When I was a kid, I would repeat the habit monthly. I’d extract my large three-ring binder from my hiding place and set it down on my childhood bed, switch on the calculator my father used to pay the family's monthly bills, and get to work. I’d sort through the plastic sheets for an hour or two, examine the numbers on the back of the cards contained within, flip through the reference guide that showed me the latest prices, calculate it all out, and inevitably come to this conclusion:
These baseball cards were someday going to make me a million bucks!
That’s what the naiveté of being an 11-year-old who’s obsessed with thousands of pieces of cardboard lovingly wrapped in protective plastic can bring. For me, my childhood obsession was baseball cards. For you, it might have been Beanie Babies or Cabbage Patch dolls or comic books. For your grandparents, it might have been coins or stamps. For the younger generations, it might be Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh.
Some of us think our childhood obsessions, which we just know we can sell for huge money decades into the future, will eventually fund our retirement. Most of us are wrong.
HuffPost reporter Dave Jamieson tells a story of rediscovering an enormous box of baseball cards in the closet of his childhood bedroom. It was mostly worthless cards (called “common cards”) from the 1980s, but he thought the cards featuring the stars of the day (Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, and Kirby Puckett) could make him some money.
“I thought those were going to be pretty valuable at this point in time. That's why I had stored them away as a kid,” Jamieson told the Art of Manliness podcast in 2010. “But when I started calling up the card shops, I started getting disconnected numbers, and I saw that the cards I had, even sort of the special ones, were going for very little money on eBay and on Craigslist. In fact, Craigslist was littered with guys like me . . . who were 30 years old trying to unload these cards they’d had from childhood.”
I didn't know it as a kid, but I was going to have to work a job to fund my retirement, after all. The 11-year-old with the baseball cards scattered across his childhood bed would be so bummed to hear that.
Most of Our Childhood Hobbies Can’t Make Us Money
For a while in the mid to late 1990s, Beanie Babies were a potential cash cow, where you could sell the rarest versions of these plush toys for thousands of dollars. That’s true even today—at least on a limited basis. As Cosmopolitan points out:
“Only very specific Beanie Babies rake in the big bucks on popular resale sites. And even then, you'll probably only attract high bids if they are in pristine condition and you can prove their rarity (people go crazy for specific color combos, limited edition drops, etc.).”
Unless you own the Ty Princess Beanie Baby and can find a motivated buyer, you’re probably going to have to stay in the workforce as your Beanie Baby collection watches you sadly from its bedroom shelf.
The same goes for most other childhood collectibles like Furbies, original Game Boys, and Easy-Bake Ovens. Yes, maybe you convinced your mother not to trash your Star Wars action figures, but they're probably still not going to be worth much of anything unless you kept them in their original packaging and never played with them. If you read comic books with Cheetos-stained fingers or you spilled Dr. Pepper on your Nintendo PlayStation or you accidentally ran over your kid’s American Girl doll with a baby stroller on a Washington D.C. sidewalk (not that I know this from first-hand experience), you’re not going to command top dollar.
Unlike kids growing up in the 1960s, I never put my baseball cards between the spokes of my bike to make it sound like a motorcycle, and my mom never threw them away. I kept my baseball cards in plastic sleeves, and I tried not to handle them too much. But some of the cards have creases, rounded edges, and maybe a bubblegum stain or two. Most of them are not in pristine condition. Meaning they’re not going to compete with my 401(k).
More information here:
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Why Most Baseball Cards Are Not Worth Much Money
I’m writing this passage before I even look up how much my most valuable cards are worth, but I’m guessing the total is going to be somewhere in the three figures. One of the main problems is that I got into collecting in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a time that’s now called the “junk wax era” because baseball cards were so massively overprinted.
One of the most sought-after cards of that era was the 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie card. If you had that baby, you could maybe sell it for $100 back then. If you had the Billy Ripkin expletive card or a 1986 Donruss Jose Canseco rookie card, maybe you’d fetch a little bit more.
For me, I hungered for the 1985 Mark McGwire Olympic team rookie card, and it gave me an early look into the art of negotiation. I was visiting my grandparents in south Florida in the early 1990s, and we were at a flea market, when I noticed somebody had set up a booth filled with baseball cards. I walked over, looked into the glass countertop, and spotted that McGwire card. The seller had listed it for $25. I walked away and talked it over with my parents.
“Tell him you only have $15 in your pocket and see if he’ll sell it to you for that,” my parents whispered.
I did what they advised, and a few minutes later, I had one of my most prized possessions. I hate negotiating, but I loved that moment.
By the time I reached high school, though, my obsessions had shifted. Looking up baseball card prices was no longer on my to-do list. Seems like I wasn’t alone in that. The industry began to die out because it was too popular.
“In that era, everything was overprinted. There were just so many Canseco, [Barry] Bonds, and Griffey rookie cards that it really brought down the values of all those cards,” Larry Holder, who covers the memorabilia and collectibles industry for The Athletic, told me. “[The industry] definitely went out of fashion. Most of the people involved got burned out on it and moved on. Plus, technology moved on. There were video games. There were more things to do.”
I couldn’t meticulously calculate all my cards every month. I got a driver’s license, got a job, got a girlfriend, got a life outside of my bedroom. I probably had some grand scheme of still collecting a big check when I eventually sold off everything nestled inside my three-ring binder, but I stopped caring about the cards. The millionaire dream I had as an 11-year-old was fading faster than Marty McFly's family photo.
COVID, though, helped bring back the industry. People had nothing to do at home. They could buy cards on the internet. They could watch people make videos about opening decades-old wax packs.
It was nostalgia, and it was entrepreneurism.
“So many people are back into the hobby, and there’s a ton of money in it,” Holder said. “Now, people in their mid-40s are looking back for those Mark McGwire cards, the Ken Griffey cards, the Barry Bonds cards. There’s a nostalgia there. And if those cards are in mint condition, those prices have really started going up. You’re not going to be making millions for those cards, but you can maybe get into the thousands of dollars.”
And just like any kind of collectible, some people are buying the cards just so they can sell them for a higher price. Think artwork or crypto or NFTs.
“I’ve had people who compare cards to pieces of art or even as stocks,” Holder said. “You and me as kids, we would have the Beckett price guide [to see how much our cards were worth]. It would come out once a month. Now, you can get immediate prices on cards as they sell. You know the comps of a card right away. You don’t have to wait a month. You know what the card has sold for and whether it’s gone up or down in price, and you can negotiate it right away.”
Me? I didn’t even know where my baseball cards were for years. I checked my parents’ house. I looked through my attic. I searched under my bed. I miserably acknowledged that they had been lost. Then, one day, they simply appeared in a guest room closet. I continued to ignore my plastic-encased cards, but at least I knew where to find them. And if I wanted, I could price them out and see how much they were truly worth.
A couple of weeks ago, I did just that.
How Much Are My Baseball Cards Worth?
Turns out that it’s not much; my collection is not going to be worth seven figures after all.
First off, it’s hard to even tell how much these cards are worth. I’d likely have to get them professionally graded (not something that was even a thing back in my day), and they’d be rated on a scale from 1-10 by Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) based on the centering, the edges, the corners, and the surface of the card. A score of 10 means it’s in absolute mint condition (the difference between a grade of 9 and a grade of 10 can be worth 4x-5x). Plus, getting a PSA score isn’t free.
Despite my cards living in plastic for the last 30 years, I imagine I don’t have a single grade of 10 anywhere in my collection, and I’m certainly not going to shell out $20 per card for a PSA score (I don’t have any Mickey Mantle rookie cards or a 1909 Honus Wagner in my collection, so why bother?).
I opened my dusty old baseball card binder and found a piece of tape printed off my dad’s calculator from the last time I looked up the value of these cards. The tape said my collection back then (I’m guessing this was 1992 or 1993) was worth $316.
Clearly, my cards have increased in value. Some of my cards are now worth dozens of dollars. Maybe there’s one or two that could go in the triple figures. The McGwire Olympic rookie card could go for about $140, so it’s increased 833% in value. If I had paid that flea market merchant $25 instead of the clever $15 I negotiated, my return today would only have been 460%. Big-time score for me.
Overall, mine is a small-time collection, and it’s not going to fund my retirement, much less send my kids to college. Maybe I could use the profits to buy a Taylor Swift ticket to her next tour or something.
The Bottom Line
Old dreams of becoming a millionaire from baseball cards die hard.
“People still think they can make money off it,” Holder said. “People still think the same way we did when we were kids.”
Some apparently can.
On Christmas morning in 2024, an 11-year-old boy opened a pack of baseball cards. Contained within it was a redemption card that featured a picture of an autographed Paul Skenes MLB Debut Patch card from Topps. His father thought it looked like a throwaway card meant for the trash. The father had no idea.
That redemption card was the equivalent of a Willy Wonka golden ticket. Instead of a lifetime of chocolate, though, that ultra-rare piece of cardboard delivered the 11-year-old boy a mountain of cash—more than what Skenes, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates—earned as his salary. In an auction in March 2025, the Skenes card sold for $1.11 million.
That 11-year-old boy who collects baseball cards is now a millionaire.
More information here:
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Money Song of the Week
I don’t think I’ve ever featured a Money Song of the Week that doesn’t contain lyrics. That changes this week, thanks to superstar jazz musician Duke Ellington who explained to his fellow musicians in 1962 what he wanted the song “Money Jungle” to be—even if lyrics weren’t provided to explain what he was trying to get across in his music.
As noted by All About Jazz, Ellington (piano), who had grown his legend in the big band era, gathered younger, more modern musicians Charlie Mingus (bass) and Max Roach (drums) into a New York City studio, and they began laying down a track without a single rehearsal. All they had were sheets with the melody and chords and “a visual description of the meaning of the piece.”
Ellington told the two men to think “crawling around on the streets are serpents who have their heads up; these are agents and people who have exploited artists. Play that along with the music.” What they got was the title track to Ellington’s 1963 album.
The song is chaotic (possibly in part because Mingus and Roach almost decided they couldn’t work together during the session), and it’s probably not what people expected out of Ellington. I’m not much of a jazz guy, and even though I enjoy some types of avant-garde music, this is just a little too random, a little too disharmonic for me. It’s like what a Mark Rothko abstract painting might sound like. Some experts say the work is a masterpiece, but to me it looks like random bits of color or a peculiar dissonance between a pianist and a bassist.
Is it enjoyable to look at or to listen to? I mean, it’s fine, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way for it. But what the heck do I know? I’ll let All About Jazz describe the importance of Money Jungle:
“By collaborating with younger pioneers of more modern music, Duke allowed himself to be pulled into new harmonic, rhythmic and melodic ideas while Mingus and Roach were able to gain the experience of playing with a master of their art. This recording session marked a new sound in music that helped to shape the developing avant-garde jazz movement.”
More information here:
Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published
YouTube Short of the Week
What an inspirational moment from the Winter Olympics, as Regina Martinez Lorenzo, an ER doc, finishes her 10K cross-country ski race representing Mexico. And if you're a physician who's kinda good at skiing, you sadly have no more excuses for why you can't become an Olympian.
Do you still have a collection of whatever it was you were obsessed with as a child? Could it make you any money? If not, do you even care?