Baseball Card Market Report for February 8-14, 2024 - Top eBay Sales

PLUS -- Are commons keeping up with the market?

Feb 16, 2024

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Babe Laps the Field

One thing you might notice about our list of the most expensive baseball cards sold on eBay last week (bottom of post) is that they’re a bit less, well, expensive than some of the lineups we usually see.

You might notice that, that is, if you get past the super-expensive 1933 Goudey Babe Ruth card. At $31,000+, that Bambino would sit at the top of most weekly lists, but it looks even more outrageous when the runner-up comes in nearly 20 grand cheaper…and features a basketball player.

So, why might the top of the market look a bit soft this time around? Hard to say.

Maybe high-end collectors/investors were budgeting their hobby dollars to cover Super Bowl snacks.

Or maybe they’re waiting for Spring Training to start to get a read on which upcoming or current players will be hot names as Opening Day approaches.

Or maybe it’s just a temporary quirk, a collective pause to breathe a bit. We’ll see what the rest of February and March brings before making any rash declarations.

In the meantime, we can lean in to the lower prices a bit and ask a pertinent question:

Are Commons Keeping Up with the Market?

One of the ideas that came up as part of our recent survey (click here to fill yours out!) was to dig into common cards every so often.

So…

How about we take a look at how some common cards have performed over the last few years, roughly before and after the pandemic?

Sounded like a swell idea to me, so I went ahead and dug up some numbers. Before we get to those, though, here are the ground rules I laid out for myself:

Pick a set that’s not ancient and scarce, but also one that’s not Junk Wax.
Pick the most common grade that PSA has assigned to cards from that set.
Define “commons” as the cards with the lowest selling prices that actually changed hands during our period of interest.
Define our period of interest as roughly mid-to-late 2019 through mid-to-late 2023.

With those rules in mind, I chose the 1975 Topps set since it fell right in the middle of the last decade before collectors had more than one card company vying for their dollars. It also fell after Topps started issuing cards all at once instead of in series.

And, as usual, I culled approximate prices from the PSA Auction Prices Realized tool.

Here’s what I found…

1975 Topps Al Fitzmorris (#24) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $6
2023 Value: $3.25
Profit/loss: -$2.75
% change: -46

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1975 Topps Bill Sharp (#373) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $6
2023 Value: $6
Profit/loss: $0
% change: 0

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1975 Topps Jim Wohlford (#144) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $5
2023 Value: $8
Profit/loss: $3
% change: 60

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1975 Topps Dick Lange (#114) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $6
2023 Value: $8
Profit/loss: $2
% change: 33

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1975 Topps Dave LaRoche (#258) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $4
2023 Value: $8
Profit/loss: $4
% change: 100

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1975 Topps Tito Fuentes (#425) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $8
2023 Value: $6
Profit/loss: -$2
% change: -25

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1975 Topps Pepe Frias (#496) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $6
2023 Value: $6
Profit/loss: $0
% change: 0

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1975 Topps Elliott Maddox (#113) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $6
2023 Value: $8
Profit/loss: $2
% change: 33

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1975 Topps Steve Arlin (#159) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $4
2023 Value: $8
Profit/loss: $4
% change: 100

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1975 Topps Diego Segui (#232) - PSA 8

2019 Value: $6
2023 Value: $8
Profit/loss: $2
% change: 33

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—

You can argue about whether these are really “common” cards since a few of these players had some big moments and seasons. But they definitely fit the bill in terms of falling near the lower end of selling prices among 1975 Topps baseball cards.

Now…

We see a bit of variation here, with some cards up, come down after the collective gut punch of the last four years. As a group, though, these ten cards sold for about 21% more in 2023 than they did in 2019.

That’s pretty close to what the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator shows — 19% when I enter a start date of December of 2019 and an end date of December 2023.

So by this little experiment, 1975 Topps commons are roughly keeping up with inflation.

I haven’t done a direct study of the top 1975 Topps cards (study flaw alert!), but I did look at 1974 Topps cards back in January. You can read that post right here.

The top 10 most valuable/expensive cards in that set showed a 163% increase over the same period (late 2019 through late 2023). So the stars outpaced the commons by a factor of eight!

So, you could look at those results in one of several ways:

Stars were undervalued compared to commons before the pandemic, so the market corrected.
Commons are undervalued now and represent a good deal.
We lost our collective minds during the pandemic and chased star cards beyond reason.
Star cards are due for a (further) fall.
This whole comparison is bogus — 1974 v. 1975.

Some, none, or maybe even all of those could be true, but the results are pretty interesting, no matter what.

And they make me think that 1975 Topps stars and 1974 Topps commons deserve some deep-dive love of their own.

Now, here are some cards that are already getting plenty of love…

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for December February 8-14, 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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