At Today's Prices What's a Good Buy

[Archive]

Posted By: davidcycleback

More modern odd ball sets with rookies or pre-rookies of stars are often good deals and, if not overproduced, will always retain some demand. Some real cheap but interesting sets include the 1980s-90s team Police sets which include many Pre-Rookie cards of folks like Pedro Martinez. The 1970s Kelloggs issues include scarce and attractive rookie cards of Eddie Murray and Dennis Eckersley. You don't see the Murray often.

Consider modern certified autograph inserts cards from the past years of Hall of Famers. You can find many good deals on no longer 'hot' issues, and the cards will always have value as they are autographed and certified. Whatever happens to insert cards in the future, a certified Brooks Robinson autograph will always be a certified Brooks Robinson autograph. Also, if autograph authenticity and authentication companies is a bigger issue in the future, these cards will do even better as the players were under contract with the card maker to sign the cards. Note that I premise this on that you are hunting for bargains on past issues, not overbidding on the latest insert. Also, I'm talking specifically about cards signed directly onto by the player-- not cut signature cards or 'band aid' sticker cards. I'm not saying one cannot buy a signed clipped off corner of check insert card. I'm just saying that when a small piece of a check is priced 20x higher than the whole check of the player, it would seem obvious to even the non-collector on the street that the whole check is the wiser purchase. It's only with the insert card collectors that tearing off a corner of check, and throwing the rest away, increases the value of the check x20. And unlike a game used jersey, from which you can get hundreds of cloth swatches to make hundreds of baseball swatch cards, there is usually only one player autograph per check. If Upper Deck leaves the single signature check whole or cuts it into 30 pieces, they can still produce only one autograph card from it. This illustrates that Upper Deck doesn't actually have to cut apart a check to make a card.