Understanding Your Baseball Card Collection

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Sports cards began as promotional inserts in tobacco packs in the 1930’s. They quickly tapped into the fan-collector passion, and a new collecting craze was born. Today, sports card collecting runs the full spectrum between fun hobby and serious investment. From 1956 to 1980, Topps was the sole producer of sports cards, making cards from that period very easy (though often pricey) to collect. There’s only one ’55 Yogi Berra. But in the 1980’s Fleer, Donruss and Upper Deck all jumped into the market. Today, companies play to avid collectors, issuing gimmicky insert cards and multiples of one player. Here’s a quick guide to collection and card types to help you keep things straight and figure out how you want to approach the heroes of the diamond.

INSERTS

The current trend from card companies is to produce “insert” cards. These cards are scarce, and only found in a limited number of packs. The statistics could be one out of fifty packs for a silver foil holograph card or one out of 20,000 for a signed card. Some extremely rare cards even contain actual pieces of sports equipment. An even more recent development on the part of card companies is the practice of slipping a valuable vintage card into the wrapping-plant. These cards can be worth thousands of dollars, which has raised eyebrows at the Attorney General’s office—they equate this low cost/high reward formula to gambling—but so far no legal action has been taken.

ROOKIE CARDS

Everyone’s excited by a new star player. Often, a player’s first-year rookie card sharply rises in value based on his performance in subsequent years and quickly becomes his most valuable card. Before 1980, a player had one rookie card when they entered the game. But now, several companies could put out multiple cards for a player’s rookie season, making it hard to determine an official “rookie” card. These days, price is usually gaged by the quality (the photo, card stock, etc.) and scarcity of the card. Eventually, the market decides which of a players multiple first-year cards will be the real “rookie.”

SETS

Again, the proliferation of sports memoribilia card companies and inserts makes it increasingly difficult to assemble a complete card set. When you have a 1 in 1,000 chance of getting the last gold plaited card you need to round out the collection, it can get pretty frustrating. But many older collectors started out this way in the 60’s and 70’s, so it’s not an uncommon ambition and a complete set often raises the value of all cards involved.

MYSTERY PACKS

Every now and then someone comes across vintage cases of unopened trading card packs of cards. The pull of the unknown is very seductive, and unopened packs from the 40’s-50’s have sold for $1,000. And again, the rise of insert cards makes even recent unopened packs potentially highly valuable. But once you buy them, do you open rip ‘em open or let the mystery live on?

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