Are baseball cards worth anything is a fair question and the honest answer has two halves. Most cards printed since the mid-1980s are worth close to nothing, because they were printed in quantities nobody has ever needed. A small number are worth a great deal. Nothing about the player tells you which you have; three other things do, and you can check all three in an evening.
How many were made
Scarcity comes first because nothing else survives without it. Cards from the late 1980s and early 1990s were produced in enormous runs and stored carefully by millions of people at once, which is the worst possible combination for value: supply is high and condition is good. A card with a stated print run, a serial number on the card itself, or a genuine short print is a different object. If nothing on the card says it is limited, work on the assumption that it is not.
What condition it is actually in
Once a card is common, condition is the price. Look at the four corners against a white background under good light, hold the card at an angle to see the surface, and compare the borders top to bottom and left to right for centring. Be pessimistic: most people describe their own cards a grade or two above where a grader would put them, and comparing your card to sales of a sharper one is where the disappointment comes from.
Whether anybody is buying
Value needs a buyer on the day. If you search completed sales for a card and find five in the last few months, there is a market and it has a price. If you find none, the market is thin, and a thin market is not a low price so much as no price at all: the card may be genuinely uncommon and still take months to sell. Absence of sales is an answer, and for most of a shoebox it is the answer.
Then put the numbers through the checker
When you do find sales, the card value checker on this site takes five of them and gives you the figure to use, with the highest and the lowest dropped and the spread shown so you can see how much the five agree. It is free, there is no account, and nothing you type into it leaves your browser.
Questions people ask about are baseball cards worth anything
I have a big box from the early 1990s. Is any of it worth anything?
Almost certainly a few cards, and almost certainly not the box. That era's print runs were enormous, so the base cards are common in good condition. Look for inserts, autographs, serial numbering and anything short printed, and check those against completed sales.
Does a famous player make a card valuable?
Not on its own. A great player's common card is still common. What the player does is raise demand, which matters once the card is also scarce and in good condition; without those two, demand alone has plenty of supply to satisfy it.
Are cards from the 1950s and 1960s always worth something?
More often than modern ones, because far fewer were printed and far fewer survived in good condition, but not always and not automatically. Condition swings the price enormously at that age, and a heavily worn common card from that era can still be worth very little.
Should I get them appraised?
This site does not appraise and does not recommend appraisers. For a collection you intend to sell, reading completed sales on your best twenty cards will tell you more, faster, than an opinion will.