The first thing you’ll notice is that the BGS 9.5 graded cards in the table warrant healthy and sometimes massive premiums to ungraded book value. For example, a BGS 9.5 1993 SP Derek Jeter RC carries a book value of $2,000, for an adjusted multiple of 12.5 times ungraded book value — well beyond its current peak ungraded valuation — while a BGS 9.5 1983 Topps Tony Gwynn RC carries a book value of $800, or a whopping 22.9 times adjusted multiple to ungraded book, and also well in excess of peak ungraded value, which has never reached triple digits.
In addition to demand, the biggest reason these cards warrant such premiums is condition/grade scarcity: Of the 10,333 1993 SP Derek Jeter RCs submitted to BGS for grading, for example, only 126 have been graded BGS 9.5.
Likewise, of the 11,859 1994 SP Alex Rodriguez RC submitted to BGS for grading, only 126 have been graded BGS 9.5. However, the 41.7 multiple is overstated in this case, for a couple of reasons: (1) The card’s ungraded value has taken a hit over the past few months — dropping from $60 to $50 — probably because of both Rodriguez’s pitiful performance in the playoffs and more recent headlines related to performance-enhancing drugs (again), and (2) actual graded values are down, as the last three sales of the BGS 9.5 Rodriguez card on eBay in February have been in the $610-$650 range.
In other words, the drop in ungraded book value has increased the spread between BGS 9.5 and ungraded values (at least for the time being), while the three sales in February suggest that the graded book value is due for a drop, and probably to the $700-$800 range, which would result in an adjusted multiple of about 11.7 to 13.3 times ungraded book, or in line with the Jeter RC.
It’s apparent that Beckett’s pricings are not presumptive or predictive in nature but are rather adaptive and reactionary and may require some interpretation to be used to properly.
The graded values of the Steroid Bunch — Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, and Sammy Sosa — have for the most part held up well compared with their ungraded book values (though not previous graded values, which I don’t have citable data for but were probably all much higher than they are today), with the exception of Sammy Sosa, whose 1990 Leaf rookie card’s current graded value of $30 is well below its April 2000 peak ungraded value of $80. A BGS 9.5 1985 Topps Mark McGwire RC carries a 22.0 adjusted multiple and a valuation well in excess of peak ungraded book value, while the $600 graded book value of the 1984 Fleer Update Roger Clemens XRC still trumps its peak 1993 ungraded value of $450.
And while the 1987 Fleer Barry Larkin RC might seem like an odd inclusion, considering its ungraded pricing has never reached double digits, a BGS 9.5 example carries a book value of $120.
The other thing you’ll notice is the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. RC, which is the only one that has pricing for a BGS 10 Pristine grade, with a $1,400 book value and a 28.0 adjusted multiple. And the reason it’s the only card in this group to have pricing is that BGS 10 Pristine examples of the other cards either don’t exist, or are otherwise too rare to price because of a lack of trading data.
Out of the 29,568 Upper Deck Griffey RCs submitted to BGS, 1,783 have been graded BGS 9.5 Gem Mint, while 76 have gotten the BGS 10 Pristine grade. In contrast, there are exactly zero 1993 SP Derek Jeter BGS 10s, and zero 1994 SP Alex Rodriguez BGS 10s.
So have baseball card values risen in the last 20 years?
If you’re wondering about the worth of baseball cards from the 1980s and early ’90s that you have stuffed in binders or shoeboxes, you could probably throw them away and not lose much in terms of monetary value. Only the sharpest examples can attain a BGS 9.5 or PSA 10 grade; moreover, these cards need to be well centered to achieve such grades, and that’s a hard hurdle to clear for the cards that were printed in 2012, much less 1983.
