Baseball Card Market Report for February 29-March 6, 2024 - Top eBay Sales

PLUS -- What are the most "sellable" junk wax cards?

Mar 08, 2024

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Old Friends in High Places

Take a look at the list of the most expensive baseball cards sold on eBay last week (bottom of post) and you’ll see an old, familiar name if you can get past the glare of the Mickey Mantle rookie card in the top slot.

Yeah, Mike Trout is back in the lineup. Will he stay there and make a bigger showing this season? We’ll get a chance to find out in the coming weeks and months — much of that depends on his health, no doubt.

But let your eye trail a bit further down our list, and you’ll see some hobby “comfort food” in the form of a couple of Topps cards from 1980s and 1990s. Unusual suspects around these parts, but near and dear to many collectors of that era.

Say, that makes me think maybe it’s time to dig into a related question..

Which Junk Wax Cards Are Most Sellable?

My (first) prime years of collecting fell during the so-called Junk Wax Era — I was knee-deep in the hobby from 1983 through 1991.

I suspect I’m not alone in that club, especially considering the continued interest I see in comments, emails, forums, etc., in figuring out which cards from the 1980s and 1990s are worth anything.

Or, more specifically, which ones are sellable, as in people will actually buy them.

It’s not that hard to figure out which graded cards from that era are in the most demand since PSA and other grading companies maintain pretty robust registries of the cards they’ve handled and the after-market sales of those cards.

But there is still a lot of resistance to the idea of grading and even the concept of it for these cards — “Why would anyone get junk graded?” is the typical indignant gripe.

I’ve covered parts of the “why” before and probably will again, but today, I want to attack the problem of sellable 80s and 90s cards from a more practical standpoint. Because, the truth is, while there are thousands of graded cards out there from the era, most of the millions of cards issued during those years remain ungraded, or raw, and probably always will.

I know the vast majority of my cards are not slabbed, and I suspect yours aren’t, either.

So which of the cards we actually own, in the sort of condition we might own them in, would be most likely to sell if we hung a shingle on them?

That’s a really open-ended question, of course, and the answer will depend on who you ask, when you ask it, what the market is up to as a whole, and all sorts of other factors.

But we can start to get a pretty good idea by doing something pretty simple: finding out which cards recently sold were able to generate the most attention and action.

For this exercise, I’m going back to our (my) old favorite, eBay, and searching for some pretty specific listings:

Baseball cards issued between 1980 and 1990
Only ungraded cards
Only sold cards
Only cards sold at auction (buy-it-now listings generally don’t give us the kind of insight into overall interest we want)
The listings with the most bids

Here is the eBay link I used for this particular “study”: most active raw 1980s baseball cards (affiliate link).

When I checked these listings in early March of 2024, here’s what I saw:

I should note that there seems to be some variability in whether you actually see the bid counts on this results screen — sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But even when I don’t, the ordering seems to be correct, and I can see the bids for each card if I click through to the individual listing.

You’ll probably also find that some graded cards creep into these listings even though we’re specifically asking them to stay way. You can’t do much to control how people list their cards.

Overall, though, this gives you a pretty good idea of which cards you might expect to gain attention if you put them up for sale. And there’s not much surprising here, right?

The Griffey and Henderson rookie cards are arguably the most popular of all cards issued during the 1980s, and that shows up here. If I narrow my range to 1981 through 1988, though, things get a bit more interesting.:

Ryan, Ripken, Gwynn, autographs, Tiffany — more of a mixed bag, but the overall trend still holds. Namely, the top-of-the-heap players and cards always attract the most attention and probably always will.

Note that “most attention” does not necessarily equate to “most money.” None of these cards are going to send anyone to an early retirement on their own.

The takeaway? There are plenty of Junk Wax cards that collectors are still plenty interested in, and you can figure out which those are with a little research.

But be prepared, because the results are likely to ground your expectations and maybe even deflate your childhood balloon a bit. If 1986 Topps Tiffany Nolan Ryan can “only” draw 25 bids, after all, your hopes of cashing in on your stash of ungraded Ruben Sierra — or even Jose Canseco — rookie cards are probably a bit overblown.

More on this later, but for now, let’s move on to something little rosier, a little greener, if you will…

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for December February 29-March 6, 2024

(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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