Quote:
Originally Posted by detroitm2
Honestly, people arent collecting baseball cards like they use to. Unless you have something super-rare/valuable, the amount of time/effort to get the cards graded and trying to sell them at a legit price might not be worth it. Best to just hang onto them until people start picking it back up again.
I have a medium sized collection of cards from the 50s/60s that I've been hanging onto for a while due to this. Some of them are "valuable", but finding someone to pay for them was a chore. I ended up just putting them in airtight cases and will hang onto them for another 20 years.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GOLFFRR
I watched a doc on netflix about baseball cards and it was saying they are all worthless now for the most part? it was really interesting doc, forget the name (im sure someone one here will be able to post it up) but worth watching.
whats crazy I have so many cards which I have been holding for years thinking they would be worth a ton some day
movie name: Jack of all trades
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I will tell you why they are not worth anything.
Back in the day us kids had to go to the local corner store to buy a pack of cards with the gum stick in them, most kids would save up their nickels and dimes to buy a pack of cards. Most of those card got pulled out and used and played with and traded over time. At the time there were very few cards available and mostly kids had them and we all know kids did not take good care of their stuff. Cards from that time period are rare and desired. During the 60's and 70's I collected about 1000 cards and still have them, most are trashed from playing with them a few are in good shape since I never played with the ones I liked. The ideal at the time was to get all the player cards for each team so you had one of each player on a team. This took a lot of work. Therefore I only had few worth something to a collector who does not have them in their collections.
Then came the 80's and you could buy boxes of card packs with or without gum, collectors wanted them without gum, gum could ruin the cards. There were people buying cases of cards, never opening any packs since it was believe this would automatically devalue the cards, so lots of people had no idea what they had in their collection. There was a guy who was maybe 10 yrs older than me when I was in high school & college in the 80's and I use to do work on his truck to make extra money. This guy collected like crazy his second bedroom in his apartment was filled with boxes of trading cards all kinds. He told me this was his retirement plan. He would be retiring about now.
About 5 years ago I looked into the values of the 1000 so cards I had. What I learn, unless I was willing to go through the 1000 card and figure out which one's may be valuable to a collector then take them to be graded since they were not in the pack, the cards were worthless.
I was told until all the homes with all those cards stacked in someone basement or extra bedroom burn down and burn all those cards out of existence most of the cards today really do not have any value. You have to willing to go through every single one and figure out if is a better fire starter verse something to frame and look at, otherwise, you will not find anyone to buy them as lot.
I ended up pull the couple which meant something to me, I had Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell cards which happen to be worth something and I was Pirate fan at the time so they have value to me.
The baseball card industry destroyed this market, the industry was investigated in the 90's for their activities around selling boxes of cards with the hopes of a very valuable card being in a pack. This was seen as gambling and kids were buying all kinds of boxes of cards looking for maybe that one valuable card.