About
25 Years of Baseball is a celebration of 25 years of baseball card collecting. The oldest baseball cards that I collected as a kid were 1986 Topps cards. I stopped collecting baseball cards in 1993 for no particular reason. I guess baseball cards just started to get too expensive and confusing, and as a teen, I had better things to spend my money on.
Sorting through my childhood baseball card collection
In 2008, I brought my collection back from storage and went through it. I remembered how fun it was collecting the cards before everything got so complicated. I went out and bought some new cards. Then I went on eBay and bought some old cards. The feeling was awesome, and the idea for this blog was born.
What I hope to accomplish with this blog is to relive those childhood days of blowing 50 cents of allowance money on a pack of cardboard, and enjoying it all along. I also want to catch up on the hobby and update my collection.
So what I did was go out and buy Topps hobby boxes from every year since 25 years ag0 — 1985-2009 — so I can catch up on the hobby. Now that I have over 50 unopened Topps hobby boxes, I’m going to explore them one pack at a time right here on this website.
It’s going to be a fun learning experience for me, and I hope the online baseball card blogging community will enjoy it along with me.
18
AM
This is pretty cool! You sound a lot like me with your collection and I also stopped collecting for awhile and then repeated the cycle all over. I’m hoping to resume it here in the near future. Good Luck with your collection!
22
PM
I like the concept, having started with the ’87 set myself. I spent every 40 cents I could find on a pack of cards, but could never complete a set that way. There were always just too many doubles, and some cards that just didn’t seem to exist. I stopped shortly after the ’91 set, and didn’t get back to it until after Sept.’01. This time, however, I went about it purchasing complete sets from 1987 to present. After that, I just kept going down until I reached the ’72 set and was forced to collect the cards individually. The fun in this method came from the way the sets were organized. I put them in binders organized by team rankings and then the player’s ages. All of the other cards were left in numberical order at the front of the binder to form a skeleton for the set. Afterward came the WS winner, then loser, then LCS loser to the WS winner, etc. After the playoff contenders were in, I put the rest of the teams in order according to their winning pct. Each team had a team card in front followed by the manager and every player in order by their age. If multiple players were on a card, I used the age of the youngest player. If players were from different teams, I put the card in with front with the skeleton set by card number. This method formed a type of yearbook that indicates the relative competiveness of each team along with the dynamics of a player’s age on the team, regardless of their talent. The wax packs result in too many doubles that are hard to get rid of.
30
PM
Hi Steve, great site… Question for you (or anyone else). I have 10′s of thousands of cards between 1986 and 1990, mostly topps, then donruss. I want to get rid of them but make some kind of money back from the many dollars I put into them. What do you suggest, do I pull out all the cards worth over a $1 or something (I know there are few), but then how do i sell them? Do I need to send them to a card company to be rated? Just not sure of the logistics on what I need to do here…. thoughts?
30
PM
I hate to break it to you, but you have what card collectors now refer to as “junk wax”. Card companies simply overproduced baseball cards in the late 80′s and there are many people now in the same situation as you. If I were you, I would consider three options: 1) Keep them, enjoy them, pass them down to your kids, 2) Donate them to kids who might enjoy them, perhaps a children’s hospital, or 3) Take inventory of what you have and sell the whole lot to the highest bidder on eBay, keeping in mind that you might get a fraction of a penny per card. Probably not what you want to hear, but I hope this helps.
1
PM
Thanks Steve, so even if I give away the Barry Bonds, McGwires, whatever else is worth something, it wouldn’t be a big deal? Just want to make sure I’m not throwing away the baby with the bathwater!
1
PM
Certain rookie cards (like the Bonds rookie) or very rare error cards from that era might fetch a few bucks on eBay when sold as singles, but I’m not aware of any 1986-1990 Topps or Donruss cards that would make you rich if you sold them. Now you say you have 10′s of thousands of cards… even at a fraction of a penny per card, you might get enough cash for your collection just by shear volume to make it worth your while to sell them. Check out eBay and see for yourself how much similar cards are selling for. I found this one on a quick search: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HUGE-4-250-OLD-BASEBALL-SPORTS-CARD-COLLECTION-LOT-/190731356475?pt=US_Baseball&hash=item2c6879893b