The Official 2004 Price Guide to Baseball Cards (OFFICIAL PRICE GUIDE TO BASEBALL CARDS)

Rating:
Summary: Don't Buy
Review: I think Beckett gets worse and worse every year. I am so upset with their magazines and their books. This books skips so many years. For example there is no Donruss 1991-2000 cards listed at all. Majority of my cards are those ones. So this book become very useless to me. It's just like their magazine they skip everything. I haven't been able to find a book yet that will tell me what the price of all my cards are. If you have any special insert cards, this book will not list them.

Rating:
Summary: Some Problems
Review: It's a huge book, over 600 pages but there are a few problems.

1. A lot of years are skipped. For instance Upper Deck '92 is missing as well as '96 through '98. Every manufacturer seems to be missing years whether it be Donruss, Fleer, Ultra, Score, Stadium Club. You name it. A lot of traded series are also missing.

2. Don't plan on using this as a reference guide for any length of time because the pages start falling out practically the moment it first opened.

The solution for Beckett is simple. Don't include every card. Over half of the 1991 Score series is 2 cent cards. Just state that unlisted cards are 2 cents and you'd save yourself a couple of pages. The book would literally be half the size or less and then Beckett could include more sets.

Rating:
Summary: Beckett's remains the price guide for collecting older cards
Review: Okay, here is the situation. Beckett's monthly price guides can barely keep up with the baseball cards that are produced each year, let alone all those surplus sets and special collectible cards that are flooding the market on a monthly basis. However, as a collector I am not concerned with the current deluge and am working on sets of older cards from those long forgotten days before Fleer and Donruss opened the floodgates. Those monthly price guides will certainly give you prices, but they are not going to be any help if you are trying to figure out which cards you need to complete a particular set that you are working on. I finally finished my 1966 Topps set, have six rather expensive cards left to complete a 1953 Topps set and a couple of dozen for both the 1962 and 1967 Topps sets. That means I need to know ALL of the cards so that when I hit the card shops and shows that I am prepared for dealers who have their cards organized by numbers, players, or random piles.

With the "Official Beckett Price Guide to Baseball Cards 2004" you have your best shot at finding out exactly what is out there for any sets that you are working on at the moment. If you need to know about the prices and you are not going the monthly guide route then the prices quoted here are going to be more valid the farther back in time you go. But the key thing here is that these guides list all the cards, including all the extras, inserts, special sets and the like from Bowman, Diamond Stars, Donruss, Fleer, Goudey, Play Ball, Score, Sportsflics, Topps. Upper Deck and whatever other companies have sprung up that I cannot remember off the top of my head (hopefully there will not be a test anytime soon).

Beckett remains the price guide I use to put together my want list for the next card show or for checking out on line auctions. This is especially important when a set has numbers missing (it happens), so that you can avoid desperately searching for cards that are not there (e.g., the 1953 Topps set has 274 cards from #1 Jackie Robinson to #280 Milt Bolling, so there are some numbers that just do not exist). As always, there is also a concise and informative introductory section that will be of use to anyone who considers collecting baseball cards a serious hobby (is there any other kind?). There are over 290,000 prices listed, but more importantly there are those boxes to check off your cards as you add them to your collection. Plus the portable size makes it easy to use on the road.