What to Do With Your Childhood Baseball Card Collection

August 8, 2007 By Matthew Paulson

From about age 9 to 12, collecting sports cards was seemingly the thing to do among me and my friends. In our particular group, basketball cards were the thing to get, for others it baseball cards, and some people were even collecting X-men cards at the time! Like many kids, I eventually lost interest and moved onto the next fad at the time, which happened to be Pogs. You know, those little disks that you would try to flip over by throwing a “Slammer” at it…those were the days.

A lot of people in their twenties and thirties are in a similar situation. They have a collection of sports cards from the 80’s and 90’s sitting around not doing anyone any good. In the past many people have discovered that their long forgotten about collection of sports cards had quite a bit of value. Most of these cards are from the 60’s and 70’s when they were much rarer. Since they no longer had any use for their collections, they sold them on the open market and collected quite a bit of cash for them. Hearing these sorts of stories, a lot of people who grew up a generation or two later have thought maybe their sports card collections from their childhood might also be worth some money.

Unfortunately most of the cards which were produced in the 80’s and 90’s aren’t worth much of anything because there are so many other people in this situation. There was a major fad in the late 80’s and early 90’s of sports card collecting, thus a lot of people have big collections sitting around. There’s simply too much supply in the market for them to be worth a lot of money. Usually getting a complete 200 card set from a certain series are only worth $40 or $50…probably twice what one might have paid for the set when they originally came out.

Your collection probably does have enough value to make it worth your while to sell them if you have literally zero use for them and just want them gone. If you have a very valuable collection, it might be worth it to take the time to sort out the cards by the brands and series, appraise them and put them on eBay, but most people won’t have the time for that. Instead you might consider taking your collection around to a few different dealers and asking them what they could give you for the collection. If they’re not interested in buying it, they could at least appraise it for you.

If you don’t have a ton of time to sell your sports cards, you could instead just hand-pick out the few that you know have some sort of value and appraise them on eBay, and simply sell those and toss out the rest. Most of the cards are worth 50 cents are less, and if a card’s not worth $1.00, it’s definitely not worth selling it on eBay.

I recently got rid of my collection and got $50 from the set by selling it to a local dealer. It wasn’t a ton of money, but I didn’t necessarily have the greatest collection either. I did keep one of the cards though to remember the long lost hobby of my youth and had it framed, and that was my gold embossed Grant Hill rookie card, the best one in my collection to the best of my knowledge. It’s completely nostalgic and would make more financial sense to get rid of the card, but it’s nice to keep around to reminisce.