I suspect that many of those people found the cards they collected as kids, discovered something in their parent's attic, or somehow inherited a collection from a relative who has assumed room temperature. I also suspect that many of them wonder if they can now take an early retirement and move to Fiji with their new 200 foot yacht.

So read this carefully:

There is no single baseball card ever made that will allow you perpetual financial freedom.

There is no Pablo Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust at $100 million +. There is no Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Hammer at $30 million. There is no Graff Pink diamond at $46 million. No $80 million piece of oceanfront property complete with mansion.

The absolute best you are going to do is a Honus Wagner T206, also known as "The Card" made in 1911. There are only about 60 in existence and the most expensive one is worth about $2.1 million. Now, that's a nice chunk of change, but the chances of you actually finding one of those cards are just a bit greater than finding it on a Friday night and not getting eaten by a roving pack of rabid beavers before you can get it into a safe deposit box on Monday morning.

There are a good number of cards worth between $150,000 and $300,000, most of which predate the modern era of baseball cards beginning in 1948. They are all generally from the 1910s with two notable exceptions. The first is the 1933 Goudy of Babe Ruth coming in as about $300,000 and the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle at around the same price. Both are officially graded.

As a side note.... Don't confuse the two meanings of Modern when it comes to baseball cards. The Modern Era began in 1948 with the introduction of the Bowman set. Anything prior to that is classified as Vintage, broken into the Golden Age (pre-1920) and the Silver Age (1921 and ending in either 1941 or 1947 depending on who you ask.) But within the Modern Era, you have another breakdown of Vintage (1948 though 1980) and Modern (1981 to present.) Confusing, huh?

If you should happen to come across a near complete set of the T206s, about 500 cards, with only the big four missing, you can still only get about $200,000 for all of them. Again, nice payday, but no real retirement fund.

Things get even worse the newer the cards get. Take out the Mantle from the 1952 set and what's left will net you about $80,000. By the time you get to 1960, the price is a reasonable $6,000 for a complete set. A 1970 Topps set will fetch you about $2,500. See a trend here?

Cards are also very condition dependent when you are trying to price them. A small change in condition can knock off or add 50 percent to the price. (I'm not going to get into a condition discussion here, If you want more information on grading cards, see my other blog post at http://www.ultimateteamset.com/howtogradeabaseballcard.html)

There are a number of notable cards from the years 1952 through the late 1960s that can bring one to three thousand dollars. Among them are 1955 Topps Roberto Clemente at $2,500, 1954 Bowman Ted Williams at $3,000, most of the Mickey Mantles before 1960, and the 1963 Pete Rose rookie. There are many, many more that price at $100 to $500. Think superstar Hall of Famer. Think of his rookie card. That's where your value is.

The most expensive card from the late Vintage and Modern era (1977 to present) is the Ripkin rookie from the 1982 Topps Traded set. In near mint/mint condition you can probably get about $120 for it. The Ozzie Smith, Rickey Henderson, Eddie Murray, Paul Molitor, and Albert Pujols rookie cards run between $50 and $100 each. Another 100 or so issued between 1977 and 2014 book at between $10 and $40 on a good day. But watch out for error cards. Got a 1990 Frank Thomas, card 414? It's worth about $2. Missing his name on the front of the card? You put a grand in your pocket.

So that's all there is to it, right? WRONG!

Starting in the mid-1990s, all the various card companies started to do things to differentiate themselves, increase their market share, and line their pockets. They started printing multiple series of cards. And they started adding inserts into their card packs. Some of those different series of cards were printed in very limited numbers. And some of the inserts were as scarce as viable dinosaur eggs.

They included relic cards that features actual pieces of game used equipment (bats, jerseys, and the like) embedded in the cards. They included certified autographs. They included what are called parallel cards -- the same thing as the base set, but with different printing characteristics like colors and finishes. Many of those parallels were embossed numbered with their print runs actually stamped right onto the card and each card in the print run given a sequential number. They even started including the actual printing plates used to print the cards. Needless to say, those printing plates are given the print sequence and print run of 1 of 1. If you hold (say) a yellow printing plate for a specific card, it is the only one in existence.

At the peak of the series insanity, each company was producing some 40 or more different imprints, each separately numbered series of cards, per year. And each of those series had hundreds or thousands of inserts in them, seeded at random in every pack you purchased. Some like Topps gold included one gold card in every pack. Some were seeded at one in every 36 packs. Others were unique and had only one example in all the packs produced. And this is where life got fun.

If you wanted to collect all the cards of your favorite player, no longer were you chasing just a small handful of base cards from the Topps, Bowman, Fleer, Donruss, Score, Pacific, and a few other sets. Now you were trying to find hundreds of cards from multiple manufacturers, each with multiple series, each including multiple parallel sets and inserts.

To give you an example of what you were up against, let's say you are a Derek Jeter fan. To get all his cards from all manufacturers starting with his rookie card in 1993 to his last card this year, you would have to purchase 15,169 cards with a total price of $396,037. Andrew Pujols is not much better with 15,044 cards worth $264,476. Even Ryan Zimmerman, a relative baby on the baseball scene, presently has 4,750 cards worth $37,064. In nine years.

So where the base cards might not have any real significant value, some of those parallels and inserts could bring many multiple thousands of dollars. For a single card. That is the power of supply and demand. Supply low with demand high = megabucks. Or actually kilobucks.

Then you have the whole spectre of graded cards. These are cards that are sent off to reputable grading companies who evaluate the condition, give them a number between one and ten, then encase them in sealed plastic slabs with their condition printed on a label. I may have what is clearly a mint Ripkin rookie that books for perhaps $150 to $200, but if it is formally graded at a 10, then the price goes up to maybe $10,000 on a good day. Hey, I don't understand the appeal either. But if you have a high-demand card in officially graded mint condition, there are fools, er collectors, who will pay dearly to own it.

One note here about card grades. Say you have an unopened set of 1983 Topps. It is presumed that every card in that set is in mint condition. But the reality of it is that most of them are not. They are generally way off-center and that brings the grade, and hence pricing, way down. Newer cards with modern printing techniques offered a lot of sets with embossed metallic printing. Many of those cards were not printed properly and the metallic printing flaked off. Others, especially from the late 1990s to early 200Os used a new type of finish that tended to stick all the cards together like a brick. So you could buy an unopened 2002 Topps set and find it to be completely worthless when you cracked the shrinkwrap off of it. Presumed mint, but complete trash. Good doorstop, though.

Most of the people who contact me wanting to sell their cards collected them during the heyday from 1985 through 1994 -- the year of the baseball strike and when casual collectors stopped caring about baseball. For those who bought quantities of annual base sets, those cards are worth about as much as kindling to start a decent winter fire in your fireplace. Companies grossly overprinted all those sets in numbers far exceeding even stunning levels of demand, Most small towns had at least one card shop, and larger cities had perhaps dozens. You could buy packs of baseball cards at any convenience store right off the front counter. The huge demand was there and companies were more than eager to provide the supply. Too eager as it turned out.

Other people have some earlier cards in the Modern Era, but they are in junk condition. Any card from 1977 on up had better be in at least near mint condition to have any value at all. Anything from 1980 and up needs to be in near mint/mint or better condition. That means essentially perfect to the casual glance. The only time cards in fair or lesser condition have any value is if they are really old and exceptionally valuable because of scarcity. I'm not gonna turn down an original Allen and Ginter from the late 1800s just because the cards are not pristine.

Sometimes volume also counts. If granddad gathered a 5,000 count box of 1975 Topps even with all the stars missing, it's still worth about $1,500. The same sized box of 1956 Topps commons would bring perhaps $75,000.

So if you found or inherited cards printed before about 1970, or you chased inserts like crazy, you may have something of value on your hands. But don't let that scare you off. If you have a hand-collated set of 1981 Topps where every card is in true near mint/mint condition or better, it is still worth about $100.

And that makes for a very nice evening out, but no new house, car, and college fund for your kids.

One other thing to keep in mind, though. Let's day you have ten thousand cards all from 1987 to 1992. They are not worth anything to a die-hard collector. BUT... those cards have an actual listed and printed book value. Even if they "book" at three cents per card, that's still $300. And given that you can not really buy any card anywhere online for less than about 10 cents, they could (almost) legitimately be considered to be worth $1,000. Donate them to a charitable organization like the Boy's Club, The Boy Scouts, Trail Life USA, or the Autism Foundation and you can take a deduction off your taxes. (See http://www.irs.gov/uac/Eight- Tips-for-Deducting-Charitable-Contributions)

Finally, remember that the value of the whole is often greater than the sum of the parts. Collectors (and fans) tend to go for complete sets. They like to hold complete annual sets, team sets, all the cards of a particular player, all the cards from everyone who was born in their home state, all players of Italian descent, or a million other criteria. A collector will lose his or her mind trying to hunt down that one elusive card to complete a set. Just remember that it takes patience, money and a loving wife (or husband) to successfully pull off getting every example included in a large collection. And the time it took you to assemble that collection does have value above and beyond raw book value when it comes time to sell.