Vintage Sports Cards – Baseball – Basketball – Football – Hockey
Here’s a great piece put together by Jon Brecka for the November 1994 issue of Trading Cards magazine, ranking baseball’s top ten most sought-after cards. Thirty years later, it’s hard to argue against! Would you trade any out?
Here are cards 6-10.
How many people do you think have all ten “All-Time Greats?” What a collection that would be!
Happy collecting!
It’s time to look at the history of another T206 Honus Wagner—this time with the PSA 1 example sold in Mastro’s 1999 auction.
While raw, The T206Resource labeled this Wanger as 31a in their gallery.
Then, after being consigned to Mastro for their November 1999 Millennium Auction, it was graded and given the notation 31b by the T206 Resource. The T206 Resource said it sold for $58,513, which is partially true, as lot 869, with the 15% buyer’s premium, the final price, per my records, was $67,290. I believe it remains in the same slab to this day.
Two other incredible cards accompanied Wagner on Page 207 of the catalog: the Plank sold for $13,126, and the Magie sold for $9,492.
By the way, The T206 Resource calls this The Long Island Wagner on their Sales History page. Is that accurate? Also, if anyone has any more information about the history of this T206 Wagner example, please reach out. Happy collecting!
Here’s a historically significant ad TCMA placed in the April 1972 issue of The Trader Speaks—one of their first as a newly incorporated company that year.
Unfortunately, I’m unaware of a definitive source of TCMA sets and checklists; the major catalogs are all missing at least a handful. That said, The Standard Catalog does include the 504-card 1972 TCMA The 1930’s set. Here’s what they wrote about it:
Extending to over 500 cards, this was one of TCMA’s first ventures into the business of creating collectors’ edition card sets of former players. Over the length of the series there were a number of style differences. The set was issued in 21 series of 24 cards each. All cards were printed in black-and-white (except for Series 18-19 printed in blue) and feature player photos on usually borderless fronts. Dimensions were about 2” x 2-3/4” for most series, with Series 15-16 in a 2-1/2” x 3-1/2” format. Except for a TCMA copyright line on some of the earlier cards, there is no other printing on the front. Back have player identification, team affiliations, TCMA copyright and, after #72, a card number. Production is reported as 1,000 sets. Blank-back version and uncut panels of 12 exist.
But there’s another great source of information for the 1930’s and reprint sets from TCMA’s ad, and that’s Bert Sugar’s 1975 The Sports Collectors Bible.
And why is that? Well, Mike Aronstein wrote the section on “Collectors’ Issues!”
He’d have had a good idea three years later what he printed! Here’s the intro that he wrote:
Next, in the first two pages of the 1930s set, notice that the first three are described as unnumbered, and Aaronstein included information about distribution. Series No. 1 was issued separately, with 2 through 19 issues in pairs.
A few pages later, on the bottom of page 346, Aronstein included information about the company’s reprint sets. Some of these are mentioned in The Trader Speaks advertisement.
Happy collecting!
Every ’90s hobby magazine wrote a feature on Topps World Series cards; in October 1995, it was Trading Cards Magazine’s turn!
Here are the links to the pieces about Topps World Series cards that were published in Topps Magazine (Fall 1990) and Sports Cards Magazine (April 1995).
Happy reading and happy collecting!
I don’t often dive into pre-war sets—they’re not my specialty. But when I spot an elusive premium issue in an old catalog with a ‘hobby-library adjacent’ aspect, it’s hard for me to ignore. Here’s a 1934 Gold Medal Foods set and its original envelope from Mastro’s December 2007 catalog.
Per The Standard Catalog of Vintage Baseball Cards, the set was issued by Gold Medal Foods (the parent company of Wheaties) to commemorate the 1934 World Series. It includes six members of the Detroit Tigers and six members of the St. Louis Cardinals. The cards are blank-backed and 3-1/4” x 5-3/8” in size. The key card belongs to Dizzy Dean.
Here’s an SGC-graded Dizzy Dean card that REA sold for $300 in February 2022.
The set sold by Mastro included nine cards slabbed by SGC, and three more (Dizzy Dean, Goose Goslin, and Joe Medwick) were ungraded and labeled “factory miscut” by SGC.
The set’s history is a bit complicated, so I recommend checking out these two threads on the net54 forums for more information.
Happy collecting!
Today, I wanted to look back at and share information from the early days of Topps as a card company, particularly the Federal Trade Commission decision regarding a complaint made against Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., alleging unfair competition methods in gaining control of the baseball card picture industry.
As you can see in the image above, the court dismissed the case on April 30, 1965, because there was insufficient evidence.
While the complaint uses a lot of legal jargon to allege a “monopoly in the manufacture and distribution of baseball picture cards in commerce,” as a collector, I find equally fascinating the reporting of sports card sales numbers from Topps, Bowman, Goudey, and Fleer.
First Goudey Sales:
Next Bowman Sales:
Topps sales in those years were as follows:
Topps sales once there were no Bowman cards were (“Baseball card gum” being packs with gum in them, and “Baseball cards” being products like vending boxes, cello, and rack packs that didn’t have gum):
And finally, Fleer sales figures:
I’ll pour through this 112-page document in the future to see what other insights we can glean about the post-war baseball card market and the impact Topps’ actions as a company had on its competitors. That will come in the future as a Part 2 of this article. But these numbers are our best insight into figuring out how many cards Topps and other companies actually produced in the early post-war era.
Happy collecting!
Here’s the original artwork Dick Perez painted for the 1989 Donruss Frank Viola #23 Diamond Kings card.
Ron Oser Enterprises offered it in a lot with a few other signed Perez originals in April 2001. I think the piece is 11” x 17”. I previously shared the Mike Schmidt and Bobby Bonilla cards from this lot on the blog.
Here’s the final card, followed by a side-by-side comparison.
Donruss obviously did some cropping for the final card. Happy collecting, and don’t forget to check out The Original Artwork Archive for more!