The Baseball Sim Market

Why you shouldn't try selling single cards

The Baseball Sim Market

The market for baseball sims is a lot different than the market for traditional baseball cards, Magic: The Gathering cards, Pokemon cards, or anything like that.

It’s one of my pet peeves, actually. People who collect APBA, Strat-O-Matic, Replay, Statis Pro, and cards for other games have very specific desires and interests. Those who sell these cards in bulk on platforms like eBay tend to not understand what we value and what we are really interested in.

The basis for this post came earlier this week when I stumbled across this Reddit thread:

Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I certainly don’t think it’s possible for somebody to make anywhere near $100,000 a year just reselling old APBA and Strat cards. Part of the reason for this is the most basic difference in the markets: sport sim collectors want entire sets, or, at the very least, complete teams.

Of course, this makes things difficult for sellers who simply don’t have complete sets. Somebody on Facebook the other day offered up an incomplete 1980 Strat-O-Matic baseball set, for example. I think he wanted $50 for about 300 cards. The problem, of course, is that the set is mostly useless unless you can come up with the missing cards.

And then you have monstrosities like this:

Now, I don’t want to criticize the poor person who somehow inherited over 2,000 different Strat-O-Matic team sets. It’s impossible to sort through them all without putting some serious time and dedication into it — and, frankly, most of the newer cards aren’t going to be worth it.

Still, it’s going to be extremely difficult to find anybody who wants to buy a gigantic lot of old Strat cards basically sight unseen. You don’t know what is and what is not complete in that stack, nor do you really know what years are included. That can be pretty scary.

My advice to sellers is to try to keep full years together as much as possible. Barring that, try at least to keep full teams together. That’s where the market for these cards currently is. After all, nobody wants to buy the 1986 Houston Astros only to discover that Mike Scott is missing.