worthless.
Thanks. I may check out the blog. I have a lot of Topps cards from 1970 that I collected back then. I think some of them are worth some decent money.
What's a Dick Pole Portland Beavers card go for these days? (Fun fact: a friend of mine from college is related to him)
I'm in. I have thousands of cards from the 70's & junk era ungraded but in perfect condition stored in card boxes. Never got around to dig into their worth.
I’m in. Just put up a display case with Hall of Famers (plus Pete). It was great going through my cards and making the selections on who got to go in the case.
Not ready to sell but I have lots of baseball, football, hockey and basketball cards from the 60's and 70's. My favorites are the topps1969 tall boy NBA sets ( all 99 "rookie" cards card plus the checklists). Chamberlain to some guy named Lew Alcindor.
I have a ball from my deceased father-in-law who was very sick as a young boy. A Warren, Ohio neighbor ran some concessions ( or supplied hot dogs) in Yankee Stadium. He was able to get a ball autographed by many of the 1940 Yankees including Joe Dimaggio, Red Ruffing, Lefty Gomez, Joe Gordon. The autographs are pretty legible but my FIL decided to shellac the ball to preserve it, which I guess was a common practice, and in the process really reduced the value of that ball : (
I'm in a similar spot, with a lot of cards from that era 50s into 80s. Now that card shows seem to be coming back in vogue, considering setting up there one day to at least sell off some of the duplicates. Beckett's vintage is a good magazine to gauge prices, plus they have some really interesting articles about vintage stuff. Never found an Alcindor in the grade I wanted (ex+) but did get most of the cards from the 1969 set, including Wilt.
If your ball is trashed, just keep it as a family treasure. Otherwise, if it is decent, you can get that graded - they will confirm the autographs (some guys had a clubhouse employee sign for them, like Ted Williams).
The only baseball card I have is a 1933 Mickey Cochrane Goudey that I got from my uncle from high school graduation.
April 23rd, 2023 at 10:26 PM ^
There's a price range listed online for that card going from $45 to $12,500. LINK
FUN FACT: While most of us would know about Boston University's athletics only because of their men's ice hockey team, MLB Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane was a five-sport star at BU, competing in football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey and boxing in the 1920s.
A lug's blog plug. Shrug? Nah, I'll drink it up. Glug glug.
I still grieve over the shoebox of baseball, football, hockey, and military jet cards from the 1950s that my mom threw out in 1965.
I feel your pain. I thought I had scored when I traded my 1957 Mickey Mantle card to an older kid on my block for an entire Topps set, absent the Mantle card.
Like you, my mom tossed all my cards in 1968 after I started college. Who would have thunk?
I have 278 Brennan Boesch rookie cards. Are they worth anything?
April 24th, 2023 at 11:10 AM ^
absolutely can't miss prospect
I've got a storage unit full of them somewhere.
You don't know where your storage unit is? Hopefully it doesn't end up on TV.
It's a very sneaky storage unit.
Started collecting a little in the early 90’s & bought a1986 Topps set. It was a hand collated set. All of the best cards (Nolan Ryan, Eric Davis etc.) were off-center with uneven borders. This card reminds me of the guy that sold me that set:
I think I have two of those Ripkin "errors" - was in my mid 20s buying Fleer boxes early in the season when the story broke on the cards - then all the stores sold out of them. Pretty bad when the "error" card cost more than Griffey Jr's rookie!