Sports Cards

If you have the right cards, sure. But if you're one of those people with shoe boxes full of old cards in your attic that you're keeping to pay for your retirement, you're lucky if your collection is worth what you paid for it in the first place.

Somewhat, also collectable card games, some Magic The Gathering cards are worth thousands! Anyway, I heard about this fellow whose granny died and left him an old house. In the basement there was an box of hundred year old baseball cards in perfect condition worth millions! True story I saw on the news. I would have kept a Babe Ruth card if there was one, and I don't even like baseball that much!

If they are old enough they could still be worth something. I think the problem actually started in the 1980s when some of the old tobacco cards and a handful of cards from the 1950s started drawing some noteworthy price tags because of their rarity. A another card company or two came out to give TOPPS some competition, and adults started trying to keep and collect them instead of just kids buying them and sticking them in their pocket and such. By the 1990s it was getting ridiculous, with some cards being declared worth $100 or more fresh out of the pack. Kids were taking them and putting them directly into plastic sleeves. All of that added up to too many cards being out there and eventually driving down how much they were worth. I still have most of my baseball cards, but I do now wish I had sold that Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card about 15 years ago.

I'm sitting on some. Every time I hear a horror story from some dude about how his mom threw out his cards it gives me hope... if enough stupid moms keep throwing them away I might actually have something!

I decided to price a slew of 95-96 topps, upper deck and fleer stuff I, uhm, acquired and realized that the bottom had completely fallen the fuck out of these things. I have a card worth 30 cents, and that's my big draw. So, uh... who wants some football cards?

A 1962 Chico Fernandez card...the year he peaked with 20 homers and a .410 SLG percentage...will get you a goat and 5 gallons of water in Darfur.

I never got into sports cards but I remember cutting the roof of my mouth with a porcelain like shard of gum that came with the cards.

. . .they were somewhat worth collecting until the 90's completely flooded the market and made many of them as valuable as toilet paper. I do keep a few from the 1950's as gifts from a dear uncle. But sports cards have drifted from a profit motive to sentimentality - perhaps that's for the better.

At least they're better than the binder-full of Magic: The Gathering cards I used to play with like 15 years ago. (No, I never had any illusions that they would be "worth" anything. And I didn't even buy most of them, most were hand-me-downs.)

When I was a kid, we would pin these onto the wheel braces of our bikes with clothes pins so that the card would hit the spokes and make a motorcycle sound. I suppose I went through some cards then that might have some value today.The cards today are without much utility or value. I am too old now to use them to make noise on the spokes of my bike.

Unless you have Wayne Gretzky's WHA rookie card in pristine condition, in an environmentally controlled humidor, under glass, I suspect that your collection will prove most valuable levelling those annoying wobbly coffee table legs.

Kind of like the real estate bubble,sports cards went up & up in value for awhile,then crashed,leaving people holding "investments" they could now barely get rid of.Some very rare cards are still quite valuable,but only if you find a real collector with some ready cash.

I might have had one or two of these during my childhood. If I did, they were no doubt attached to the spokes of my bicycle with a clothes pin in order to produce that once popular and mildly irritating whirring sound. What I did once own and cherish in this line of alleged collectibles was a fairly respectible stack of Beatle Bubble Gum cards. I'm not sure they would be worth anything today but, I wouldn't mind having them back simply for the sake of nostalgia. Unfortunately, they disappeared not so coincidently about the time we later moved. And to think - if my mother hadn't been such a stickler for tossing my stuff out...well, I probably wouldn't be rich now but I'm pretty sure I would qualify for an episode of Horders.

Generally, trading cards are worth the paper they are printed on. Kids who put money into trading cards in the late 80's onward probably took a major hit. I went through a bunch of mine recently, and ended up giving 90% of them to Goodwill. Some of my 80's basketball cards are worth something, though (in case you were worried about me).

Back in the early nineties I sold a bunch that I had had for many years and it helped make a down payment on a house. They dated from the sixties and seventies and were among the things from my childhood my mother didn't toss. Since then, everybody and their dog makes sports cards, usually five or six editions a year. Now, with a few rare exceptions, they're not worth the paper they're printed on.

These really boomed in the 80's, but are almost an afterthought today- too many competing card companies, " special" series, and the like. Consequently, cards that used to fetch a lot of money have depreciated greatly, unless you have one of those famous Honus Wagner cards or something quite old.

I remember these, and they came with a stick of wretched gum. If I'm not mistaken (and I may be) the gum is more valuable than the cards.