Below are short bits & pieces on sportscard & baseball trading card collecting.
Please wander around the website for more info, prices, values & images
on vintage baseball, football, basketball, hockey, sport and non-sports cards.
Auction's most costly vintage baseball cards
The history of vintage baseball card auctions is long and colorful.
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.
BUT IT DOES NOT...
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.
Over 5,000 vintage sports and non-sports items in each weekly auction
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1958 Hires Root Beer
Hires Root Beer issued this 66 card set back in 1958. The cards came with an attached advertising tab. Cards with their tab intact are extremely difficult to find and thus are quite expensive. The actual card size varies from 2-3/8 in. to 2-5/8 in. wide and 3-3/8 in. to 3-5/8 in. high without the tab. Cards are numbered from #10 thru #76 with #69 not issued.
The card design - a wood grain "knot hole" through which the player is viewed - is a collector's favorite and was brought back by Bowman for their 2003 Bowman Heritage product. Although small at only 66 cards, the set did contain it's share of cards of Hall-of-Famers and Superstars such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Pee Wee Reese, Don Drysdale, Richie Ashburn, Bill Mazeroski, Duke Snider, Larry Doby, Don Newcombe and others...
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1985 Leaf Baseball
In 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.
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How long have sports cards been around ? (part 2)
The first important and mainstream basketball set was issued by Bowman in 1948.
Other than a Topps set in 1957-58 and a 1961-62 Fleer set, there were no
mainstream basketball sets issued until Topps started producing yearly sets
beginning with their 1969-70 set featuring the rookie card of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
who then went under the name of Lew Alcindor.
In hockey, there were a few sets issued in the 1910's and while O-Pee-Chee issued
some sets in the 1930's, the real modern sets began in 1951 with the itroduction
of Parkhurst's first set.
In racing, while cards go back as far as the early Indy car days of 1911,
modern racing sets began in 1988 with the issues released by MAXX.
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