Where do I go if I want to find out if my husbands old baseball card collection is worth anything?

You need to do a lot of research.

1. You need to learn what grading is. The better grade condition the cards are in, the more they will be worth. I personally think that grading services are one of the biggest scams out there and wish I had thought of it. The only reason I think it is a scam is that people use the grading scale more like a value multiplier, which is not what it is supposed to be. But for you to learn a bit, here's a link to the PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) grading scale - http://www.psacard.com/grading/grading_standards.c...

When dealing with collectors, you have to be very strict on the condition, unlike a lot of Ebay sellers.

2. You need to learn a bit about collecting. Not everyone goes for complete sets, but go after favorite players. Most of the biggest names hold their value or increase (ie. Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, etc). A lot of who we would have called stars are not really holding their value in this economy (bad economy=less value for non-essentials). For example, when I quit collecting back in the 80's, the 1975 George Brett rookie card was going for between $200-250. Now you can find it for around $60. You also need to take into account regional stars influence on value. George Brett's card is worth more in or around Kansas City where he played then in Florida or California.

3. You need to be able to identify card's years and manufacturer's. Simplist way is looking for the copyright. If not, look at the last year on the player's stats and add one.

4. This is a bit of a rant to those who put down baseball card stores. They have no idea on how to run a business. In running a business, inventory (excess inventory) is bad. Most stores will have boxes upon boxes of cards that will probably never be able to be sold. No store will ever give you the "book value" of a card only because they need to cover their overhead (ie paying employees, rent, utilities) and they will offer lower prices on cards that they can not sell as opposed to cards which they can turn around quicker. All in all you could expect about $0.10-0.30 on the dollar in selling to a business. That is not a rip-off, but that is the way an owner can stay in business. What does that mean for you? It means you can either strip out all the key cards and toss all the commons, or put together sets to get rid of the commons with the key cards. Either way, you are looking at 10-30% of what fair value would be. which brings us to:

5. Get a Beckett Price Guide. The online I think is more of a rip off, but easier to navigate, so you are paying for convenience. In using the price guide, there are two things to remember. Learn what the two columns are - they are high and low prices for the cards in near-mint condition. Just because you have a certain card does not mean it will automatically be worth the high end value listed. The low end is not there for the Fair-Good grades of cards, but it is also for the Ex-Mnt.

And you have to remember it is a GUIDE. It is not an exact price list for what a card is worth. Beckett gathers card prices from various stores throughout the country and give the values for the cards and what they have sold for. If a card start to become easier to obtain, the price will decrease and Beckett will reflect that in their next month's edition.

Good luck in selling the cards (and hope they are not from the late 80's-late 90's when the cards were over-printed). You can either get low value and get rid of them quickly or put the time (possible even selling them privately) and get a higher return.

First of all let's determine what "old" means in terms of baseball cards. Anything from the late 1980's to mid 1990's is not "old" and is worth less than it was 15 to 20 years ago. 90% of the people that don't want their cards anymore have cards from this era. Just do a search on ebay and Craig's List and see how many people are trying to get rid of cards from this era with no luck.

The value starts with cards from before 1980. There are a few exceptions but for the most part once Fleer and Donruss (and later Score and Upper Deck) joined Topps in making cards the market become flooded with product. Supply was a lot higher than the demand which keeps the price of cards after 1980 a lot lower.

The other thing that affects value besides demand is condition. Most collectors won't be interested in anything after 1980 if it's not in mint condition.

They could be worth quite a bit but to make money on them you need to understand how collections work. Usually a collector collects in sets. This could be a set of one team or a set of one season. It may be that one paricular card is harder to get than another, leaving some collectors with an incomplete set. So a shop would offer you a price on the whole lot and not indicate a value of a particular card. It's worth doing some invetigating before finding a dealer.

Yeah u need to do some research so you don't get ripped off. Either go to Beckett's online price guide which costs money or buy a baseball beckett price guide at a card shop and look up some of the ones he knows would be worth money to get an idea of what hes got. You can also go on EBAY BAseball cards and type in certain cards to search for. If you type in a card and someone has one of them auctioning on ebay u can get an idea of what they are going for. Even though ebay is an auctioning site and the card usually doesn't sell for book price. I will give you an idea of what you can get out of it. So be careful and get all you can out of them. It would be better to hold on to them and pass them on to a son or a grandson then to just get rid of them and get ripped off.

Beckett's price guide online (which you will pay to use), or buy the actual guide at a book store........Stay away from the comic book/baseball card shop owners...Those guys are out for themselves.

beckett online price guide. 99% of the time if you go to a dealer, they will tell you lower prices incase you want to sell the cards to them.