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Posted By: David Smith

Peter,

In the mid 1990's I was in College and put some ads in small town newspapers asking to buy old baseball items. From one ad, I received two calls. One was about some cloth baseball squares and the other was from a guy who had some cards from both his Father and his Grandfather.

I went to the small town and looked at the cards first. They were Redman cards without the tabs from the 1950's and W502's from 1928. Included in the W502's were some Hall of Fmae players including Ruth and Gehrig.

I told the guy I was interested in the cards, especially the older ones. He asked me how much I would give. I said I didn't know, what do you want. He came back with $400 dollars. I agreed to that figure but then one of his buddies said he would buy the Ruth and Gehrig for $400. I said I would think about this because I had to go and see about some other items, the cloth baseball squares.

Well, the cloth pieces turned out to be B 18's in nice but not great condition. They were commons but reasonably priced, so I bought them. When I telephoned the first guy again, he wasn't home and I left a message. I didn't hear back from him for a while. When he did call back, he wanted $1,000 for the W 502's. I later learned that he had taken the cards to some shows and got some offers from dealers.

The problem with this guy was, he didn't know what he had. He knew the cards were old and that Ruth and Gehrig were in there. He assumed that everyone was trying to rip him off with the lowball offers. I thought $400 was fair considering there were only 15 or 16 W 502's, that they had some damage and wear and that his Grandfather had written team changes in pencil on the cards after the guy was traded.

I think the same thing would happen today and the asking price might be even higher. He could get on the web and look for the cards but W 502's don't come up that often. Because of that, he might look for comparables and not find any. After that, he might just look for ANYTHING with Ruth and Gehrig and that is in the same age range. Obviously, Goudeys would come up. He could then base what people were getting for Goudeys and assume his cards were worth that.

See, the Internet and eBay works both ways. They give people info about what they have so that they will not get ripped off but they also can give people an over-inflated sense of worth as far as their cards go. This might be why their aren't as many finds. People think what they own is worth more than what dealers/collectors are offering and wont sell.