Baseball Card Values: Tips for Grading

Video Transcript

"Let's take a look at some of the other variables and grading cards. I mean some of the obvious, some stupid kid would tape or bend the card. You know that, or somebody like me put it in their bicycle spokes which is really dumb. We will look at some other things on these cards, for instance, here is, lets pick one. Here is a Reggie Jackson. Now we can take the age of the card. It says 1970, so this is 71, so it is newer. Its certainly not as old, so it may not be as valuable depending. And as I said, don't forget, it's who the star is and Reggie was extremely popular. So if we look at this card we see Reggie Jackson. It's card number 20. Look at the back. You can tell its 1970, so this card was from probably 1971. Lets look at this card. Does it look centered? No Expert Villagers. Why does it not look centered? Because this has a margin on this side that is wider than the margin on this side. Let's take a look. Is it glossy and sharp? Yes I can tell. It's got a sleeve, but I can tell. That's another important consideration to look at. After that, we take a look at the corners. Are the corners clean, cut tight. Do they have any dog eared edges. Those are the types of things that make it go down in value. Another biggie would be any type of staining. Even if it's very minor, that would depreciate the value significantly. Now this one I didn't have graded because I didn't want to spend. its probably about ten or fifteen dollars to have a card graded. So when you do have a card graded, you want to know that it's going to be worth your while to put that money out to have it graded because, when you do have a card graded, if it is a higher value, card it gives it more credit ability and actually increases the value if it has a legitimacy of a grade. This one isn't graded, but it's not going to be high because of the centering."