A Desperate Plea From Those Of Us With Knowledge Of Baseball Cards

Here's a scene for you. Pay close attention.

We're in a card shop. Could be any card shop in America. Here's an exchange that I guarantee you happens once or twice a day.

Customer: Do you guys buy cards?
Owner: /sighs knowingly. Yeah, yeah we do. What do you have?
Customer: Oh, old stuff. Real old stuff. Big name players, too.
Owner: /sighs further. Can I take a look?
Customer: Yeah, sure, sure.
Owner: /looks.
Owner: /sighs once more.
Owner: Yeah, this is all late 80's/early 90's stuff. We can't really use any of this, we've already got a ton.
Customer: /begins to look worried. Well I've got a ton of em. I mean I could give em to you real cheap, everything I've got for 50 bucks.
Owner: No no, you see, we've got tons and tons of this stuff already. I've got a room in the back completely full of this stuff. Topps and those companies really overproduced their product in the 80's, and now pretty much everything from the era is worthless.
Customer: Well what about 20 bucks? I'll give you everything for 20 bucks.
Owner: /sighs, /rues this routine, /wonders where life went wrong.
Owner: I don't think you understand. If you left them here, for free, on my counter, I'd just give them to a kid or something. I have literally boxes, and boxes, and boxes of this stuff in the back. I'll never sell it all.
Customer: Oh...
Customer: You sure? I mean look here, Ryne Sandberg. Jose Canseco. Mark McGwire. Big stars, man.
Owner: Yeah, don't need anything like that.
Customer: (disappointedly) Well, alright. Thanks, I guess.





I work in a card shop, so every now and then I play the part of Owner in the above conversation, only without all the sighing, because my life doesn't involve owning a card shop and dealing with this on a thrice-daily basis. But to illustrate what I'm getting at, most people think that the stuff they'd pull out of a pack like the above 1984 Topps one is worth $20-$30 in total. The truth, is that the cards inside the above 1984 Topps pack are as likely to be worth anything as the 23 year old stick of gum that accompanies them.

I make this post as one makes a PSA. Because honestly, I think most people have no clue. People think their unopened factory sets of 1986 Topps are going to send their kids to college someday. I'm not exaggerating.

I have no clue where the perception that Baseball Cards = Trust Fund came from, but. Well, I lie. I know where it came from. It came from a number of people discovering around the mid 80's that their childhood baseball card collections from 20 and 30 years prior were now worth hundreds if not thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so then a whole shitload of people bought up baseball cards like they were gold bricks and shelved them away thinking that 20 or 30 years (i.e. now) down the road they could make fortunes. Unfortunately, what nobody stopped to think about was that the whole reason the cards from the 50's and 60's were worth so much was because nobody had them anymore. All the children of the 50's with baseball cards went to college in the 70's and their parents tossed em. Created rarity and the like. Nobody did that with the 80's and 90's cards. Everybody's kept em locked away in mint condition waiting for the time to be ripe.

I do hate to be a burster of bubbles, but unless an extreme amount of people start getting extremely frustrated and/or 1980's Topps cards become a popular alternative to firewood, that time of ripetitude will never come to pass, because there are billions, if not trillions, of 80's cards out there just sitting around.

I make grab boxes for our card shop, where we toss 90% 80's/90's fodder into a box and mix it with 10% stuff from the last five years to keep people entertained with a crapton of cards for a cheap price. For about the past year and a half or so, I've been working on a pile of 1990 Juan Bell Upper Deck rookie cards, inserting 1 into each grab box I make. I started out at like 125 or something, I think I'm down into the 30's. The point of that little anecdote is this: 125 1990 Upper Deck Juan Bell rookie cards. First, who the hell is Juan Bell? Second, that's just his Upper Deck card. Just from 1990. That doesn't take into account the like four other brands that were making cards at the time, nor does it take into account that in the back room I like to frequently mention there's probably another 500 Juan Bell cards stashed away in a dusty box under four other boxes that consist entirely of those stupid yellow Fleer cards from 1991 or whenever.

So, because I'm nice, I've prepared a little primer:

:

Gold mine. Congrats. There are few of this nature in existence and people will pay top dollar for even common cards from this era, in any condition.

:

Worth a little bit. These are the 50's/60's variety. Stars like Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle or Hank Aaron will draw large cash amounts. Common cards will draw smaller sums like $4 or $5 a card.

:

Worthless. You know how they've annihilated the rain forests in South America? That was to make baseball cards in the 80's. Whole thing. Junior Felix rookie cards alone account for one missing chunk the size of California.

The late 90's and early turn-of-this-century brought us the autograph and jersey card. At first this was innovative and made for top dollar cards (the first jersey card insert set featured Tony Gwynn, Ken Griffey Jr, and Rey Ordonez, if my memory serves me correct. I'm not looking it up. Anyway, the Rey Ordonez still sells for like $40 or $50.) But now, rest assured, those are pretty much worthless too, unless it's got a low serial numbering or the card features a big name player.

In short, my desperate plea:

Sorry, your baseball cards are worthless. Accept this with as little pain as possible.