Mascot

How to Sell Your Baseball Cards During the MLB Playoffs

By Guinio Volpone

Seller preparing to sell baseball cards with a scanner and marketplace listings open on a laptop

Postseason baseball sends buyers looking for the players on their TV. Here's how to list your cards before they search.

The Chicago White Sox started their first MLB playoff run in five years by sweeping the Houston Astros. Across town, the Chicago Cubs were swept by the San Diego Padres. That's the reality of baseball in October.

With eight teams vying for the Commissioner’s Trophy, the stakes are higher than ever for the Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, Milwaukee Brewers, Cleveland Guardians, New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Rays White Sox, and Padres. With every game broadcast on national TV, fans throughout the country—and across the globe—will be watching every at-bat, pitch, and attempted stolen base, with every big play sending fans looking for sports cards to commemorate the moment.

So how do you make sure your cards have a worldwide audience as big as Shohei Ohtani? The best way to sell baseball cards during the MLB playoffs is to have them scanned, priced, and listed before the games start.

As baseball heats up during October, so does buyer interest—and sellers who list early, and on more than one marketplace, can take advantage by getting their cards in front of those buyers wherever they’re searching for them.

Why October Moves the Baseball Card Market:

Last year's World Series is a great example of the kind of demand playoff baseball can bring. Rob Veres, the owner of Burbank Sportscards, told Sports Collectors Daily that most Shohei Ohtani cards under $1,000 rose about 50% during the 2025 postseason.

“Ohtani has been a big seller for us for a few years, but after Game 4 of the NLCS when he hit three home runs and pitched six scoreless innings, everything went to a whole new level,” Veres told Sports Collectors Daily. “We had three display cases of Ohtani graded cards that held 180 cards each. After that game, we have about a dozen cards left.”

To be fair, not every player gets an Ohtani October, but the pattern holds: people buy cards of the big name players they see in big time games. And with plenty of stars set to take center stage over the next month, you should already have a pretty good idea of the players and cards to list for sale.

The Names to Watch:

With the ALDS and NLDS both underway, here are a few players whose cards you’ll want to keep an eye on:

  • Kyle Teel, Chase Meidroth, and Munetaka Murakami (White Sox): Teel and Meidroth arrived in the Garrett Crochet trade, and they drove in four runs in the Game 2 clincher against Houston. Murakami loves to hit the long ball, and became the first Japanese-born rookie in MLB history to hit 30 home runs in a single season, finishing the season with 35—good for the 10th most across the league this season. This young White Sox team is electric, and fans want in on the action.
  • Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers): The Dodgers are the defending champs, and they’ve still got the two players who drove last October's card market. Whether or not you believe Ohtani is the next Babe Ruth is up to you, but the card market hasn’t shied away from putting him in rarefied air.
  • Jacob Misiorowski (Brewers): Milwaukee’s ace led the league with a 1.85 ERA, and the Brewers are the NL's No. 1 seed. Can they make it out of the National League?
  • Cam Schlittler (Yankees): The 25-year-old pitcher started in the Yankees' Wild Card sweep of Boston, which they won by a combined 18-2. Not bad for a player taken in the seventh round of the 2022 MLB Draft.

How to Get Your Cards Listed ASAP:

1. Scan everything first: A baseball card scanner identifies the player, year, and set of a card from a photo, allowing you to quickly sort through your inventory. Mascot's AI scanner offers unlimited scans on every plan and works with a flatbed so you can scan several cards at once. Graded cards import by cert number from PSA, CGC, SGC, and MBA.

2. Pull your playoff players. Once you’ve got your inventory scanned, filter it by players on the remaining playoff teams, listing those cards as quickly as possible. All your other baseball cards can wait until November.

3. Price appropriately: Check recent sold listings for the exact card and grade of the cards you’re listing so you don’t come in way over market value. That said, you want to get your money’s worth, so set a floor you're comfortable with. If you’re looking to move as many cards as possible this postseason, automated markdowns are a useful tool, dropping the price over a set schedule. That said, during the playoffs when demand is high, you want to make sure you’re not scheduling a price drop for a player who just hit a walk-off. Mascot's Pricing Rules let you set rules in bulk for a filtered group of cards, turning hours of pricing into a quick, easy, process.

4. List everywhere at once: Some buyers search eBay while others watch a Whatnot stream during the game. Multi-channel listing publishes the same card to eBay, Whatnot, TikTok Shop, Shopify, and more, then delists the card across all platforms when it sells to avoid duplicate sales (and refunds). Looking to get even more reach? The Mascot Network puts more potential buyers in front of your card for just a 3% fee.

5. Revisit your listings after every round. When a team is eliminated from the playoffs, its players' cards usually stop getting attention, with prices dropping until fresh hope arrives with the start of a new season in the spring. Decide in advance whether you'll hold onto them for a few months or if you simply want to quickly offload your inventory.

Whether you're selling one Teel rookie or a box of Dodgers cardboard, the cards that sell best this month are the ones already listed when the games begin.