OT Hobby - sports cards

[Eneto-55]

My wife's family owns a few rental apartments, and a renter left boo-koos of sports cards - baseball, basketball, & football. Are those cards worth anything, or do you have to look up every player to see if it's just recycle paper, or of some value?

 

There appear to be some from the late 80's, but mostly from 90 and up to 92.

 

I collected baseball cards when I was a kid - the ones that had a sheet of that hard bubblegum with it.  That was in the early through around the mid 60's, and I suppose I had had some that might be of value now, except we played with them, and I gave all I had to my older brother. (They were all stolen years later when someone broke into his apartment while he was in college.)  Some cereal boxes also had baseball cards on them, and we cut those out and kept them, too.  Seems to me that this is an example of a child's collector/'toy' item that was ruined when adults got involved.

 

There must be thousands of these cards from this guy's apartment after he moved out.  I just wonder if I should just throw them out, or what.  (I have already spent quite a bit of time straightening them out, as they were all thrown together in huge garbage bags.  Some are still in the 'collector boxes' they were sold in.  But all are pretty much in new condition.)

[Young Ed]

I collect and play a collectible card game. There is a tracking ap for that where you can scan and lookup cards with a smartphone camera. Something like that would be the quickest way to determine value. Beyond that see if you can find a local shop that might want to buy them all. 

[Los_Control]

Makes you wonder why they were left behind?

While I have no experience in the collectables like cards or coins .... seems others will buy rolls of coins just to search through them to find a 1 in a million rare coin.

Now they can re roll the coins and trade them back in for more to search ....

 

Same with cards, buy a set just to search through for the one hard to find valuable card .... this time you cant just box up the worthless cards and return them for more.

So you end up with thousands of leftover cards ..... They walk away with a nice organized collection of cards worth $$, they leave the trash behind.

 

Or there could be some good cards there, do not know the situation or conditions of why they moved.

I once moved out of state a few years after I became disabled, the Caravan was filled and no more room. I had a storage unit that was all paid up and had no way to haul the items. Left a fully stocked 3 tier tool box, old family antiques and other items .....

 

Only way to really know is to check them ..... Or find some kid that would be interested in them and give the cards to them.

[Eneto-55]

4 hours ago, Los_Control said:

Makes you wonder why they were left behind?

While I have no experience in the collectables like cards or coins .... seems others will buy rolls of coins just to search through them to find a 1 in a million rare coin.

Now they can re roll the coins and trade them back in for more to search ....

 

Same with cards, buy a set just to search through for the one hard to find valuable card .... this time you cant just box up the worthless cards and return them for more.

So you end up with thousands of leftover cards ..... They walk away with a nice organized collection of cards worth $$, they leave the trash behind.

 

Or there could be some good cards there, do not know the situation or conditions of why they moved.

I once moved out of state a few years after I became disabled, the Caravan was filled and no more room. I had a storage unit that was all paid up and had no way to haul the items. Left a fully stocked 3 tier tool box, old family antiques and other items .....

 

Only way to really know is to check them ..... Or find some kid that would be interested in them and give the cards to them.

My brothers & I also collected both stamps (used) and coins back when we were kids.  We picked up pop bottles along the highway, and once we had a dollar we would stop in at the bank when Mom was grocery shopping, and buy a roll of pennies.  Then we looked through them, and kept the wheat pennies.  Then we would save up again until we could make a whole dollar again, and do it over and over like that. (This was in the early 60's.  I never did find a 1955 S, which I wanted because I was born that year, and also in California. It was kinda' valuable already then. We never bought any pennies at more than face value. Never found any Indian Head pennies, either.

 

Did you ever get back there to get the rest of your tools and stuff?  (We still have stuff in two states in Brazil, if someone hasn't carried it off by now.  I also still have a car in Oklahoma, but it's at my brother's place. Oh well, it's just stuff.  We'll leave it all behind eventually anyway.)

 

Oh, by a rough estimate, I'd say there are around 1,000 cards for each of the three sports.

Edited September 26 by Eneto-55

[Los_Control]

5 minutes ago, Eneto-55 said:

Did you ever get back there to get the rest of your tools and stuff?

No, the manager of the storage company did call me a few months later and ask me what I wanted to do .... I told them to have a storage sale.

When I was disabled, it took 5 years to get onto SSD ... Wife and I managed to hold our heads above water for 3 years .... finally we were basically homeless and called Father to help us and come pick us up ..... and we lived in a travel trailer in wife parents driveway for 2 more years, before ever getting a court date for a ssd decision.

Life happens in ways we do not always get to choose the path ....

During that time Mother passed away and it was good the wife could be around her .... It was the 1993 Dodge Caravan Father came and picked us up in NM and moved us to WA .... then when mother died he gave the van to his daughter and is why it is special to us .... a lot of our life has happened in that van and it all has been good since then.

 

25 minutes ago, Eneto-55 said:

Oh, by a rough estimate, I'd say there are around 1,000 cards for each of the three sports.

My best guess is they have been cherry picked already and no real value there .... though there may be some card that later has value.

Could you imagine the fun a 9-12 year old boy could get out of the cards by researching and looking them up? Just hours upon hours of learning and some good clean fun.

Possible they may find a card worth $5 .... they might get excited and start a hobby for life and keep them on a good path out of trouble with other kids.

I would talk to your pastor at church and see if he knows any child that maybe would be interested in such a hobby.

Maybe the Church can think of some game or a reward system .... do a good deed and you get to reach into the bucket and randomly select a card ... lets see who can collect the most cards?

 

6 hours ago, Eneto-55 said:

I just wonder if I should just throw them out, or what. 

I think there is some good in everything ..... sometimes we just got to search for it.

In good condition I'm not interested in them .... someone is and just need to find them.

 

My wife had a hobby of color books and puzzle books. And when her Mother passed away she also had the hobby and Father gave all the materials to the wife.

So she had 3 very large totes filled with color pencils and books to color in .... while some were a bit complicated with very small spaces like a paint by numbers deal.

They all went to a children's ward where young kids were sick & bed ridden and it would give them something to do.

You can find a use for just about anything.

[Eneto-55]

I know that it was probably a waste of time, but off and on over the last several days I sorted all of the 1987 edition DonRuss baseball cards. (The last performance records are for the 1986 season.) There were a total of 660 cards in that year's issue, and I'm missing 39 to make a complete set. (First I sorted them by hundreds, making 7 piles; then by tens, and finally put them into order, and separated out the duplicates.)

 

The first 27 cards are 26 of what they call the Diamond Kings and the checklist is # 27. Five of the 39 missing cards are in this set.

I haven't kept track of any baseball teams since the 60's, so only a couple of the missing names are familiar to me: Pete Rose (#186) & Reggie Jackson (#210). (I must have hear their names some place or the other, because I don't reckon they were playing back in the 60's....)

 

Some people say (on-line) that the valuable cards are from the upper numbers (like those in the 600's in this set) but others say to look for players who were new to the game in that period.  I didn't check all of them, but saw a couple that only had data for 1986, so I checked on-line for those cards.  People on epay were asking 30 for one of them, and 20 for the other.  This whole deal has reminded me how it was back when I was a kid, saving up money to buy a 5 cent package of baseball cards, hoping that I didn't just get cards I already had.  Whoever invested in these cards had probably over 2,000 total, of just this one year and brand. There are up to 7 or 8 duplicates for some players. 

 

There are also cards from other year sets from DonRuss, and for a few other brands of cards.  That's just the baseball cards.  I never had more than a small stack of cards, but now I kinda' wish I had all of those nickels back I spent as a kid.  But it was fun at the time. Sucker.  My 2nd oldest brother was the one who was really into baseball.  Tulsa had a team back then, the Tulsa Oilers, a farm team for the St Louis Cardinals.  So that's who we rooted for.  But my brother listened to every game he could, recording each play, so that he had accurate up-to-date records of each player's performance.  Then he devised a game based on the odds of each player's chance of hitting the ball, what kind of run they would make, etc.  He recorded each play for these make-believe games - He had piles of papers from that.  (Then he & our oldest brother would get into arguments about which sport was the most dangerous, auto racing or baseball.  I was the third kid, so I stayed out of all of that.)

[Ulu]

Wow!  That’s a lot of cards.

I owned exactly two baseball cards in my life. A Tops Mickey Mantle & a Rodger Maris.

 

How did I get so lucky? They must have printed a lot more cards of the popular players. I never bought any more cards before or since. It was that terrible chewing gum that came with them.

 

They ended up being my bookmarks in highschool, and lost over 50 years ago.

 

Edited October 7 by Ulu