Baseball Card Market Report for December 22-28, 2022 - Top eBay Sales

PLUS -- The Big 5 tell us how baseball cards did in 2022

Dec 30, 2022

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December Was No October for Baseball Cards

So, if you take a look at the list of top-selling cards on eBay last week, down at the bottom of this post, you’ll see another batch of amazing cardboard that nevertheless did NOT make the cut of the top 100 most expensive for the year.

(That full list was part of our last paid newsletter for the year, available right here.)

And so concludes a long stretch of so-so numbers — comparatively speaking — to wrap up the year.

Will the downward trend continue, or is this just some hobby-wide bah-humbugging we’re seeing as another funky year winds down?

Are there any longer-term trends at play?

Speaking more broadly, and looking backward rather than forward …

How Did Baseball Cards Do in 2022?

It’s been another wild year, both in the sports card market and in the world at large.

So … how did baseball cards fare during 2022?

Did they continue to go up, up, up in prices?

Or did they start coming back to earth? (Hint: See our opening up there.)

There’s a lot of ways to look for evidence around those questions, but one of the most accessible is to pick a few exemplars and see how they fared over the last 12 months or so.

With that in mind, I picked a “Big 5” — five cards that change hands quite a bit, that are easily recognizable to collectors across the generations, and that command pretty hefty (though not necessarily exorbitant) price tags.

I also threw in a bonus card that I just happened to have handy numbers for.

And, speaking of numbers, for each of those five (six) cards, I found out what they were selling for last December, what they’re selling for now, and compared the two by way of our price multiplier (with today’s prices in the numerator and yesterday’s in the denominator).

As far as the condition I picked for each card it was either 1) the most common PSA grade for that card or 2) a grade that sees a lot of activity on the open market but that’s relatively accessible, pricewise, to at least a decent swath of collectors/investors.

Here’s what I found:

1968 Topps Nolan Ryan (#177) - PSA 6

December 2021 Value: $1400
December 2022 Value: $1700
Multiplier: 1.2

1975 Topps George Brett (#228) - PSA 8

December 2021 Value: $650
December 2022 Value: $650
Multiplier: 1.0

1980 Topps Rickey Henderson (#482) - PSA 9

December 2021 Value: $1900
December 2022 Value: $1800

Multiplier: 0.95

1982 Topps Traded Cal Ripken, Jr. (#98T) - PSA 9

December 2021 Value: $450
December 2022 Value: $400

Multiplier: 0.89

1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey, Jr. (#1) - PSA 9

December 2021 Value: $220
December 2022 Value: $180
Multiplier: 0.82

1993 SP Foil Derek Jeter (#279) - PSA 8

December 2021 Value: $550
December 2022 Value: $400
Multiplier: 0.73

—

I’ll let you decide which among these was our bonus, and which were in our starting lineup … our Big 5.

Doesn’t really matter when you look at those multipliers, anyway.

Bottom line? If you were looking to make a one-year killing in the baseball card market, this was not the year to dump your dollars into these particular cards in these particular conditions.

Pretty much all of them just teetered around the same price level they started the year at, and only the Ryan rookie card actually gained in value.

Put another way, if you had bought one of each of these cards in these conditions last December, you would have paid something like $5170 in total for the lot.

And, if you had sold those same cards this December, you would have raked in something like $5130.

That’s a difference of $40 to the bad, or a loss of 0.77% (that is, 77 one-hudredths of one percent).

And that’s what stagnant prices look like.

If there is a trend to be gleaned from this small sample of numbers, it’s that older cards did better than new cards, across the board and almost uniformly. I mean, each value multiplier up there is smaller than the one above it!

Would these trends hold if you looked at every card in the market?

*shrug*

The overall trends might, though you would surely find outliers in both directions. You could easily perform this same exercise for any cards you wanted, and I’m pretty sure you’d have some fun doing it.

But this Big 5 Plus One represents a pretty hefty cross-section of the “old” card marketplace, with some of the hobby’s most iconic cards. If they struggled to hold their ground in 2022, there’s a pretty good chance other cards did, too.

Of course, sometimes even just holding your ground keeps you in pretty rarefied air. Just ask the …

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for December 22-28, 2022

(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
Most expensive hockey cards sold in the last 30 days

Now, on with the show …

Baseball Card Values Newsletter

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