The One Million Baseball Card Store is a baseball card collector’s dream come true. Located in Denver, Colorado, this immense store houses over one million different baseball cards spread across thousands of sets, players, and years. Stepping inside the store is like walking into a warehouse solely dedicated to the history of baseball as told through the players and sets immortalized on these tiny trading cards.
The store was opened in 2005 by lifelong collector Ed Thompson who had amassed a personal collection of over 800,000 cards through decades of dedicated searching, buying, and trading. Thompson’s collection had grown so massive that he needed an entire building to properly store and organize it. He decided to turn his collecting passion into a business and opened the One Million Baseball Card Store, bringing his vast holdings and new acquisitions with it.
Inside, rows and rows of long shelves span the entire length of the two-story building packed to the brim with cardboard boxes overflowing with thousands of crisp baseball cards from the earliest years of the hobby in the late 1800s up to the modern era. The collection includes common and rare cards spanning all eras of the game as well as complete sets, subsets, insert sets, and special limited issues. Thompson has cards from the pioneer tobacco issues of the late 1800s all the way to the latest offerings from today’s manufacturers.
The collection is so expansive it takes a team of five full-time employees to constantly catalog, organize, and maintain it. Each new shipment or acquisition requires hours of sorting and cataloging to fit it into the store’s sprawling indexing system. The store employs an intricate library-style organization with hundreds of numbered shelves dedicated to specific sets, teams, decades, and player name alphabetization to help customers and staff easily locate items.
Customers are welcome to peruse the shelves themselves to search for their elusive chase cards or browse sets from eras before they collected. More valuable vintage pieces requiring protective sleeves are kept in magnetic storage boxes at the front counters. Knowledgeable staff members are also on hand to offer assistance, appraisals, and share their expertise about various eras, inserts, and the value fluctuations of certain rookie cards over time. Even lifelong collectors are often amazed to discover obscure pieces within the store’s depths they didn’t know existed.
In addition to its incredible cache of cards, the One Million Baseball Card Store serves as a kind of living baseball card museum. Thompson displays unique original scrapbook pages, rare prototype samples, and one-of-a-kind test prints alongside relevant sets within the store’s shelves. A large framed wall near the front displays some of the rarest and most valuable cards in the collection including vintage greats like 1909-11 T206 Honus Wagner, 1914 Cracker Jack starring Joe Jackson, and a PSA-graded 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle.
Many collectors come from across the country (and world) just to experience stepping inside the awe-inspiring One Million Baseball Card Store. While some come simply seeking a unique card to add to their collections, others come as baseball pilgrims to pay tribute within the hallowed halls dedicated to their hobby. After over 15 years of acquiring new inventory, the store’s collection has indeed grown beyond its initial one million card goalpost into the realms of sheer card plenty. For any serious collector, simply being inside its cavernous shelves provides an experience they’ll remember for a lifetime.
