Pre-War and Vintage

[Touch'EmAll]

The past few months I have been cruising the internet for articles and videos about older baseball cards and their future. Seems like most people are tagging vintage as strictly post WW2, often referring to 1952-1980. And 90+% of what I find is about Vintage. Upon basic internet search, there is almost no pre-War current articles/videos.

Generally, the Vintage market is doing well compared to Modern. A couple sites mention the last year to be break-even to down 5% for Vintage prices. Modern has dropped like a rock, but then Modern did spike more to begin with during the pandemic. I haven't seen such data on pre-War, and I imagine it depends on the cards you have - from which sets, top tier HOFers vs lower HOFers vs commons. From what I have, I am going to guess during the last year, nice pre-War was generally up 5-10%.

One video mentioned that as many of the older Baby Boomer collectors pass, we will see an influx of raw Vintage hitting the market and getting newly graded by their heirs. Supposedly, many of these collectors may not have jumped on the Grading Bandwagon and have retained their cards as raw. They speculate this influx may put a damper on the Vintage market and values may actually drop. OK, yeah, I see the argument here. My thought is that yes, a lot of Vintage cards will come to market, but how many will be high end caliber - PSA 8 range? A boatload of 2-5 grades, perhaps most likely. If so, might that do the opposite and push high grade up even higher?

Now move to pre-War. do these same older Baby Boomers have binders full of raw pre-War sitting around for heirs to take to market and get graded? Gee, I don't know - what do you think? If heirs don't find quantity of pre-War, we could see a larger separation between Vintage and pre-War with the Cobb's and Ruth's and such continuing to escalate substantially. What do you think?

Regardless, I love pre-War. the vast majority of what I have is pre-War. I am thinking selling Vintage and Modern (not that it's a lot) except for a few special super nice handful and seeking a solid pre-War want list card (T206 Cobb, bat off).

Enough rambling, cheers y'all!