Baseball Card Market Report for March 7-13, 2024 - Top eBay Sales

Mar 15, 2024

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.

James Wood If He Could — and He Just Might

Take a look at the list of the most expensive baseball cards sold on eBay last week (bottom of post), and you might see an unfamiliar name…a couple of times.

Just who is James Wood?

Well, he just so happens to be one of the prospects the Nationals claimed from the Padres in exchange for Juan Soto (who also appears below).

Wood has also been making headlines with an exciting run through Spring Training and just might end up with the Nats on Opening Day.

Jackson Holliday is on our expensive-card roster, too, and he just might push his way onto the Orioles roster. So will Holliday-Wood form a Baltimore-D.C. rivalry for the ages?

Time will tell, but for now, their cards are heating up, a sure sign that spring and Opening Day are nearly upon us in earnest.

Now, while we wait for all the new young stars to break out, let’s check in on an old-time hobby favorite, shall we?

Looking for 1987 Topps Condition Rarities

We’ve done quite a bit of digging at “Junk Wax” values in various contexts here and there in this newsletter, looking for new angles on an old theme.

By and large, it’s putting lipstick on a pig — there are millions and millions of each of these cards running around out there in the wild, and no amount of analyzing will make most of them worth much.

But of course, there ARE some cards from the 1980s and 1990s that pull in decent money — mostly PSA 10s of Hall of Famers and error/notorious cards.

Could there be, though, some hidden pockets of “scarce” Junk Wax cards that have gone mostly unnoticed?

Hmmm…

One truth that old-school collectors learned about right away when we started poring over the history of the hobby was that there are certain cards that have always been tough to come by in decent condition.

Like centered copies of the 1979 Topps Paul Molitor and Ozzie Smith cards. Or most 1971 Topps cards, thanks to the chippable black borders.

So, might there be some condition rarities hiding among our favorite Junk Wax issues? To find out, I popped open the PSA Population Report for the 1987 Topps woodies.

When I looked in early March, I found that PSA had graded about 110,000 of these cards in total, with a condition breakdown at the top of:

PSA 7 - 8820 (8%)
PSA 8 - 35,814 (33%)
PSA 9 - 37,742 (34%)
PSA 10 - 21,340 (19%)

So the question then becomes, are there cards in the set that break these patterns?

Well, of course there are!

First, we have a group of star cards that don’t show PSA 9 as their most populous grade. Among those are:

Pete Rose - 13% PSA 7, 37% PSA 8, 30% PSA 9, 12% PSA 10
Barry Bonds - 12% PSA 7, 42% PSA 8, 31% PSA 9, 9% PSA 10
Mark McGwire - 7% PSA 7, 42% PSA 8, 36% PSA 9, 10% PSA 10
Kirby Puckett - 12% PSA 7, 39% PSA 8, 26% PSA 9, 16% PSA 10

There are others, but these were some of the big names that jumped out at me right away. Is it possible that PSA 9s and 10s of these cards are undervalued since they’re relatively underrepresented?

Definitely possible, though I haven’t run any comparisons here to draw a solid conclusion. If I were looking for condition bargains in this set, though, these are the cards I’d start with.

At the other end of the spectrum are several star cards that show up in great shape way more often than you might expect:

Gary Carter - 48% PSA 10
Bert Blyleven - 59% PSA 10
Wally Joyner - 43% PSA 10
Steve Garvey - 44% PSA 10
Eddie Murray - 38% PSA 10
Mike Greenwell - 64% PSA 10
Pete Rose (manager) - 46% PSA 10
Will Clark - 37% PSA 10

There could be some selection bias here, as collectors are probably sending in what they think are their best Clark and Joyner cards. It could also be that a lot of these 10s were handed out long ago, when some of the players pictured were more mainstream.

At any rate, these percentages would cause me to think twice about how much I’m about to pay for, say, a PSA 10 copy of the Mike Greenwell rookie card.

You can do this same sort of exercise with any set and try to come up with some targets for further investigation. It’s fun and might be instructive — we’ll try to dig into whether or not any of these really are under- or overvalued in a future deep dive.

And speaking of cards that might seem overvalued to some jaded collector eyes, it’s time for the …

Top Baseball Card Sales on eBay for March 7-13, 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

Discussion about this post