Baseball Card Market Report for August 3-9, 2023 - Top eBay Sales

PLUS -- Who decides a raw card grade?

Aug 11, 2023

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All-tani

Usually, our list of the most expensive baseball cards sold on eBay over the last week are chock full of players from across the diamond ages.

And that’s still true with this week’s list (see bottom of post), but man…Shohei Ohtani is going all Tom Brady on us here!

Of the 70 sales listed down below, the Angels’ two-way star accounts for 34 of them. That’s pert near half, in case your week-end math needs a little boost.

But that’s not to say there’s nothing else on our list to suit your tastes if you’re not into the impending-free-agent hype that comes with Ohtani.

Mickey Mantle, Mike Trout, and Babe Ruth make strong showings, and the true Willie Mays rookie card (1951 Bowman, that is) shows up a couple of times.

Heck, there’s even a Hideo Nomo sighting in the offing!

There’s even a fun, “raw ungraded” 1960 Topps complete set to ponder.

And speaking of pondering raw offerings…

Who Decides a Raw Card Grade?

Last week, I happened across a raw 1983 Topps Tony Gywnn rookie card on eBay that I thought was pretty interesting for a few reasons:

It had recently sold on 8 bids for $27 — decent activity for a raw card.
The seller (Greg Morris Cards) self-graded the card as VG/VG-EX.
The card looked pretty solid, condition-wise, based on the pics in the listing.

In case you missed it, here is that original Gwynn listing (affiliate link).

That got me wondering how collectors view the cards they see online in terms of condition, which prompted this post, where I asked you to grade my 1984 Topps Ron Hodges card (also raw).

That post and poll are still live if you want to have a look.

The results of that survey (so far), have been pretty interesting, with most folks clustering around a few possible grades. But there were multiple readers who graded the card everywhere from Good to Mint.

That just goes to show that grading is somewhat subjective, especially when we’re judging based on images on the net.

So … how did the eBay bidders judge that Gwynn card’s condition?

There’s a pretty straightforward way to find out, and that’s to look at how much graded copies of the card are selling for. As you can see from PSA’s Auction Price Realized tool, that Gwynn RC goes for about $15 in PSA 7 (NM) and about $35 in PSA 8 (NM-MT).

The raw card on eBay, the one Greg Morris Cards graded as VG/VG-EX falls between those two prices. So that’s pretty good evidence that the bidders consider the raw card to be in that general condition range.

But they might even be thinking bigger, because if the bidders planned to have the card graded in the event they won the auction, they’d want to leave some room for the cost of grading.

And PSA 9 Gwynns are selling for around $175 — plenty of breathing room between $27 and $175, right?

So, yeah, grading is in the eye of the beholder, which is one of the big reasons that slabbed cards are such a big deal in the hobby. They introduce an impartial third party that helps both sides (buyer and seller) feel like they’re working from the same premise.

That’s also one of the big reasons that graded cards always show up on lists like our rundown of the…

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for August 3-9, 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 …

Baseball Card Values Newsletter

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