How to Take Care of Baseball Cards

Taking great care of your baseball cards can maximize the value of your collection. Baseball cards lose a lot of value when they aren't properly handled and stored, even minor damage can drastically reduce values.

Use Appropriate Baseball Card Holders

I won’t go into too much detail about this piece of the equation in this article since it’s covered rather extensively elsewhere on the site but no discussion about the property care of baseball cards would be complete without at least mentioning it. Using high quality baseball card holders and in your binders, baseball card protector sheets, will help keep your cards in mint condition.

Teach Kids When They Begin Collecting How to Care for their Cards.

Collecting baseball cards with your kids can be a wonderful experience, helping them learn how to care for their cards in a fun way only makes it better. If you teach them to be careful with all cards, not just the valuable ones, they’ll do better overall. Those no-value common cards are great cards for kids to take a look at and handle without a case but still teach them to handle them with care and that’ll come second nature to them when they end up eventually handling more valuable cards in the future.

Be Very Careful Inserting and Removing Cards from Top Loaders and other Holders

Don’t try to put a card in the wrong size sleeve, top loader, or screw-down holder. Cards come in various thicknesses so use holders or sheets made for that thickness card. Visit this site for an overview on baseball card sizes. Resist the urge to insert and remove your cards from their holders frequently and you'll lower the risk of damaging the cards quite a bit. We all love to take a closer look at our cards from time to time but keeping them in their cases as much as possible helps tremendously. Use hard plastic baseball card holders for cards that young kids might want to handle. If you’re starting a collection with your son or daughter for example it wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun for them to never be able to pick the cards up, so putting them in a more protective case can remove almost all of the risk in letting them handle the cards.

Tips About The Storage Environment

Store cards in a dry environment with low humidity and a lack of extreme temperatures. Extreme temperatures aren’t good for your cards. Aside from temperature and humidity a ‘suitable environment’ also takes security into account. If you have very valuable cards in your collection take extra care to keep them in a secure location, preferably one that is fire proof. For extremely valuable cards the same care that would be taken for any priceless collectors item be it a piece of art or what have you. A bank or other secure location might be the best option for those cases.


To learn more tips for taking care of baseball cards to maximize their value click here.