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The “low-grade” baseball card “has various condition flaws,” said the auction catalog description. The corners are as round as a baseball. There are so many wrinkles that it looks as though it had gone through a washing machine. On the reverse is a dark ink splatter resembling a Rorschach test. My psychological interpretation of the pattern is that it is a huge dollar sign.
Despite its manifest imperfections, the Honus Wagner card just sold for $440,000 in Robert Edward Auctions, smashing all auction records for examples graded in “poor condition .” In 2008 the exact same card sold for $227,050 in a Heritage Auction. In December 2014 another Wagner in poor condition but with superior eye-appeal fetched $403,664 in SCP Auctions.
The record provides another telltale sign of the bull market in high-end vintage baseball cards. The Wagner, next to the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, is the industry’s most iconic card, so it establishes other prices. Furthermore the latest Wagner represents the biggest sale since the huge Ty Cobb tobacco card find in March. Both cards are part of the fable T206 set from around 1910.
“A Wagner card almost always sells for more the next time it’s brought to auction because they just aren’t available that often” says Rich Mueller, the editor of the highly respected Sports Collectors Daily. “I think the average is maybe one per year, if that. The demand comes from collectors and investors. Even if you don’t know that much about old baseball cards, you know the Wagner. It’s the most recognizable item in the entire field of sports collecting. There are probably fewer than 75 in existence, but there are a lot more than 75 people in the world with the means and desire to own one— even if it’s just for a couple of years. They just have to decide how high they’re willing to go.”
Baseball card fans track Wagners’ provenance, or chain of custody, as if they are Picassos and other fine art. Andrew Aronstein is researching the three different Wagners his father, Mike, bought and sold from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The first one cost him 20 cents; the third, $1,500. He pocketed $21,150 in profit for the third, called the “Jumbo Wagner” because of its extra size. In 2013 the Jumbo changed hands for $2.105, 770 million in a Goldin Auction. Peter Nash, on his website, is performing the Herculean task of tracing each Wagner’s history, stretching back to their production around 1910.
The most recent Wagner for sale once belonged to one of the hobby’s pioneers and color characters, David Festberg. He paid the dealer’s price at a Pennsylvania show in 1986 and sold it seven years later in an auction through Sports Collectors Digest— for just $27,000, according to a former longtime employee, Brian Cataquet. That was only $2,000 more than his opening bid. Festberg opened one of the country’s first baseball card stores in 1979 on the outer stretch of Flatbush Avenue in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood that had seen better days. .
I remember biking there periodically in the late 1980s. His hole-in-the-wall shop was crammed from floor to ceiling with old baseball cards and Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia, and his mother Shirley, a dealer of nonsports cards, kept a watchful eye on customers to prevent theft. Festberg has since vanished. He is now a yogi in India, according to Cataquet.
The Wagner’s consignor could not have picked a better time, in the wake of the Ty Cobb tsunami. While cleaning out their great grandfather’s rundown house in the South, a family nearly threw out a crumpled paper bag containing seven super-rare Ty Cobb baseball cards with the Ty Cobb tobacco brand on the back, bumping the total population up to 22 cards. In March four of the baseball cards from the “Lucky 7 Find” sold for an estimated $3 million. The remaining three are still for sale on eBay, priced between $500,000 and $1 million. “It’s hard to say without knowing who was actually bidding, but I think the attention those cards brought was a big boost for vintage card sales in general,” Mueller says.
The owner of an extremely rare 1915 Cracker Jack baseball card advertising display poster featuring Cobb, Honus Wagner, Joe Jackson, and many other immortals, which somehow survived 100 years in an old Wisconsin barn, saw coverage of the Lucky 7 Find and reached out to the Mile High Card Company. Thanks to 21 bids, the poster has soared to $39,114. (The auction closes May 5th.) “The same thing happens whenever there’s a lot of publicity around a big find or a major sale,” says Mueller. “Some of those bidders are new and even one determined bidder can have a pretty dramatic increase on final pricing.”
At a large baseball card show in White Plains, New York, a consignment director for another major sports auction house who bought and sold a rare Ty Cobb-back card before the Lucky 7 Find agreed. “Anything that generates this amount of electricity is good for the industry,” he told me, requesting anonymity.
A few tables away sat the latest issue of a magazine called Beckett Vintage Collector. Its cover story about the Lucky Seven Find hailed it as “The Find of the Century.” Inside Joe Orlando, the president of PSA, a card-grading company went one step further, declaring that the discovery was “the greatest in hobby history.” Whether or not he’s right, there’s no arguing that the investment craze for baseball cards shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
