Baseball Card Holders

What type of baseball card holders do you use to protect your cards?  If you’re a serious collector, you most likely don’t have your valuable baseball cards in a shoebox in your attic.  In a previous post I had asked whether you protect your baseball cards.  You know that these cards can be worth real dollars today.  So how do you ensure that your investment is properly protected? 

When it comes to baseball card holders, you can’t count the different types on one hand. There are top loaders, penny sleeves, 9 slot pages, one touch magnetic holders, one-screw-down holders, four-screw-down holders, card stands, wall mount holders, acrylic, poly, thick, ultra-thick, mini-snap, etc. And there are several different leading makers of these baseball card holders.You can find good dealers of these holders by doing a search in Google, going to your favorite hobby shop, or of course you can always use good old eBay. Let’s take a look at each type of baseball card holder.

The penny sleeve is the most basic type of card holder. It is basically a soft plastic material that will protect your cards from surface scratches and minor dings. These sleeves can be inserted into a top loader for further protection. The penny sleeve will not protect your cards from major damage, but it is a basic form of protection that many cards should have. If you will be shipping baseball cards, most people put the card in a penny sleeve and then a top loader. So, if you’re planning on collecting or selling cards, and protecting many of them, you’ll need plenty of penny sleeves. They are pretty cheap to get. You can actually get 10,000 sleeves for about $30 on eBay. (That’s less than a penny per sleeve; $0.003 per sleeve actually).

The next basic type of card holder is a top-loader.  Your average standard baseball card size is 2.5 x 3.5 inches.  The top-loader which would be used to fit a standard baseball card is 3 x 4 inches.  A top-loader is made of stiff, clear plastic, and provides much more protection for your cards than a plain soft sleeve.  Most people ship their baseball cards in a soft sleeve slid into a top-loader.  This provides a double layer of protection for the baseball card.  You will see that top-loaders do come in several different sizes in order to accommodate all the different baseball card sizes, as well as photographs.

The next level up in card protection is the screw down case.  These are made of thicker and harder plastic than the top-loader.  If you wanted to bend a top-loader you could.  You can’t with these screw down cases.  There are also a few different types of screw down cases:  one-screw, four-screw and for the purposes of this conversation, we’ll include the magnetic one-touch case also.   Below you will find some links to the different types of screw-down and magnetic cases, found on the Pro-Mold website.

One-Screw
Four-Screw
Magnetic One-Touch

When purchasing these types of card holders, you’ll want to pay attention to the thickness of the cards you will be encasing.  They make different size holders for almost all the different thicknesses of cards.  We won’t go into the details of card thickness here.  For information about how to measure your card’s thickness check out this post.

One type of card holder I’d advise you to avoid in most cases, if you plan on preserving the quality of your cards, is the 9-slot holder.  These are the card holders that became popular in the 1980s and were used in baseball card “books”.  They’re great if you’re a kid and want to carry around a bunch of cards for trading with your friends.  But if you’re a serious collector, these holders are prone to having the cards slip out and sometimes the corners being bent, especially if you put cards in the holder back to back.  Again, for kids who put their cards in a book just for fun and trading, these are fine.  

One of the surest ways to preserve the quality of your card is to send the card to one of the premier card grading services.  They will put the card in a hard plastic slab for you, which is supposed to be permanently sealed, and the grade of the card (usually along with a serial number of the graded card) will be placed on a sticker in the casing.  You’ll want to have your cards graded by a leader in the industry, and these companies are some of those leaders.

Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA)

Beckett Grading Service (BGS)

Sportscard Guaranty (SGC)

Global Authentication (GAI)

You can also purchase a display case, which will hold a bunch of graded cards.  These cases, sometimes used by dealers at shows, can also be wall-mounted for display.  You’ll find an example of such a case here. 

You can see that when you’re considering card holders, they aren’t cookie cutter.  There are many types to choose from, at many different cost points.  In general, you can’t go wrong either getting your card graded, or dropping it into a penny sleeve and then a top-loader.