Baseball Card Collection For Sale

[Deleted]

Hey, anyone know anything about baseball cards? Someone just gave us four of those giant Tupperware storage tubs filled with old baseball cards -- not from the 50/60s, but from the late 80.s/early 90s. Includes several unopened boxes of Upper Deck, Topps, Leaf, etc and albums of assorted rookie cards for Frank Thomas, Bo Jackson, Ken Griffey Jr... even a Don Mattingly signed baseball with his 1984 Rookie card. Tons of cards to go through. We have gotten all the nuances of collecting cards; so long ago...

The deal is, we have to sell the stuff and give her half the $$ we get. She had all these in her attic and is moving. Her sons told her we were the best source to move these things. heh heh

Any ideas how do we sell this stuff? We know nothing about EBay etc. or collecting anymore. Did it with son, back in the day... We looked up a couple of cards online and they appear to be pretty valuable.

Basically we want to sell them without getting scalped.

[BlueSox GM(Matt P)]

Only way to get full value for signed stuff is to get it certified. You can always try Ebay, but you'll probably only get a fraction of the value, as they will see that either you don't have a certificate listed or they will ask and you will have to say that you don't if you don't want to get dinged by Ebay. Best bet is to get together the best of the best cards, and buy a Becketts guide at your local Walmart and get some ideas on the prices. The other cards, you might get more selling as bulk than selling individually. Someone will buy the lot, hoping to find a Griffey, etc. Don't go to card shows, as you'll most likely find sharks that will undercut you trying to make a buck.

[Deleted]

So is hiring someone to certify them the way to go?

[Deleted]

My first response would be I'll give you all the cash in my wallet for them...

Its pretty simple to get information on card values, either online or Beckett book. Best bet is to get your best cards certified.

Depending on how you want to go about it there are a few ways to go, but seeing how its a 80's-90's collection my personal opinion is to piece it out and try to sell the higher value pieces online, via EBAY or a similar platform.

That is unless you can find a buyer willing to make a decent offer on the complete collection or some of the complete sets. Most collectors wont be salivating over this stuff since so many sets were printed in this era and everybody was collecting them.

[Deleted]

We get half of what we can sell them for, so we basically want to unload them with minimal work on our part and not get ripped of. They aren't our cards, we can take what we're offered... but we don't want to be a sap on this and would like to get somewhere near real value for the lady.

[Winston-Salem Spirits (Brad)]

Certify the ball. Unopened Upper Deck packs might be valuable as well as are a select few Rookie Cards from the 80's (Griffey's Upper Deck 89 or Ripken's Topps 82 would probably be the cream of the crop from that era). Generally, the mid 80's is when there started to be a huge flood of cards into the market. In that time span there are really only a handful of cards worth certifying because even some of the top rookies (85 Clemens, 88 Maddux, 85 McGwire, etc) are still flooding the market. Not hard to get most of them cheap. Pull out the gems, certify them and and the ball, then sell the whole lot of them together for the price of all the good stuff.
I think you'll find that it might be hard to move that stuff without giving steep discounts on the Beckett prices.

[Deleted]

Thanks Brad.

Where do we go or who do we contact to get them "certified"?

[BlueSox GM(Matt P)]

Sounds like Brad has a better feel than most. I haven't been in them for almost 25 years, so he's probably the best guy to follow. There are online certification services that you can ship your stuff to be certified. You have to probably insure it and stuff to be safe. I'd look for similar prices on Ebay for the signed item to get an idea whether it is worth the expense to certify it, and how much you want to insure it for, unless you can find a local certification resource. Depending on your proximity to sports teams, you might actually find someone local. For me, I live in the middle of nowhere in Upstate New York, so my only choice is online or go to Steiner Collectibles in the city (they usually do all the commemorative stuff for the Mets and the Yankees).

[Deleted]

We live in downtown St Petersburg. Not so many sports memorabilia shops around here, though there are a ton of antique shops and antiquity auctions here.

[Sand Gnats (Matthew)]

80/90s stuff was so mass produced it is hard to find any real valuable cards, maybe a few $50-100 cards, but you're unlikely to get any big money items and the only way to get the big money to have the high value cards/autos certified which isn't cheap per card. You're looking at something like 12-15$ a card to certify from a company like PSA or Beckett. Been years since I looked into this stuff, so maybe some things have changed.

[Deleted]

That's our problem. We haven't paid any attention to the "value" of cards for 20+ years. And even before that, we liked baseball cards because they represented the game and our favorite players, not because they had any monetary value. We started collecting cards in the 50s, and had a giant box of them -- hundreds of the ones that are now the center pieces of collections, mostly Yankees but all the HOF of the era. As usually happened, Mom tossed them out during spring cleaning when we were in the far east.

Just trying to do this lady a favor. Her son grew up with our kid and now lives in New Orleans, and her husband died last year. She's basically cleaning out the memories.

[BlueSox GM(Matt P)]

Isn't that the way always is Moms. My mom sold about a couple thousand dollars of cards for $100 bucks when my dad left her. My brothers and I were pissed but we weren't in town at the time. I can only imagine Smoke in the Far East...

[Generals GM (Pete)]

so dumb question, you have to get card certified? or just the autographed ball?? The ball I can see, the cards confuse me.

Funny because a few months ago I dug out my old shoe boxes of cards that I collected. Guess I am not as old as El Guapo (no offense meant) because mine are from the 70's and 80's. Anyway, my 10 year old son has gotten into collecting baseball and football cards, which I love. He was trying to price some of them out from a free website we found online. He kept quoting me pricing, to which I said, great, just have to find someone will to pay that price.

I have to imagine there are a lot of "dealers" that buy these sets on the cheap and turn around to sell them. Mine aren't worth that much to sell, I would rather keep them, too many memories. I also collected them based on the players I liked. I was (and still am) a Mets fan and my brother is a Yankees fan. So I would always give him the Yankees and he would give me the Mets, I think I got ripped off!!!

[BlueSox GM(Matt P)]

Autographs only

[Deleted]

We grew up a Yankees fan, and we had literally hundreds of all the Yankees cards -- the one considered important now -- Mantle was our favorite player, of course. We had every card his that ever came out, right up through the end of his career in the 60s. Can you imagine owning twenty or thirty of his rookie cards and having your mom throwing them away so she could convert your bedroom to a guest room? heh heh

Rizzuto was our next favorite and then Berra and Whitey Ford. But we owned literally dozens of cards on every Yankees, complete sets of cards from 1951 through 1962, at which time we left for the military. We prided our collection not just for having all the Yankees but for having so many of all the Mantle cards, etc. Ugh. Heartbreaking.

For some reason she missed our football cards, though. They were in a smaller box on a shelf. We had complete sets 1955 through 1959 and lots of singles -- that's the Jim Brown and Johnny Unitas era, if you're wondering. Bart Starr... etc. We still own those, but our interest in football faded over the years to the point where we don't watch it at all these days. We sold the 1955 set for $3K a few years ago when we were writing free lance and hard up for $$$ and couldn't met our mortgage payment. heh

[Deleted]

Look up what a complete set of 1952 Topps cards go for. heh heh And we had multiple cards (many) of all our favorites, especially Mantle, the big cards and the small ones.

[Deleted]

Looked it up online just now:

portasite.com/?category_name=1952-topps

El Guapo is now weeping... Though many of the cards were likely not mint condition because we handled them all the time. Didn't store them in plastic sleeves of anything like that, just dumped them into a big box from the grocery store. heh