Baseball Card Market Report for April 6-12, 2023 - Top eBay Sales

PLUS -- Recent retirees with HOF resumes in The Investment Corner

Apr 14, 2023

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Shohei Me the Way to Cooperstown

It’s not often that you find the Left Arm of God on a list of the most expensive baseball cards these days.

But if you scroll down to the bottom of this post to look at the top-selling cards from eBay last week, you’ll find that heavenly appendage not once but TWICE.

Yep, two Sandy Koufax rookie cards made the cut, and one of them tops the whole darn list.

Yeah, a double dose of the Left Hand of God — like, the original, and a spare, maybe. How cool would it have been had Koufax had a spare left elbow back in 1966?

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Other names you don’t see too often on these lists are Frank Thomas and Johnny Bench … but they’re both there this week.

Maybe it’s all part of the hope of spring, when even old, dusty, forgotten cards can climb back into the limelight every so briefly.

It’s great to have baseball back, huh?

Shohei Ohtani must think so, too. No doubt collectors of his cards do, as evidenced (partly) by the whopping ten entries he has on our bottom-of-post list this week.

If this kid’s not careful, he’ll end up in the Hall of Fame.

Which reminds me. I want to think about some …

Recent Retirees in The Investment Corner

The Hall of Fame is the thing when it comes to long-term card value.

And making noise on the Cooperstown ballot is a surefire way for sorta forgotten players to get back into the limelight and drag their cardboard along with them.

The Class of 2024 will start percolating for real in a few months, after the Class of 2023 is inducted, but, well, looking at the very next ballot favorites is kind of boring, right?

I mean, we all know Adrian Beltre and Phil Hughes are going to sail in on their first try. (Not to say I won’t write about this class as the time approaches, because you know I will.)

But what if we look out two, three, four, five years?

Yeah, that’s a bit more meaty.

So, for this month’s Investment Corner, we’re pushing all our chips in on guys who might get the call between now and 2028.

As a refresher, here are the rules:

I get to fake spend about $1000 on cards matching our theme — down-the-line HOFers in this case.
I have to “buy” cards that have actually sold on eBay recently.
I have to revisit these picks in a year to see how they’ve performed.
We all have to realize that this is all cardboard we’re talking about, so investing any real money in said baubles is dicey at best and likely to leave you with significantly less money if it all turns out to be a *ahem* house of cards. This is all for fun, in other words, and no money will or even should change hands.

With all that said, here are the guys I’m betting on this month to pay off in several dozen months.

1999 Bowman Chrome C.C. Sabathia (#344) - PSA 10 - $165.73

Sabathia is no Tom Seaver or Randy Johnson, but he is likely to be one of the last handful of starters to win 250 games for a long while (until the baseball winds blow the other way again, at least). And, with a Cy Young Award and a Yankees World Series championship under his belt, he’s pretty much a shoe-in for a plaque in 2025.

See listing (affiliate link)

2001 Fleer Authority Ichiro Suzuki (#101) - PSA 10 - $295

Ichiro was on target to be a member of he Class of 2024, but a brief farewell tour with the Mariners to start the 2019 season pushed that back a year. No matter, the most prolific hit man of the last 30 years or so would be a first-ballot guy in 2025, 2023, 1923, or 2123.

See listing (affiliate link)

2010 Topps Heritage Buster Posey (#114) - PSA 10 - $163.50

Posey is sort of the anti-Ichiro, in that he dropped a surprise retirement announcement on us after his age-34 season in 2021. That moved up his first ballot from sometime in the 2030s to 2027. While his short career (12 seasons) stunted his overall totals, Posey will get into Cooperstown, and there’s a good chance it will happen that first time around.

See listing (affiliate link)

2004 Bowman Chrome Yadier Molina (#301) - PSA 10 - $209.35

Molina and Albert Pujols rode off into the sunset together after a storybook-ish final season with the Cardinals in 2022. While Molina’s overall numbers are just OK and actually slightly below average from an offensive perspective, he gets a lot of credit for handling the St. Louis pitching staff for nearly two decades. He might not be a first-ballot inductee, but Yadi will get plenty of support.

See listing (affiliate link)

2001 Bowman Albert Pujols (#264) - BGS 9 - $159.50

Pujols, on the other hand, has been a slam-dunk first-ballot guy for a dozen years or more. His mid-to-late-career swoon with the Angels couldn’t erase all that he did in the first decade of the new century. And all we’ll remember in 2028, when he joins Molina on the ballot, is that sweet, sweet St. Louis swan song of his.

See listing (affiliate link)

—

All told, we “spent” $993.08 on this batch of probably-will-be Hall of Famers.

That leaves us $6.92 for a cup of coffee, which, in 2023, might get you a small at the local Mug-n-Run.

We’ll check back in, say, 2030, to see how our picks are panning out.

The “Start” of Something Big? Maybe Not So Much

Last April, we took advantage of the start of a regular season that might never have been, thanks to the ongoing labor strife, to fake-invest in some cards that represented a new beginning of some sort.

A debut set from a new company.

A new card format.

An old player in a new uniform.

You get the gist.

Here’s the rundown of what we “bought” back thenj and how much we “sold” for this month..

1989 Upper Deck Gary Sheffield (#13) - PSA 10

Bought (10/2021): $45.00
Sold (10/2022): $40.00
Profit/Loss: -$5.00 (-11%)

1972 Topps Nolan Ryan (#595) - PSA 6

Bought (10/2021): $148.50
Sold (10/2022): $150.00
Profit/Loss: $1.50 (1%)

1984 Fleer Update Roger Clemens (#U-27) - PSA 9

Bought (10/2021): $390.00
Sold (10/2022): $300.00
Profit/Loss: -$90.00 (-23%)

1986 Donruss The Rookies Barry Bonds (#11) - PSA 10

Bought (10/2021): $182.50
Sold (10/2022): $175.00
Profit/Loss: -$7.50 (-4%)

1988 Score Unopened Case

Bought (10/2021): $208.13
Sold (10/2022): $265.00
Profit/Loss: $56.87 (27%)

1957 Topps Saul Rogovin (#129) - SGC 8

Bought (10/2021): $20.09
Sold (10/2022): $20.00
Profit/Loss: -$0.09 (0%)

1984 Fleer Update Bret Saberhagen (#U-103)

Bought (10/2021): $5.00
Sold (10/2022): $10.00
Profit/Loss: $5.00 (100%)
—

(The price we’d have to pay now - “sold” — is culled from the PSA Auction Prices Realized tool, generally taking the most recent sale of the given card in the given condition as our barometer and leaning on recent eBay sales in some cases.)

All in all, we “spent” $999.22 on these cards last April and “sold” them for $960 this month. That’s a loss of $39.22 loss, or about 3.9%.

Griffey and Clemens tanked our chances of turning a profit, but Sabes and, especially, 1988 Score kept us within swinging-bunt distance of getting out of the red.

And speaking of red alerts (OK, we weren’t speaking of alerts, but we are now)…

Here are some cards that got all the alarm bells firing at once last week…

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for April 6-12, 2023

(Quick note — this list contains affiliate links to the original eBay listings.)

If you want to see updated 30-day market toppers anytime, we have a couple of resources over on WaxPackGods.com:

Most expensive baseball cards sold in the last 30 days
Most expensive football cards sold in the last 30 days
Most expensive basketball cards sold in the last 30 days

Now, on with the show …

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