by A J Grape

Created on: July 22, 2008   Last Updated: November 25, 2008

By now, anyone who has ever had a passion or held a passive interest in collecting baseball cards has heard of the legendary sale of "The Holy Grail". In 2000, the now famous 1909 T206 Honus Wagner Tobacco Card, nicknamed the "Mona Lisa" by many in the baseball card collecting industry, sold on eBay for over one million dollars. That was a milestone never before reached, creating quite a resurgence of interest in the hobby and triggering a countrywide search through closets and shoe boxes for long lost and disregarded stacks of baseball cards.

In casual discussions about the hobby, I find a continuous thread of common ground everywhere I go. Many people, with a glint in their eye, tell a nostalgic story of an old pile of baseball cards they once held with pride. Unfortunately, most of those stories end with, "If only I had taken better care of them". We laugh when we remember how we use to handle those cards. I heard one guy tell about the cool sound a Mickey Mantle Rookie Card made when it flapped against the metal spokes of a bicycle wheel. He still has that card, but it isn't pretty. If only we knew then, what we know now, right?

And that brings us to the main point of this article. How do you assess the value of your baseball cards? Well, there are six factors that have always been critical in the evaluation process. The list goes as follows: Player Popularity, Rarity of the card, Brand recognition, Age of the card and the Condition of the card.

Today, the single most effectual factor is the Condition of the card. "Wait a minute", you say, "Everyone knows that the Rarity of a card trumps all the other factors". Yes, that's true, Rarity reigns supreme. But, Condition is the Rarity X-factor. Take that T206 Honus Wagner, for example. The experts agree that there are anywhere from 50 to 75 of them in existence today. 50 to 75, now that's a rare baseball card! The recent sales and re-sales of these cards have been tracked and documented with intense scrutiny. Making my point, many of those cards sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the aforementioned "Mona Lisa".

So how does one card from a short group, sharing equal rarity, hold so much more value than the others? The answer can be found in its condition. In the old days, Rarity was the value scale. But, with the advent of live internet auctions this is no longer the case. Try to sell a $20 card on eBay and any imperfection will bring on a whining and nitpicking that you would not believe. I heard

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