Wifasso.com
Henry’s Random Thoughts
A Word About
Cincinnati Reds Bobblehead Values
July 5, 2011
For coins, baseball cards and other very established
collectibles, we can assign values and print price guides, and as long as the price
guides don’t fall into the trap of giving an inflated “book” value, they can be
relied upon to give you a good idea of how much you can buy or sell your item
for. Completed items on Ebay have been a good guide
for over a decade now. While SGA’s are an established collectible nowadays, the
market for them is pretty thin. The vast majority of
collectors just buy tickets and go to the games. There will be a hardy
group of Ebay resellers running in circles getting
anywhere from a dozen to a hundred of them at the games, but there aren’t a
whole lot of them willing to do such work for fairly modest profits anymore.
And most of them sell in a flurry of activity right after the game. They don’t
hang onto inventory as a rule. So especially for the older ones, they only come
up for sale occasionally, and if someone sells a bunch of the same one, it
doesn’t take long for the market to get temporarily flooded. So not only is the
value hard to establish, it’s hard to say there really is a steady value. The
guidelines below are just that, loose guidelines.
For the majority of years, everything pictured for a
given year on this site (except for that one horse racing item) should be
valued at about $100 per year. This assumes you kept all the packaging and
everything is still in nice shape. 2002’s items are worth closer to $200, while
2008 is probably more like $60 (and it needed that Nuxhall
statue to bail it out even at that). 2009 was a good year and might be worth
$150 or so.
Individual bobbles are worth from $10 to as much as
$75. I believe the Bench from 2002 and the Larkin from 2001 are worth close to
$75, while the 2009 Votto is already around $50. The
worst of the bunch is the 2008 leisure suit Dunn, which isn’t even worth ten
bucks. We got stuck with a ton of them, since we didn’t know what they would
look like until we bought the tickets. We sold something like 60 to a baseball
card shop in Kentucky for a couple bucks each. If you walk into a card shop
over there and notice a stockpile of them, that’s almost
gotta be our old stockpile. For the rest of them, as
a general rule, the player featured determines the value. They made 40,000 Griffeys and only 10,000 Harnishes,
but don’t expect to get a Griffey in trade for your Harnish
just because of its rarity.
I must repeat, this is just a rough guide, since a few
people have asked. Your selling results may vary. Also, if this sits out there
for years and inflation ravages the dollar, you would adjust the dollar value
of any collectible accordingly.
As far as ones in good shape but without the box it
came in, you can cut the value in half for all of them from 2002 onwards. The
2001 ones came in generic boxes so the box is less important. As far as broken
ones go, if a repair is tiny, such as re-gluing a piece that was glued on
originally, it’s basically worth pretty close to its mint value. But one with a
major break or obvious cracking isn’t worth much at all. Unlike ones from the
60’s, if you need to describe it as cracked, it probably isn’t worth selling.