Baseball Card Prices

From "Becket 21 baseball Card Price Guide (1999)", the price guesstimates for a variety of baseball card sets of interest. Well, cards that I'm interested in at least. Here's an index for this page:

Topps Complete Sets ~ Topps Traded Sets ~ Kelloggs 3-D Sets ~ Miscellaneous

Topps Complete Sets

Topps (www.topps.com) is the most popular card company, or at least, they used to be. I'll tell the story after the table.

The 1990's set are pretty boring. Topps collapsed in the late 80's due to new competition and a decline in the quality of their cards. It's a classic "Roman Empire" deal where Topps' monopoly fell under its own weight.

The price for Topps' sets seems to have bottomed around 1991, and they are trying to get their act together. The price of newer sets is increasing. Topps is reducing the number of cards to focus more on the stars that people seem to covet so much.

Topps collapsed in the late 1980's. You can see the price breakdown after 1985. Also, the 1985 price is largely due to the Mark Maguire rookie card of that year. Otherwise, you may have seen a steady decline in price from 1984 to the end of the decade.

Topps in the 1980's is the opposite of the beanie baby experience in the 1990's. Topps was alone at the top of the baseball card market and allowed the quality of their cards to slip. Also, Topps addressed the new "card shop" market by flooded the market with complete set boxes that could be purchased directly from Topps and reduced the value of buying individual packs of cards.

The 1970's were the golden years for Topps and, you could argue, for baseball as well. These cards are the real deal, and they're the ones I focused on mostly as a youth.

The 1971 set has a price spike because it is the only year that Topps used a black background on their cards. This made it very tough to keep the cards in good shape... hence the high price.

Most of this is before my time, but I do remembe the classic gray background of the 1968 cards, and I had a few 1969 cards.

Topps Traded Sets

For some years, Topps issued an addendum to their normal baseball card set to accommodate trades that had happened during the year. The cards in these sets show the guy who was traded in his new uniform. Whooppee! The value of these sets seem to be determined mostly if some star player was traded that year.

I never had these as a kid, but I guess it would be a nice addition to your regular set. Whatever.

Kellogg's 3-D Sets

Daryl and I used to grab these out of Kellogg's (www.kelloggs.com) cereal boxes. They were cool because they were sort of a bogus 3-D, sparkling effect. They were smaller than most baseball cards, and Kellogg's only made cards for like the top 60 or so star players each year. These cards were (are) very fragile and easily creased because they aren't made of paper, or they are covered with some stuff to provide the 3-D effect.

They don't make 'em any more, but dang they were cool.

You could get these Kellogg's cards individually in boxes of Kellogg's cereal in a little plastic bag, or you could mail in some dough to Kellogg's to get the whole set. The 1971 set is wildly expensive because it's the one year that Kellogg's didn't offer that whole set deal. You could only get the 1971's one at a time.

Kellogg's ditched their 3-D cards on year (1973) when they changed printing companies. The 1973 cards are 2-D. I remember those cards; they were shit.

I also remember the 1972 All-time Greatest cards. These cards included Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, etc. and they were really tough to get. They were the coolest... no doubt.

Miscellaneous

First, an all-time favorite of mine: 1970 Booklets Set. These were like little comic books that told the story of the player: his family, how he got into baseball, his highlights, etc. It folded out into 3 sections. There are only 24 booklets, and I remember having "The Ernie Banks Story".

Another really cool thing that came out in 1975 was Topps mini cards. They were replicas of the regular cards, but a little bit smaller. Excellent. Topps did this for a few years, I think, but teh 1975 cards were the best.

Topps also made so baseball card sets that were larger than the normal cards. These are typically called Big or Super sets. They weren't copies of the normal set, but another whole deal with just star players.

Topps puts out reprint of the super-old 50's sets every now and then . They call these "archive" sets. I haven't seen one yet, but they look pretty cool.