Auction's most costly vintage baseball cards![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
The history of vintage baseball card auctions is long and colorful.
Over 5,000 vintage sports and non-sports items in each weekly auction
T-206 Honus Wagner tobacco cards have sold for upto $2.8 million in
auction. The "Holy Grail of Sports Cards", it's extreme-high auction
value can mostly be attributed to great PR and "auction fever".
It's not close to being the rarest baseball card and Honus Wagner is not
Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle. Yes, the T-206 set is beautiful & special but
because of the # of cards and scarcities, few collector's try to complete,
which should keep auction competition down compared to say 1933 Goudey
or 1952 Topps baseball card issues. There's a story Wagner banned his card because he was anti-tobacco but there are other stories about financial considerations. You surely have heard of PSA and may even know that this card was the FIRST they ever graded. But did you know that dealer (B.l. .ast.o name encoded) admitted tampering with the card, perhaps having it trimmed down to size, before PSA graded it so highly for the auction.
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![]() ![]() 1969 Topps Stamps |
1985 Leaf BaseballIn 1985 Donruss created a special version of its baseball cards (1985 Leaf) in an attempt to enter the Canadian baseball card market. Except for the addition of a colorful green leaf, the card fronts were virtually identical to Donruss cards. The most interesting difference occurred on the back where the Leaf cards featured text in both French and English !At only 264 cards, the Leaf set was much smaller than Donruss with it's 660 cards. But ... because of it's smaller set size the Leaf set has a much higher percentage of star cards. There was also a special two-card "Canadian Greats" subset with paintings of Dave Stieb and Tim Raines. Top rookies are: Roger Clemens, Kirby Puckett, Orel Hershiser, Dwight Gooden and Mark Lamgston. |
Like all collectibles, over time some sports cards go down in value, others go up and some can even become very valuable. Card values are based on many factors: player popularity, scarcity, condition & collector interest. A card can be scarce but without demand value may not be great.
Q: What are some ways to collect cards ?
* Complete sets by year & issue
* Cards of your favorite player
* Cards of your favorite team "TEAM SETS"
* Rookie cards
* Hall-of-Famer cards
* I even had a girlfriend that collected Don Mossi (checkout his ears),
players whose last name start with "Z", and the Brett brothers George &
Ken (she had a crush on George).
* "TYPE COLLECTING" (everyone should at least do a little of this !)
"Type Collecting"
is collecting at least one of each different "type" of issue.
On scarcer issues you can add a less expensive common
while on others you can select your favorite player or team.