Baseball cards in a New Jersey attic

[Tricia]

This guy had no children but often told his nieces and nephews that the real treasures were in the attic. It wasn't until his passing that they found millions of dollars in signed baseball cards along with the letters from the players who signed them.

https://nypost.com/2020/06/11/new-jersey-man-leaves-behind-trove-of-signed-baseball-cards/

 

[crgildart]

Amazing story. Saw it on the news earlier this week.

 

[Jim Kenney]

Thanks for sharing, hadn't seen that. One of those occasional finds in the baseball card hobby, where a great, unknown collection is recovered from an attic or basement. This one seems like the holy grail. The fact that it belonged to a 97 year old meant it was collecting dust a lot longer than most before it came to light. Also, with the collector being from NJ and focused on the Yankees during a golden era is also huge for the value of his collection.

So I'm one of those guys who managed to salvage his boyhood baseball card collection from oblivion. I have a mini "Uncle Jimmy" collection of about 1000 cards mostly from the early 1960s. Like the Jimmy in this story I don't have any younger generation family members that have interest in these cards and they've been untouched in a closet for a decade or more.

Because I didn't collect a ton of cards I can remember most of them by heart from several years of pouring over them when I was age 10 Sadly every time an old major leaguer passes away I think of whether I have their baseball card; for example, I think I have this 1962 card of the recently deceased Cy Young award winner Mike McCormick:

My cards are in decent condition, but not pristine. That means my whole collection including Mickey Mantle's, Wille Mays', Stan Musial's and all is probably only worth a few hundred dollars. Condition is everything, not that I've been pricing things or following the market at all in recent decades.

 

[Philpug]

How many collections like this are still in attics? I would say there is more, many will never know. Not just baseball cards but other "collectibles" too. What is cool with this collection is all of the personal letters from the players that is included. Uncle Jimmy was pretty thorough in his archiving.I still weep for the ones that ended up in landfills from parents throwing them away after the kids left home.

There have been some good domuentaries about baseball cards and collectors. It seems the peak in card values and some sports memorabila has passed, I imagine this collection clould have been worth 30-40% more 5-10 years ago.

 

[Jim Kenney]

A few years ago I went through a streak where I watched a lot of American Pickers episodes. They would often mention that the recession of 2008 hurt the value of a lot of collectables and some never recovered. Potential buyers had less disposable income to blow on goofy stuff. This covid recession might cause something similar. Also, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Nolan Ryan, Lou Gehrig and other icons or extreme rarities may stay valuable, but a lot of secondary stars lose attraction and value when everyone that ever admired them is gone.
For example, Hall of Fame slugger Mel Ott is largely forgotten by casual fans. You can get this 89 year old card of his for $89.

If you owned this card and tried to sell it to card broker you'd probably only get a third of that price.

 

[mdf]

.I still weep for the ones that ended up in landfills from parents throwing them away after the kids left home.

But that's what makes the remaining ones valuable....

 

[Tricia]

I still weep for the ones that ended up in landfills from parents throwing them away after the kids left home.

Or the kids who clean out a house after someone dies and just fill the dumpster with the "old crap"

I recall many times when my dad took me to the basement where he had a cabinet full of fish decoys.
He would often say, "When I croak, don't let your mom sell this in a garage sale. Its worth a lot of money."
Turns out, may of the fish decoys he has are part of folk art in the fishing community and are worth upwards of 200.00/inch Many of them are 10 inches long. That's not the millinos they're talking in the baseball card collection but its still more than selling for 1.00 at a garage sale.
My dad has a handful of Peterson Decoys. He lived in the area where I grew up and there were some oldtimers who knew Oscar Peterson.
One of my dad's neighbors talked about how Oscar would hitch hike and his dad would pick him up, often brining him home for dinner. One day when his dad brough Oscar home for dinner, he had carved a salad bowl from a single piece of wood as a gift for his family.
The salad bowl had become lost in the family possessions until my dad showed up with a Peterson decoy book and he saw it (with the dent in it that he and his sister caused as kids) in a book worth stupid money.
I'll see if I can find the page from the book.

Oscar W. Peterson - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Edit to add: I just found out that some of Oscar Peterson's work is in the Smithsonian.

Oscar Peterson

Oscar "Pelee" Peterson is among the best known and most widely imitated fish carvers. He began carving around 1905 and may have made as many as ten thousand to fifteen thousand decoys.

americanart.si.edu

 

[Jim McDonald]

Fish decoys? They actually work, attracting real fish to swim over and say howdy?

 

[Tricia]

Fish decoys? They actually work, attracting real fish to swim over and say howdy?

Yes they do,
The fish shape is meant to swim and you have different loops to hook the line to to make them swim, as well as lead weights in the bottom that gives the fish specific balance.
Trust me when I say, I know way too much about fish decoys. Spent a fair amount of time in a fish shanty with my dad.


My dad is in his late 70s. He makes hand crafted fish spears which are highly sought after because he weights the head where the handle attaches just right so it goes straight.
This girl won a contest using one of my dad's spears.

Kylie Brooks throws a mean Spear – Michigan Fishing Report

bucsfishingreport.com

 

[James]

Friend of mine’s father had a signed Blacksox ball. Sometime as kids he and friends rummaged in the attic, found a baseball, and went outside with it. It then disappeared, never to be seen again.

 

[Jim Kenney]

RIP Jay Johnstone, from Covid-19
He was known as a prankster back in the day. I have this baseball card, one of my favorites:

 

[Jim Kenney]

Rough year on older MLB legends, RIP:

I have almost all of these cards.

 

[Jim Kenney]

New record set for a Hockey card, $1.3 mil, Gretzky rookie card. Apparently, this is one of only two copies of this card in super great gem/mint condition. Laymen would hardly be able to detect it, but same card in slightly worn condition drops in value to just the hundreds, instead of millions - crazy.

Unclear who the buyer is ... but it's the latest example of the ridiculous boom in the card industry -- in the last few months, cards from all sports have gone for INSANE prices, but condition is everything.

 

[James]

^ That’s just crazy.

Maybe 10 years ago I was at a train station looking at the schedule. A guy comes up and asks me about the next train. He’s got a windbreaker on, says in small letters over the heart, “Edmonton Oil Cans”. Not Oilers. I thought, huh... gotta be a minor league team. Big guy, bald, taking a train to nyc. After he walked away it hit me, it was Mark Messier.

 

[Philpug]

I have almost all of these cards.

About 20 years ago there was a peak in Hot Wheels. I sold all of mine including some very rare ones, one had a comma in it's value. I don't regret it. While the collection might be worth more now...Not in the cost of money and the risk that something could have happened to them in that time.

 

[Jim Kenney]

2020 was as bad as you thought it was (for # of past MLB player obits)

DECEMBER 11, 2020 ~ SAM GAZDZIAK

full article: https://ripbaseball.com/2020/12/11/2020-was-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-was/

EXCERPTS:
Ever wonder what it’s like writing baseball-related obituaries in 2020? In a word, it’s been exhausting. Let’s use this week as an example.

I wrote and published stories on Tommy Sandt and Bill Spanswick on December 5 and 7, respectively. While I was working on those, reports came out that that Lorenzo “Chico” Fernandez died, so I started working on his story. Within the next 24 hours, news broke that Dick Allen, Roger Moret and Denis Menke all had passed away as well. Dick Allen’s obit, given the length of his career and the complexity of his story, took a couple days to write, but it was posted on December 10. I spent the afternoon of the 10th off my phone — By the time I got back in the car and started catching up on emails, I received notices that Phil Linz and Billy DeMars had both passed away. That makes for 7 deaths within the first 10 days of December alone. That’s 2020 in a nutshell: just an relenting string of bad news.

If you’ve followed... baseball news in general, you may get the sense that 2020 has been especially hard on the baseball community. The deaths of six Hall of Famers, including four within a five-week span, is a tremendous loss by itself. It’s more than that, though. [HALL OF FAMERS, RIP 2020: AL KALINE, TOM SEAVER, LOU BROCK, BOB GIBSON, WHITEY FORD, JOE MORGAN.]

Through December 10, 2020, there have been a confirmed total of 107 major-league ballplayers who have passed away... That’s one of the highest death counts in the last 50 years — and we have 21 more days to go to the end of the year.
The death count is up about 15% over recent past years...But so far, there have been only four instances where it [covid] was named as a cause or contributor of death: Tom Seaver, Jay Johnstone, Rick Baldwin and Lindy McDaniel.

We don’t know the cause of death for the majority of the 2020 ballplayer deaths. Most of the time, it’s not listed in the family-provided obituary or the news reports... It’s hard to tell if 2020 is a one-time spike or a sign of things to come, but it’s not just your imagination: when it comes to saying goodbye, this has been a lousy year for baseball.

 

[Jim Kenney]

Ugg, this is turning into a major league baseball RIP thread.
Latest lost today is Hank Aaron. He was known for breaking Babe Ruth's career homerun record, but he was also one of the greatest all-around hitters and outfielders.
I have this 1962 card.

George W. Bush, a one-time owner of the Texas Rangers, presented Aaron in 2002 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor.

“The former Home Run King wasn’t handed his throne,“ Bush said in a statement Friday. “He grew up poor and faced racism as he worked to become one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Hank never let the hatred he faced consume him.”


Willie Mays, another Alabama native who arrived in the big leagues a few years ahead of Aaron and seemed most likely to break Ruth’s record until late in his career, remembered all the All-Star Games they played together as National League teammates.

“He was a very humble and quiet man and just simply a good guy,” said the 89-year-old Mays, who finished with 660 homers. “I have so many fond memories of Hank and will miss him very much.”

“He might be the greatest player of all time,” said the late Tony Gwynn, a fellow Hall of Famer. “Just look at his numbers. Everybody characterizes him as a home run hitter because he’s held that record so long. But he was a great baserunner, a great defender, a great player period.”



We've also lost two other Hall of Famers (and LA Dodger greats) in the month of January 2021: Tommy Lasorda and Don Sutton.

Current Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner was struck by all the greats who have died in the last 13 months.

Gibson, Seaver, Whitey Ford, Lou Brock, Al Kaline, Joe Morgan and Phil Niekro — Aaron’s teammate with the Braves for a decade — all died in 2020, the most Hall of Famers ever to pass away in a calendar year.

“We’ve lost some of the greatest to ever do it,” Turner tweeted, adding that Lasorda is “gonna have a hell of a roster to manage up there.”

 

[Jim Kenney]

Record $12.6 million price for 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle on 28 Aug 2022:​

https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb...rd-126-million-price/arkpp8zaeqivs5yvgcymyded