What's the Best Way To Sell Baseball Cards?

Knowing the best way to sell baseball cards can turn your binders full of forgotten cards into clutch cash infusions. Those pieces of printed cardstock may be the definitive example of a collectible, going from a promotional tool for other businesses (particularly those with gum to sell) to a potential multi-thousand dollar windfall for owners who play their cards right.

Some baseball cards can be worth truly life-changing sums of money, but unless you have an authenticated, century-old Honus Wagner card sitting on the top of your collection, you may be wondering how to even begin turning all those old cards into cash. Every collection is different, but here are some steps anyone can follow to find the best way to sell baseball cards.

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The Best Way to Sell Baseball Cards Starts With Learning Their Value

How to Price Baseball Cards and Store Them

Where to Sell Baseball Cards

Tips for Selling Baseball Cards in Bulk

What is the Best Way to Sell Old Baseball Cards

Start Building Your MLB NFT Collection With Dibbs

The Best Way to Sell Baseball Cards Starts With Learning Their Value

A vintage, mint-condition Babe Ruth card will be worth more than a beaten-up 1992 card for some lefty relief pitcher nobody remembers. Why is that the case, though? There’s an art to valuing baseball cards that involves a variety of variables: the most obvious, of course, is the player on the card. Better-known players command better prices. But the card's condition will also have a major impact on pricing, with perfectly preserved examples of in-demand cards selling for orders of magnitude more than their dog-eared counterparts.

On the other hand, other accidental factors such as misprinted designs or statistical errors — basically, anything the manufacturer got wrong before the card left the factory — can make a card significantly more valuable.

That’s all good to know if you have a specific card in mind, but if you’re looking for a quick hint at how valuable your overall collection may be, one of the best metrics is the overall era of cards that compose it. To generalize much of the nuance, cards from before World War 2 tend to be worth the most, cards from before the collector boom of the ‘80s also tend to be worth a good amount, and modern cards need special status (such as depicting a star in their time as a rookie) to be worth much.

How to Price Baseball Cards and Store Them

Now that you know what to look for in your collection, the next step is determining how valuable individual cards may be. Pricing services will show you general values for individual cards as identified by player, card year, and card manufacturer; some price guide options include PSA, Beckett, and Mavin.io. The first two are well-established names in card grading, and the latter is a general search engine for finding the estimated value of collectibles.

As you look into pricing for individual cards, you’ll doubtless see references to official grading categories. Companies such as PSA and Beckett professionally appraise the condition of cards, verifying their authenticity and giving them official statuses such as “Near Mint” or “Excellent.” A good appraisal will make a card even more desirable on the market. The problem is that these grading services can be prohibitively expensive to use. Unless you have some truly rare cards in your collection, having them graded may end up costing you more than you make.

Going through your collection of cards is also a great time to re-evaluate how you’re storing them, particularly if you’re planning on shipping them. Most cards should be fine in binder sheets or individual “penny sleeves,” as long as the material is acid-free and archival safe. Older cards require more deliberate handling and care, but we’ll get into that later.

Where to Sell Baseball Cards

People looking for the best way to sell baseball cards have more options now than ever before, ranging from physical stores to dedicated auction houses to all-new options for fractional ownership. Enough potential avenues exist for selling your cards both online and offline that they merit their own articles, and you can look forward to more on that soon. Here’s a quick survey for the time being.

Numerous organizations host regular online auctions for sports memorabilia, with some of the best-known options including PWCC, Pristine Auction, and Lelands. These specialized auction houses cater to all levels of collectability, with bids on everything from more recent cards that may fetch just $30 or $40 to cards attracting $10,000 bids. Some online services even offer to travel to you to buy your cards in person.

If you’re looking to stay local, you likely won’t have to look too far to find a nearby collectibles shop happy to review the highlights of your collection. You may not get as much cash in these smaller markets, but establishing a relationship with the local collector community can pay off in many other ways, such as getting leads on potential trades or simply connecting with others who share your same interests. Finally, you can also arrange private sales using go-between platforms such as Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. If you’re selling to strangers in this way, protect yourself by arranging for your transactions to take place in public spaces and with cash upfront.

A more contemporary and exciting option for sellers is to convert their collectables to an NFT and sell fractional shares of it in an online marketplace like Dibbs. A powerful new collectibles market built on blockchain technology and solid physical security, Dibbs is a fractional marketplace where fans, collectors, and investors all over the world can buy pieces of your valuable memorabilia — and don’t worry, the card itself will remain in one piece, safe in a carefully monitored vault. Click here to learn more.

Tips for Selling Baseball Cards in Bulk

Selling cards one by one can be profitable, but it can also be very time consuming. If you just want to get those big boxes of cards out of storage fast, you could head straight to eBay. Listings for bulk baseball card sales are common on the internet’s leading auction house, often with no more specifics than the general year range of the included cards. Your old collection could become a tidy little bundle of cash in the time it would take to get a single card graded.

Free online auction site Listia is another popular option for selling baseball cards in bulk. While Listia’s auctions are all money-free, using an internal system of points instead, you can always cash out by picking up Amazon gift cards or other items you would have bought anyway.

What is the Best Way to Sell Old Baseball Cards?

Many of the tips we’ve already covered apply to selling especially old baseball cards. While older often means more valuable, that’s only true if the card is in good shape — and older cards will only remain in good shape if you handle them properly. Thankfully, taking care of old cards is mostly a matter of common sense.

You’ll want to avoid handling old cards as much as possible. They tend to get fragile in their old age since they weren’t printed with the idea that people would still be interested in them 100 or even 50 years later. A cheap pair of white cotton gloves can help keep finger oil off of cards if you want to be especially careful.

Once again, acid-free binder sheets or individual sleeves will do the trick for most cards, and you should keep their containers in dry areas well away from direct sunlight. Finally, if you’re planning to ship the cards out to buyers, make sure to pack them well in stiff, well-cushioned packages, and don’t try to save money by underestimating their value on shipping insurance.

Start Building Your MLB NFT Collection With Dibbs

For those looking to step into the new era of digital collectables, Dibbs is the ideal place to start. Dibbs is the world's first 24/7 spot market for instantly trading fractional interests in real-world collectibles. The Dibbs platform allows customers to buy, sell and trade fractions of collectible assets from any connected device with just a few clicks.

Dibbs uses tokenized representations of physical assets (item tokens) to enable instant trades, either for a full item token or a fraction of one. These tokens exist and are transferable on the WAX network. The physical assets are held by a third-party custodian. A holder of 100% of a collectible token can choose to take possession of their asset by surrendering the item token to the custodian and requesting shipment of the card to their address.