Stop me when this sounds familiar:
You collected cards in the 90s when you were a kid, and then decided that it was time to stop. Now, you’re seeing a lot of chatter about how the sports cards market has grown the past few years, and you’re wondering if that baseball card collection sitting in your parents’ attic is going to pay for your next house.
Sound about right? That was more or less my story….
So where do you begin with looking up value?
In order to find out how much baseball cards are worth, you’ll first need to sort them. Put the ones that have no chance of having value off to the side. The rest, you’ll want to look up individually on sites like 130point, PWCC, or eBay.
I know looking up cards one by one can be tedious, but your other solution is to sell your entire collection at 30 cents on the dollar.
So let’s help you figure out how much your baseball cards are worth!
Decide What Your Collecting Goals Are
You’re likely going to fall into one of these three groups:
- You want the cards gone and you need/want the money ASAP
- You’re not in a hurry and would like maximum return
- You want to get back into actively collecting and/or flipping for profit.
Each of these goals will lead you to pricing out your collection differently—mostly in how much time you’re willing to spend.
#1 Cards Gone ASAP
Like I said above, you COULD sell the whole thing site unseen, but you’re going to have sell it at a lower price than you think…and for sure leave money on the table. This can be done with some hobby card shops, Facebook Marketplace, or to a friend.
Even if you don’t want to spend much time at all, you should at least look through your collection for the high-dollar cards and then dump the rest. Here’s what you’re looking for:
Rookie Cards of Stars – Keep rookie cards for anyone that made an all-star game. If you don’t want to look up prices for that many, focus on rookies from hall of famers. This is likely going to be your best source for true hits. Just don’t be too disappointed when players you think should make you rich don’t do much. For example, I have a Kevin Garnett rookie worth $3 and a Steve Nash worth $2. It’s all a matter of their status in the sport’s history, as well as the rarity of the card.
Insert Cards of Stars – Insert cards are the ones that look different from the base cards. Although they are rarer, often they are valued less than base cards by many collectors! For example, a base rookie almost always outsells an insert rookie. Of course, there are exceptions for rarer, popular inserts of stars. Here’s a good example:
I had one of these – of course I sold mine for $265 a few years ago. But it’s Jordan, it’s a rare insert, and it’s a sweet die-cut card.
Also, especially keep an eye out for serial-numbered cards or parallels—like a gold or silver version of a base card.
Older Base Cards of Superstars – And I mean old. If you have a base (regular) card of Ken Griffey from 1993, that’s not worth much at all:
I’m saying guys like Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays.
If this sounds like a lot of work, you can either find someone you trust to help you go through the collection (you could offer them a reward, like 30% of your profit), or you could sift through and only keep the MOST obviously valuable cards—like rookies of hall of famers— and dump the rest.
If you want to dump it all at once, you’ll have to be okay with accepting a lowball offer. People will naturally assume you’ve already taken the good cards out, even if you say otherwise in a listing. By “lowball,” I mean probably around 30-40% of comps because whoever buys your collection is also buying 100 hours of pricing & selling cards.
=> Check out my article Where Can I Sell My Sports Cards in Bulk?
#2 Not in a Hurry, Looking for Max Return
Alright, so you’re still going to go through your cards like you do in the above example, but you’re going to look up much more of them.
Basically anything that you might even think has a possibility of selling for a couple of dollars gets set aside.
The main difference here is that anything that might be worth something in the future (hall of fame inserts, base, or rookies) gets put back into storage to get checked on in 10-20 years. Just remember you’re saving players that will be remembered—I’m talking your Ken Griffeys, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwires, Derek Jeters, A-Rods…those kind of all-timers. Second tier guys get forgotten decades down the road.
#3. Restart Your Collecting or Flipping Empire!
When I pulled out my collection from the 90s and early 2000s, I had about 6,000 cards to go through. I wanted to figure out what cards were worth selling right away, which cards I should hold onto for the near future, which cards I wanted to keep for my personal collection, which ones get put back into storage, and which ones are dumped in the recycling bin (or donated to goodwill or given to kids).
If that sounds exhausting or tedious, then you’re probably not in this category anyway! I thought it was a blast.
Here’s how I decided which cards were in which category:
- Cards to Sell Right Away – second tier players of rare inserts. These were cards that maybe could be sold for a few bucks on eBay and I didn’t think would hold value long-term. I also sold a few higher value cards in the $50-$100 range because I wanted some seed money. These also weren’t cards I was interested in holidng longer term (like a rare Scottie Pippen insert).
- Cards For a Near-Future Flip – These are guys that I thought had a chance to go up in value. I had a few cards from the early 2000s, and if they had yet to retire, I held them until they did. Or, these were guys who had recently retired that were going to make the hall of fame.
- Personal Collection – Your choice! Favorite players, favorite teams, cards that just look cool…just keep the ones you like! I have a soft spot for serial numbered cards. I have a nobody rookie numbered out of 4,500 that I keep for no earthly reason other than I like serial numbered cards!
- Back into Storage – Cards that still don’t have a ton of value, so they aren’t worth selling right now. Think about your junk wax cards (like say, your 1988 Topps collection)…they still might not be worth much later, but another 20 years in the attic might give you better values.
- Dump the Rest!
How Do I Find Out How Much my Baseball Cards Are Worth?
So the big question! First, I want you to understand that your cards are worth what people are willing to pay. I know that sounds dumb…but as a teen I subscribed to Beckett Magazine, which had prices for tens of thousands of cards. I remember looking in there and I’d see my card priced at $40…only to list it in the early days of eBay and get $2.
The best way to search for cards is that you’ll first want to find the year the card was made! For baseball, this is easy—just look at the fine print on the bottom on the back. Then, you want to find out who made the card. Also usually pretty easy…just the company name that’s on the front of the card.
Then you want to see if it’s a base card or an insert card. The insert cards will say something on the front, like this one:
In fact, if I’m trying to look up my card, I’ll usually go to eBay, and type in something like “Luis Castillo postseason auto topps”—basically a word soup description of the card. Then, you can look at pics and match up the proper description of your card. You’ll find other listings that have it all laid out for you. Sometimes you’ll have to adjust a feature unique to your card—like how this one is serial numbered #26/30:
That’s actually a card of mine I sold on eBay a little bit ago.
So let’s jump into my 3 favorite places to value cards!
Value Your Baseball Cards on eBay
The granddaddy. It’s actually not my favorite place to look for values, but it gives you good insight into volume. You can see what others are listing their cards for, if cards listed at auction have bids, and how many are for sale.
But here’s the secret to valuing on eBay—only look at SOLD listings! Many people will list cards for super high prices, which can give you a false sense pretty quickly just by looking at Buy It Now listings.
So, look on the left-hand side if your desktop and scroll down until you find “sold.”
On mobile, you’ll find this by clicking “Filter” in the top-right corner, and then “show more.”
Once you have that selected, you can see prices that real people are paying!
2. Look Up Card Values on PWCC Marketplace
With PWCC, you do have to register to see past sales, but it’s free!
Their search functionality is incredible, and very forgiving if you don’t type something in exactly. I like that they give you a very clean view of all completed sales of your card going back in time for years. You can see very quickly the history of sales on a card.
You can also mouse over pictures to make them bigger. Overall, a very quality site.
3. Find Card Values on 130point
However, in my mind, this is the gold standard. Their site is a little bit clunkier…and it’s search isn’t quite as forgiving…but they have one feature that’s unbeatable:
On all of the “offer accepted” listings (which is A LOT), they actually show you what the accepted offer was! On eBay or PWCC, you’ll see what the original price was and that an offer was accepted…but you don’t know how much that was. If it says “$1,299 best offer accepted”, you don’t know if that was for $200 or $1,200. 130point will tell you!
And there you go! There are certainly other sites (COMC, being another one with high volume sales to look at), but those are the only three that I ever use. Good luck with figuring out how much your baseball cards are worth!
