Cale Makar Rookie Card Blowing Up

CALE MAKAR ROOKIE CARD

I haven’t collected cards for a really, really long time. I would guess I bought my last real pack in around 1985 or so. But, from 1972 or so until ’85, I bought at least 10 packs a week of all the four major sports. Cards were 10 cents a pack in the ’70s and I got a $1 allowance per week. So, anytime I got that dollar, I was off to the local convenience store to buy 10 packs of whatever was in season. I saved them all, and had enough savvy intuition as a punk junior-high kid to know they might be valuable someday.

And then my mom threw them all away when I was at college. In fairness to her, my first cat, Ollie, urinated on a box of open cards in the closet in my room, which created an ungodly stench and made my mom throw out almost everything near it, which were the thousands of original 1970s and early 1980s cards.

I had a ton of great cards – multiple Walter Payton rookies, lots of Mike Schmidt rookies, a Gretzky rookie. All, tossed in the trash. I had a t-shirt once that read “Once I was a millionaire, but then my mom threw my baseball cards away.” In reality, it never would have been that much, not even close.

Back in my Denver Post days, I did a story on Bill’s Sports Collectibles and asked the owner, Bill Vezas, how much my cards would have sold for. He said “A few thousand bucks” but that was it. The cards that make you rich are things like Mickey Mantle rookies, and really older cards. Some new cards definitely can get hot and the card industry, after a dormant period, is relatively strong again.

Which brings me to the value of the rookie card of Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar. In a word, the card is hot.

As you can see from the picture above, there is one Makar rookie on Ebay where the asking price is $2,474.95. There are others that have current bid prices of $600 or more, with lots of existing bids and lots of time left on the clock. The 2019 Upper Deck “Young Guns” is considered the true Makar rookie card. That’s the one you want to get.

I would absolutely expect the Makar rookie to get more valuable as time goes along. Who knows, it might be a “holy grail” kind of card. Happy hunting.