There comes a point in every collector’s journey when their thoughts turn to determining baseball card values.
Maybe you’ve been collecting for a few years and your spouse or kids or mom and dad are giving you a hard time about the “clutter” you’re building up. If only you could show them how much your cards are worth!
Or, maybe you’re ready to sell your collection, or at least “thin the herd” as a friend of mine says, and want to get a handle on the value of your cards.
Or, maybe, card values have always been top of mind for you, or they are top of mind as you’re entering the hobby, and you want to find a way to stay on top of the market.
Heck, there can be any number of reasons for card values to be important to a hobbyist, and they’re all valid. Especially now, in the years after the 2020 hobby boom, money is a big part of the cardboard game, and you owe it to yourself to at least know how to figure out how much your cards are worth.
(This post is part of a complete series on How to Sell Baseball Cards.)
That’s what we’re here for now — to give you the tools to do just that!
What follows, then, are four of the best ways to determine baseball card values in the current market, mostly from the comfort of your laptop or cell phone.
And, if you’re interested in weekly updates on the market, along with in-depth analysis of various aspects of card values, you might be interested in our Sports Card Market Report newsletter.
Now … on to the card value tools!
(Note: The following sections contain affiliate links to eBay and Amazon listings for the cards being discussed.)
eBay
Most of the time, and for most cards, eBay will prove to be a rich source of information about the value of your baseball cards in the current market.
And, by “current,” I mean CURRENT — from real-time back to the last 90 days. That’s because the base eBay website (no fancy tools or APIs) lets you study sales on the giant auction platform over the previous three months.
That’s key, because “sold” cards mean people have actually spent money on them, and eBay gives you a chance to see how much collectors are spending on specific pasteboards.
The process is pretty simple, but let’s run through an example.
Say you’re sorting through a box of old baseball cards and run across a 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco Rated Rookie card. When you see that little pencil mustache of his, your heart skips a beat — maybe you remember when that card ruled the hobby, or maybe you’ve heard about some of Canseco’s exploits, or maybe you’re just intrigued by the age and “specialness” of the card (Rated Rookie designation).
Whatever the case, you want to find out what that Canseco rookie card is worth. So … let’s find out !
First, head over to eBay, and you should see a screen something like this one:
Now, just type your card name into the search bar …
… and hit the “Search” button. That will bring up a list of 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco cards currently for sale …
These results are interesting and just might entice you to buy a Canseco RC, but they don’t mean a whole lot from the standpoint of figuring out the actual current value of the card.
Why?
Because sellers can ask whatever price they want, but a card (or anything) is worth only what someone will pay for it. And, while “for sale” listings can be helpful in this regard if you’re watching live, active auction listings, many or most cards in these results don’t meet that criteria.
What we want instead is to look at the “sold” listings among these results. To do that, scroll down and look for the “Sold Items” checkbox in the left-hand column:
Click that box, and the page will refresh with JUST the ’86D Canseco’s that have actually sold on eBay in the last 90 days.
And this is where the gold lies, information-wise.
Now we know that. here in April of 2022, that 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco card is selling in the $10-20 range … right?
Well, yes. And no. Sometimes.
See …
Those first several results are all “raw” cards, meaning they’re not graded. That’s probably true of the card you found, too, considering you uncovered it in a box of other stuff, but maybe you want to know what the ceiling is for this card.
That is, if you were to get your card graded, and it came back with a “perfect” score, what would it be worth then? Well, eBay can help us answer that question, too!
To get there, we just need to refine our search a bit more. And to do that, just scroll to find the “Grade” section of the left-hand menu, and click “10”:
Then, behold the results …
And here, finally, we have our answer: a graded GEM MINT 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco Rated Rookie card is selling in the range of about $425-450 in the spring of 2022.
(That BGS card is an outlier because the rest of these results are PSA-graded and, mostly, because it’s autographed, and it’s the sig, not the card, that is graded.)
From there, you can start to decide things like …
- How does your card measure up, condition-wise, to those that are selling?
- Is it worth getting your card graded?
- Do you want to sell your card?
… and many others, no doubt.
The answers to those questions are going to be up to the individual to a large extent, but we can start getting at them with a methodical approach — but not in this article. Those are for another day and scope.
For now, it’s time to leave eBay behind and dig in to the …
PSA Price Guides
There are actually (at least) two versions of the PSA price guide — their Sports Market Report Price Guide and their Auction Prices Realized (APR) tool. We run down the relative merits and details of both in this article.
For our purposes here, though, the APR tool is a better fit because, as the name implies, it’s based on real auction sales of real cards. The SMR is, too, to an extent, but the methods used to calculate the prices there are a bit more opaque, and the results are less obvious and immediate.
So, let’s head over to the APR …
There, you’ll be presented with a front page featuring a search bar:
We’ll stick with our 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco and type that in to the search, then click the magnifying glass. That will yield a results page that looks something like this:
You can see there were multiple Canseco cards issued across different sets by Donruss in 1986, and you can also see how many sales of each PSA has tracked, in the last column (“FOUND”).
The card we’re interested in is the first one on the list, so we’ll click that link:
Here we see the card name and number, along with the number of sales PSA has tracked (again) and the total money that exchanged hands for those cards (“Value”).
Now, if we scroll down, we’ll see a summary of sales of this card by PSA grade:
The columns are:
- Grade – the grade of the PSA card(s) sold
- Most Recent Price – the most recent price PSA has recorded for that card (1986D Canseco, in our case) in that grade
- Average Price – the average price for all copies of that card sold in that grade that PSA has tracked
- PSA Price – the price as listed in the PSA SMR Price Guide
- Population – the total number of copies of that card that PSA has graded to be in that particular condition; not the number sold in tha