Baseball Card Market Report for June 5-11, 2025 - Top eBay Sales

PLUS -- Checking in on 1981 Topps Traded Baseball Cards

Jun 13, 2025

Note: When you click on links to various merchants in this newsletter and make a purchase, this can result in this newsletter earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

Sparring Like It’s 1939!

In the summer of 1939, Joe DiMaggio hit .381 to win his first of two American League batting titles while also nabbing his first of three MVP awards. Meanwhile, 20-year-old Ted Williams hit .327 as a rookie. And, of course, the Yankees won the pennant, outdistancing the second-place Red Sox by 17 games in the A.L. standings.

The rivalry was on! Joe D. and the Splendid Splinters would go toe-to-toe for all sorts of titles and awards from then until DiMaggio retired in 1951.

That same year, 1939, Play Ball issued cards of both young superstars. And last week, 86 years later, a copy of each showed up on the list of the most expensive baseball cards sold on eBay (see bottom of post).

Who won this battle, Williams or DiMaggio? You’ll have to check out the full listing to find out. But you also have to admit it’s pretty fun to see these “ancient” cards mixing it up with names like Skenes, Made, Wood, and the rest of today’s young stars.

Now for some cards that aren’t quite so ancient…

Checking in on 1981 Topps Traded Baseball Cards

Late last month, we took a look at recent top-selling 1981 Topps Traded baseball cards on eBay over on our YouTube channel:

This set marked the first time that Topps or any other card company broke out a separate, self-contained product to commemorate player movement, relative to their base set from the same year.

Now, in decades past, Topps (and O-Pee-Chee) often noted player trades with on-card markings like “now with” or other blocks of text.

And Topps also explicitly marked certain late-run cards in 1972, 1974, and 1976 as “TRADED.”

But the 1981s were a different sort of beast, as the set covered a full print sheet of 132 cards, and they were sold as boxed sets instead of inserted as singles in wax packs. The cards were numbered sequentially from the end of the base set, beginning at #727 and continuing on through #858.

This initial Topps Traded set was met with somewhat lukewarm collector interest — we were already faced with three times as many cards as in previous years, thanks to the debut of Donruss and Fleer in the marketplace, after all.

And even as the hobby boomed in the mid-1980s, the 1981 Topps Traded set suffered compared to later renditions of the set due to a relative lack of big-name rookies. Tim Raines and Fernando Valenzuela made the cut, but they also already had other rookie cards in the base 1981 sets.

The first card in the set — Danny Ainge — did carry some swagger since it was his first Topps card, though Fleer and Donruss included him in their 1981 sets. That swagger only increased when Ainge switched back to the hardwood and began winning titles with the Boston Celtics.

All these years later, those three are still the main drawing cards, though others have gained some hobby love, too. The Rollie Fingers issue is sort of iconic, for example, since it’s his first Brewers card and shows him as he looked winning the American League Cy Young and MVP Awards in ‘81

With all that as background, how’s about could we take this opportunity to give this set the old before-and-after treatment?

What follows, then, are approximate selling prices for the ten (roughly) most valuable 1981 Topps Traded baseball cards, from both spring 2024 and spring 2025 (per PSA’s Auction Prices Realized tool). Prices are for cards in PSA 9 condition.

—

1981 Topps Traded Fernando Valenzuela (#850) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $200
2025 Value: $200
Profit/loss: $0
% change: 0

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Tim Raines (#816) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $28
2025 Value: $22.50
Profit/loss: -$5.50
% change: -20

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Danny Ainge (#727) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $23
2025 Value: $23
Profit/loss: $0
% change: 0

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Rollie Fingers (#761) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $23
2025 Value: $23
Profit/loss: $0
% change: 0

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Carlton Fisk (#762) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $25
2025 Value: $25
Profit/loss: $0
% change: 0

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Bert Blyleven (#738) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $10
2025 Value: $10
Profit/loss: $0
% change: 0

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Bruce Sutter (#838) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $12
2025 Value: $15
Profit/loss: $3
% change: 25

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Dave Winfield (#855) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $20
2025 Value: $25
Profit/loss: $5
% change: 25

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Joe Morgan (#807) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $15
2025 Value: $20
Profit/loss: $5
% change: 33

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)

1981 Topps Traded Gaylord Perry (#812) - PSA 9

2024 Value: $10
2025 Value: $12
Profit/loss: $2
% change: 20

Check prices on eBay (affiliate link)
—

Overall, these ten cards saw about a 4% increase in terms of selling price over the last year or so. That’s not much, but the overall market remains pretty flat, too. Certainly nothing like the boom of the pandemic years.

Some cards showed bigger gains or losses, but keep in mind that there aren’t many of any of these that changed hands in any particular condition in any given month. Small sample sizes, in other words. And point-in-time market anomalies can really skew sales numbers given those small samples.

With that caveat in mind, it’s interesting that the Valenzuela is trading slightly lower now than a year ago. With his death last fall, the Dodgers legend saw a surge in media coverage, which can often bump up action on a player’s card — and their prices. Of course, we’re looking at prices several months removed from that shocking development, on either side.

All in all, this will always be a groundbreaking set, if not a super expensive one. Fun stuff all around, and definitely chock full of nostalgia.

Now, here are some cards that will need a bit more than nostalgia to make them winning buys for their new owners in the long run…

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for June 5-11, 2025

(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

Discussion about this post