Baseball Cards

Perhaps this has been addressed earlier but do ABA cards have any value? Or ones of players from long-ago folded teams? I have cards of guys with the Utah Stars, Kentucky Colonels, Memphis Tams/Sounds, etc. Same with the NHL: California Golden Seals, Cleveland Barons, Kansas City Scouts, etc.

 

I'd guess the same rules apply to those as to all other cards. There might be a niche collector who would pay more for commons, but as a general rule star players and complete sets are all that's worth anything. They're probably worth more than baseball cards of the same era, though, since they're likely rarer.

 

BUMP ...
Dust off those Ellis Burks RCs!
Baseball cards are back!

Or not ...

Shohei Ohtani Rookie Card Sells for $6,725 as His Memorabilia Market Soars

 

That's $353.94 per at-bat ... or a better return than Dick's investment in Bitcoin!

 

You've all heard my sad story somewhere along the way. I was born in '56 and inherited my oldest brother's baseball cards in the mid-60's somewhere. I know for sure that I had some 1959 Topps, because I remember the Hank Aaron - Eddie Matthews Fence Busters cards. Nellie Fox. Willie Mays. Harvey Kuenn. Al Kaline. Those I remember for sure. Lord knows what I had and didn't know it. Some of them made that cool whirring noise in my bike spokes. Most of them got thrown out by my mom with I was maybe seventeen or so.

Sigh.

 

The other side of that is that I bought Magic: The Gathering collectible playing cards when they first came out. Two boxes of starter decks, ten decks to the box, sixty cards to the deck. I sold twelve cards for $1500 five or six years back. They paid for my Dragoncon weekend.

 

You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl?

 

My kid has been collecting this year's regular Topps set. The number of sets can be intimidating, but we concentrate on the primary set. I bought him the plastic sheets and a binder, and he dutifully places them in the proper slots on Sundays when I give him his pack for the week. We don't have a Playstation yet so, like me, this is for now how he is connecting to and learning the players.

 

That's really cool. How much does a pack go for anymore?

 

I think standard Topps packs are about 3 dollars for 12 cards. A far cry from the 50 cents, 15-card packs of my youth. I buy a pack once in awhile, but find, that I just don't have the connection to athletes that I did when I was 10 or 12. Part of growing up for sure, but now I've rediscovered Legos. Go figure. Talk about expensive, when did plastic bricks get so spendy?

 

I think $5.99 for 36 cards.

 

I had a love-hate relationship with the stale bubble gum.

It was in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s and I bought a Fleer or Donruss pack from their first year (‘81?), before Topps sued to prevent them from using the bubble gum. I had to try it... it was the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. Necco Wafers tasted like Reese’s cups after that.