Baseball Cards

[atticfind]

Guys, just a random thought as I have been going through some of my old things to clean out things we don't need. What happened to the value of baseball cards??? I collected these all through my younger years. They are worth less now than they were new it seems to me. Do you see there ever being a rebound in value for the older cards?

[figurecollector]

I think the ones 86 and before will retain value. After that, starting with 87, there were fewer rookies of note and those people were collecting may have lasted a few years and faded away. There are obviously some exceptions.

The companies that joined the Topps, Fleer, Donrus and Upper Deck saturated the market to the point that one could not collect everything any more, particularly when the refractors, foil, uniform, autograph and bat cards started coming into play.

I quit around 93 when these became the predominate reason to collect and it was a business more than it was fun. Just give me a set with the player on the front and the stats on the back and I am happy. I don't need the rest.

[atticfind]

Amen! Man I used to love collecting just the plain old baseball cards. All the other stuff that started coming into play ruined it! I was a kid at the time and I don't think I will ever forget the excitement of getting a new pack and rushing home to open it and see which players I got that particular day. Good Times!

[Terrible Tony]

For years I collected baseball, football, basketball, soccer & boxing cards, but I am more of a hockey card collector. Although I haven't bought any in 2 years, I love searching through some of the older cards than the new ones. Some of my older cards are from the 1950's. One of the reasons I slowed down collecting is that newer sets don't include the whole team, only the star players. I always liked collecting the entire team, especially my favorite team. Over the past few years, my collection started to focus on only the fighters and goalies. I kind of stop caring for star players, because their cards are dime a dozen, although I have landed some nice rookie cards of star players past and present.

[BoogDoc7]

Yeah, late 80s to mid-90s cards really don't hold much value. About the only ones that may be worth something are high-graded autographs of HOF rookies from that era. Overproduction and all...

[atticfind]

Yeah, most of mine are in that mid 80s and 90s range. I always kept a Beckett price guide back then, and I have noticed the value of a lot of the cards have actually gone down in the price guides as they have gotten older. Thats a shame..............

[figurecollector]

Even though I stopped collecting the cards around 1993, I kept buying the Beckett's until 2005. They kept listing less and less cards in each set by year due to the influx of newer makers starting in the 90's and that is when I decided I did not need the magazine anymore either since there were few changes monthly in the ones I was interested in and fewer values shown. I still have all the magazines also.

[Terrible Tony]

When it comes to the Beckett's, I usually buy the thick bi-yearly ones, because it contains all the cards in all the sets. The monthly ones are pretty useless, since they only feature a couple of cards per set, usually the star players and the ones that changed in value.

[figurecollector]

Last I knew of, Beckett also had the values on line for a fee. i never got that involved with it since I was geting the magazine.

[atticfind]

Same here, I bought the monhtly Becketts and kept them all. Probably still at my parents house somewhere. I ran across one of the newer versions at Walmart not long ago and was shocked at how little was in it. It was a waste of paper.

[figurecollector]

When I first started getting Beckett's magazine, they id not take advertising. They eventually changed and it seemed the majority of the magazine was ads at the end of when I was receiving it.

[speeddemon340]

Like most kids of the 80's I to collected and bought many card from 1986, 87, 88, 89. They just made to dang many. Here is a great little documentary from ESPN if you all haven't seen it. It is about the Honus Wagner card. It is 14 minutes long.

espn.go.com/30for30/film?page=holy%20grail

[jnorlund]

Baseball cards haven't all lost value, graded cards and hall of famers as well as high grade rookies of popular players and rare inserts are still going well. The majority of cards lost their value from these three things:

1) Overproduction
2) The move to the insert/chase card only model
3) eBay - once people could see how many there were of certain cards, the values that dealers kept trying to sell them at just didn't make sense.

[spockoda]

Nov 28, 2011 15:45:47 GMT -6 atticfind said:

Amen! Man I used to love collecting just the plain old baseball cards. All the other stuff that started coming into play ruined it! I was a kid at the time and I don't think I will ever forget the excitement of getting a new pack and rushing home to open it and see which players I got that particular day. Good Times!

I feel this way about comic books as well until the prices of new ones raised to $1.00 and over, they started printing them on "slick" paper all the time, and when they became "graphic novels" rather than "comic books". With cards and comics greed reared its ugly head and hurt each one as far as it being collected to one degree or another. I've bought a handful of new comics over the past 23 years but I think in 1990 or 1991 I gave up cards.

[retro]

THEIR VALUE PROBABLY WONT REBOUND UNLESS SOMETHING CRAZY HAPPENS NOBODY IS INTERESTED IN THEM JUST MORE ATTRACTED TO OTHER SPORTS ITEMS NOW A DAYS LIKE JERSEYS ETC...MAYBE A DIE HARD COLLECTOR IS OUT THERE SOMEWHERE