re: Are baseball cards still a thing?

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Last month, when my parents sold the house I grew up in, my mom forced me to come home and clear out my childhood bedroom. I opened the closet and found a box the size of a Jetta. ... [T]his was my old stash. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of baseball cards from the 1980s. Puckett, Henderson, Sandberg, Gwynn, and McGwire stared back at me with fresh faces.

I started calling the lucky card dealers who would soon be bidding on my trove.

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First, I got a couple of disconnected numbers for now-defunct card shops. Not a good sign.

Then I finally reached a human. "Those cards aren't worth anything," he told me, declining to look at them. "Maybe if you had, like, 20 McGwire rookie cards, that's something we might be interested in," another offered. "Have you tried eBay?" a third asked.

If I had to guess, I'd say that I spent a couple thousand bucks and a couple thousand hours compiling my baseball card collection. Now, it appears to have a street value of approximately zero dollars. What happened?

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