Without going into too much detail here my grampa died recently and left me his baseball card collection. We were very close and he left them to me with the full understanding that I would sell them immediately. He had no interest in baseball whatsoever and couldn’t tell you who played for what team. He was simply addicted to collecting these cards and started right around 1990. Now, when I say addicted I mean addicted. There are enough cards to easily fill the entire cargo area of a medium sized bread truck, and I’m not exaggerating. He was mostly addicted to getting the extra special insert cards and collecting high profile players and bought cases of packs just to root through to find these elite cards.
I used to collect cards and comics when I was a kid in the 80s so I know my way around the market. I just don’t know how to deal with an uncatalogued collection of this magnitude. He cataloged all the stars and special cards, of which there are a shitload, but the rest of them are simply sorted by brand year and set. There isn’t any single database that can tell me what I have and it will seriously take me a year or more to accurately capture the entire collection on my own.
What is the best way to approach this? I’m fully aware that he started collecting at the wrong time and the market has been flooded with cards since about 87 and the value is not going to be Beckett dollars etc… I still need to sell them though as I have nowhere to put them and that’s what he wanted me to do.
There are probably people who can catalogue and value the collection for you for a fee. Perhaps you could go to one of those specialist shops and get some advice on getting in touch with such people.
Are there any trade publications or magazines for collectors? There are probably advertisements in those offering cataloguing/valuation services.
It sounds like your grandfather did all the work for you already. If he cataloged all the big players and special cards, that’s what you work with. The rest are commons that aren’t even worth the paper they’re printed on to a collector. Take those to a children’s hospital or something and let the kids have fun.
As for special cards and the stars, search eBay for them and use that as your price guide (Beckett is nice, but rather worthless in the real world, especially post-eBay). I’m not sure if lots or individual cards are selling best these days, but you’ll likely have to sell them in lots.
Finally, are there any Nolan Ryan’s in this collection?
I’m not sure if they still publish price guides for Baseball cards or not - the bottom fell out of the market in the 90’s, so it became less relevant. I would suggest looking on eBay to see what things are going for.
Important things to note when searching for your card or cards on eBay : The publisher (Topps, Donruss, Fleer, whatever) and the year. Look for auctions (close to completion, preferably), not eBay stores.
Complete sets of a given year are worth more than individual cards from that set. Even if 539 of the 540 cards aren’t worth a penny on their own, there’s a collector out there who’ll pay a bit of a premium to get the whole set at once, on top of the price for the big-name rookie card.
And yeah, since his collection is post-1990, it may end up being more trouble than it’s worth. I’d suggest building out whatever complete sets you can, and selling those, and then you could try other creative kinds of lots, like “Joe Smith Topps Baseball cards 1990-2005” where you focus on one player and put a bunch of his cards together - he may have a fan out there who’d never considered collecting baseball cards.
There’s also rookie cards. If you have a list of all the sets represented in the collection, you should be able to look up online which players appeared for the first time ever in each set.
The OP mentions the Beckett guide in his OP. It’s still being published and (even better) is fully searchable online.
Unlikely. Complete sets haven’t been a thing for a long time. It’s all about graded cards now. If you’ve got any big rookies, it might be a good idea to get them graded. You’ll pull in a bit more money.
If there’s a catalog, why wouldn’t rookies be part of it already?
You can sell the commons- they are close to worthless, but it sounds like you have a LOT of them. I had a small closet filled of boxes of commons from my 1990’s collection, which totaled over 100,000. I sold them and all for a hundred bucks. The most effective way for you, if you factor in not wanting to waste hours and hours of your time sorting or making sets or anything, is just put out ads on craigslist or ebay or something, “Instant collection for only 19.99!” if you sell the commons in lots of 20,000 for 20 bucks, people will buy them, and from the sound of description of the collection’s size, you would make several hundred dollars, more than worthwhile way it to get rid of the bulky, worthless part of the collection. For the rest of it, if he was that serious of a collector, even though he started in the 90’s he probably has acquired a lot of still valuable, rarer older cards. The catalogued cards in cases you should have appraised for sale (not value) by a profesional. Most of them will probably list as valued at $2 or less, but there’s no way you’d be able to sell 10,000 $2 cards for anywhere close to $20,000 in a short amount of time. But there may be enough quantity of decent cards to offer an enormous discount off list value and still get someone to give you thousands of dollars for them.
Keeping sets together vs. selling the really collectible cards one by one is a tough one.
My “gut answer” is, break up the sets; I think you are likely to get more money that way. (If a set has rare cards A and B, and someone has A but not B while someone else has B but not A, neither is going to pay that much more for the entire set than for just the card they want, and this way, you make two sales (three, if you sell the non-rares at bargain basement rates) instead of one.)
Oh? Good. That was a response to Cunctator’s post, actually.
Selling a Topps 1985 set with a M/NM Graded Mark McGuire rookie card is going to net you more money than selling the graded rookie card and the rest of the set separately. I **guarantee **it. For collectors, complete is ALWAYS a thing.
I guess. Maybe I’ve been out of too long (I think I last bought regularly in 2001), but I don’t ever remember complete sets being anything more than a curiosity for a small subset of collectors. And even then, sets from the 90s were being sold as kindling, not collectibles.
I didn’t get the impression that Cubsfan’s grandpa bought complete, sealed sets. Looks like he rooted through packs for special inserts. In that case, as much of a pain in the ass it would be, the way to get the most money is to sell those cards individually on ebay or at shows.
Another idea would be to try to estimate the value of the grand total of this truckload of cards and shop the entire package around to dealers/collectors. I assume that approach will get you much less money, but would at least be much easier.
As an aside, who bought $100 worth of commons? Why?
A lady whose kids were collecting cards with no care for value, she probably figured they’d get more enjoyment out of 100,000 baseball cards than a lot of equally expensive toys out there, plus it would keep them quiet for hours.
Unfortunately it seems that no cards since 1990 are really anything to get excited about. The market just became super saturated. The easiest thing to do is to pack’em all up take them to a dealer who seems trustworthy and unload the whole lot of them in one fell swoop.
I don’t think you can say that yet…any of the star Refractors from Finest’s first year (1994?) will fetch a pretty penny and there were some significant rookie issues around the same time.
I agree for the most part. The thing is though that he was able to amass ALOT of the specialty insert cards. The ones with ball bat pieces, field dirt, uniform fabrics, holograms, fucking you name it it’s in there. He actually managed to collect an entire 1992 Topps GOLD set. If you recall you only got 1 or 2 gold cards for every BOX of packs and he managed to collect all 792 cards in the gold flavor. That’s just to illustrate how much we are dealing with here. The cards are all in Illinois right now so I don’t know exactly which cards there are but I’m sure there are a shitload of rare cards, the question is how can I sell them fairly without getting taken to the cleaners and selling by the pound.
FYI I originally put this in Cafe but it got moved twice.