Baseball Card Market Report for February 1-7, 2024 - Top eBay Sales

PLUS -- How "hard" is the market for each baseball card?

Feb 09, 2024

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The Fearsome Foursome

The list of the most expensive baseball cards sold on eBay last week (bottom of post) probably looks pretty boring at first. After all, Mickey Mantle, Shohei Ohtani, Willie Mays, and Jackie Robinson account for nearly 70% of the listings.

There’s nothing new and shocking about those names, right? But even among those luminaries, there are a few oddball or seldom-seen cards that can get your hardcore collecting juices flowing.

When was the last time you saw a 1948 Swell Sport Thrills card sell for north of six grand, for example?

Of course, with items like that Jackie card, it’s tough to pinpoint a true market value over the long term — there just aren’t many “comps.”

But when there are comps? There’s a little trick you can use to start getting a…

A Rough Gauge of a Card’s Market “Hardness”

The other day while I was putting together the listings for one of these newsletters, I reminded myself about a little tool/toy that I stumbled across awhile back.

I talked about this way back in the early days of this newsletter, here and also here. Those pieces show you how the process works.

The basic idea is that you can use eBay to get a very rough idea of supply v. demand for any particular card, set, player, whatever. You do that by looking up how many of whatever you are interested in are for sale right now and then also looking up how many of those same things have sold recently.

Then the ratio of sold to available gives you a number you can compare to the same value for other cards/sets/players/whatevers.

As an example back then, I put together the sold/available ratio for each year in the existence of baseball cards, snapshotted at that moment (~March 2021). Here’s what that looked like:

The caveat there was that the “sold” values were the number of cards offloaded during the preceding three months, while the “available” values were themselves a snapshot of stuff for sale right then.

So again, not a perfect representation of supply v. demand, but an interesting point of comparison across the years.

It occurred to me the other day that we might also use this fraction — let’s call it the demand ratio — to get an idea of how soft or robust the market is for any given card, relative to other cards.

I decided to play around with this a bit with a few big cards from the 1980s, along with some of their contemporaries. Here’s what I found:

Card | # Sold | # Available | Demand Ratio

1982 Topps Cal Ripken, Jr. 1300 2100 0.62

1982 Topps Lee Smith 249 442 0.56

1984 Donruss Don Mattingly 560 339 1.65

1984 Donruss Darryl Strawberry 233 297 0.78

1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey, Jr. 3500 3000 1.17

1989 Upper Deck Gary Sheffield 357 726 0.49

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Aside from the caveats I talked about above, there are a few other qualifiers you should keep in mind here:

Some listings that came up with these search terms were for unopened product or complete sets that contained these cards, rather for than the singles themselves. I didn’t do anything to exclude those.
Search results included graded and raw cards.
I didn’t weed through the listings to get rid of any mislabeled cards.

There are probably others, but that’s enough for now.

So, are there any surprises here?

Well, there might be for collectors who haven’t been in the hobby all that long. In particular, how can it be that Mattingly has the strongest showing of all among these cards, even better than Griffey?

That’s likely because the 1984 Donruss Don Mattingly rookie card is a foundational piece of the modern hobby. Maybe the foundational piece. If there had never been a 1984 Matting craze, there very likely would never have been an Upper Deck — at least not then, and not as we know it.

But I’ve run through all that at length before, right here.

So, while Ripken and Junior continue to garner more sales overall, Mattingly’s core looks strong and long-lasting.

A milder surpise might be Sheffield’s relatively poor performance here. After all, he was a stronger presence during the last three months than at almost any other time since his retirement.

On the Hall of Fame ballot for the last time and trending toward election for much of the pre-announcement period, Sheffield was never far from the hot stove limelight. Even with that boost, though, he still finished on the bottom of this heap.

And now that Sheff has fallen off the writers’ radar, those RCs probably won’t be setting many records for the forseeable future.

Some specimens which may, indeed, be in line for some price records, can be found among the…

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for February 1-7, 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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