Dave --
Most of my soaking experience over the last 20 years has been with trade cards, and a pretty large percentage of the trade cards around today were soaked out of albums, much more so than with tobacco cards. I generally haven't had any problems with any of the standard types of trade cards, which would include the baseball trade cards you mention. My first soaking experiences, 20+ years ago, was with an album of trade cards and other ephemera where the pages were brittle and falling apart, but the cards were fine; I didn't have any problems soaking them, and most of those cards are still in my collection today. I posted this description of how I do it in one of the recent soaking threads:
http://www.net54baseball.com/showpos...70&postcount=7