Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
John In the fall of 1990, Topps Magazine did a ‘Focus on Football’ listing the 100 most valuable Topps football cards on the market.
Prices aside, how do you like the order? One thing I like is that three checklists made the top 10!
Here’s the magazine cover in case you want to pick one up.
I’ve always felt team sets were a great, accessible, and inexpensive hobby niche. So here are 200 1961 Jay Publishing Unopened Picture Pack Team Sets that were sold together in late 2004.
Jay Publishing Co. actually made a variety of team collectibles in the late ’50s and ’60s, including yearbooks and picture packs. These contained 5” x 7” black-and-white baseball “cards” from specific teams and were popular ballpark collectibles. Each bag had 12 cards and originally sold for 25 cents.
This particular lot included twenty GAI-graded picture packs.
Here’s the original artwork painted for the 1953 Topps Bob Young card.
By the way, there isn’t a single PSA Gem Mint 10 graded copy of this card in the Pop Report, so 9s are >$1k.
This is an incredibly cool piece related to the 1934 Goudey baseball set, sometimes called the “Lou Gehrig Says…” series; Chuck Klein’s signed endorsement contract to use his picture and name on cards in the set.
You see, Gehrig’s name and picture (blue background) are used on the bottom of most cards in the set.
But 12 (cards 80-91) feature Klein’s (red background) who had just come off a Triple Crown season.
The 7” x 8-1/2” document, dated July 18, 1934, defines the business agreement. A sample 1934 Goudey card featuring the “Chuck Klein Says…” ad is attached to the top of the document.
In December 2005, Mastro auctioned off the original photo archive used to create the 1950 Bowman baseball set. Most pictures were described as 7-1/2” x 10”, with a few smaller and odd sizes, mainly in EX/MT condition.
The lot comprised 252 photos representing 251 of the set’s 252 cards. Al Kozar (card 15) was missing, but a photo of Phil Marchildon (Philadelphia Athletics) was included. Marchildon was bumped from card number 140 for Pete Suder.
When I first shared the photo on Twitter, Keith Olbermann replied with the following photo and wrote, “Here’s the other shoe. I got this about 15 years ago: it’s a painting clearly designed for the 1950 Bowman set – except the team the guy is on, is Buffalo of the International League. And the player is…the bumped #140 Phil Marchildon. The assumption was Bowman had prepared some kind of IL set to match its 1949 PCL effort. Now I doubt it – though I wonder why they prepared Marchildon in a minor league uniform (albeit an accurate one). Surely if he’d made the set he would’ve been shown with the A’s.”
Mastro auctioned off this huge 1962 Post Cereal Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris store banner in April 2002.
The overall 34″ x 48″ head-to-head format was meant to be hung over a string mid-aisle to afford a 24″ x 34″ view from either side. Mastro described it as a very fragile and exceedingly scarce collectible.
In the spring of 2012, Robert Edward Auctions sold the following banner variant used in Canadian stores.
It’s visually a little different and slightly smaller, 20” x 30” unfolded. It sold for $1778.
I’d love to see what a pair of 1978 Donruss KISS Series 1 and II Unopened Wax Cases would command together at auction today!
These were offered in 2002 by Mastro, so who knows how legitimate they were. The Series 1 case was described as opened but untouched, with a few boxes showing rippling from exposure to dampness at some point. The Series II case was described as unopened.
Heritage did sell this 1st Series case for $25,200 in February 2022.
