An Interesting, Vastly Incomplete Look at Baseball Cards

pleasant for my throat either. But we should probably tell everybody why we were inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke in Las Vegas recently and why Jerry is still there. Go ahead, well, it's because we were honored this year by the Podcast Academies ambi's basically the Oscars of podcasting with the Governor's Award, which basically says, hey, you've been at this for a while and we think you're doing a pretty good job,

and why don't you think about hanging it up? And here's an award on the way out the door, right And we were like, but we're a big career and they're like, nope, too late, you got the award. You've accepted it. You have to stop now. Yeah, it was

really cool. It's kind of a lifetime achievement. And we've gotten a Webby or two here and there and some other things that you know, it's always nice to get those things, but this felt like a genuine honor and like the one that we should go pick up in person. And we had a great time and a epic dinner celebration dinner afterward with Jerry and her friend and and my friend and Nathan who does our marketing, and it was just a really great celebration. It really was. It

was a wonderful experience. So thanks a lot Podcast Academy because that was really cool. So it's really neat. Yeah, and got heffed? Did you pick They didn't give us one on stage because they're mailing them. But did you pick that thing up in the green room? No? Did you? Yeah? Dude, it's it's heffed. It's got heffed. I mean it looks like it. It's like a genuine bona fide statuette. Yeah. All my other statues you can blow on them and they tip over. You're like, oh it's hollow. Yeah, this

one's got halfed. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you again to the Podcast Academy, and honestly, thank you to everybody who's ever recognized us with an award. That's really meaningful every time. So thanks, Yeah, buddy, Well, and we said this you know on stage. In fact, you buttoned it up nicely. But you know, the listeners or the reason we have this career in this job that we've been doing for

so long. And I know it sounds trite, but like we wouldn't have gotten this award or even be doing this job if we didn't have the amazing support over the years from you guys. Absolutely means a lot. So we should probably get going on baseball cards, right, Yeah, another quick CoA for baseball cards. We have learned over the years the hard way that when you do a topic that is it's just like yeah, it's not like oh,

ballpoint pins or this or that. When some people are very passionate about this thing, that we can get ourselves into trouble because we get little things wrong here and there that they think are major things. So we respect the baseball card community and just want to not apologize in advance, but just say that you know, we don't know nearly as much about this as you do, so

so be kind. I think it's well put. I'm just going to come out and admit right now, I cannot find the difference between a bonus card, an insert and a subset card. Okay, they may be all the same thing, but I am terrified that there's a slight difference and that we're going to get chewed up for it. Well, I didn't even know that we were going to be comparing those three things. So I'm in big trouble. Did

you collect baseball cards as a youth? Here's my deal is I have somewhere a box of probably I don't even want to hazard a guess, maybe five hundred, two hundred, let's say two hundred cards of different kinds. Have some old Star Wars card So I've got a few football cards. Yeah, I have some baseball cards, but I was never a collector. I would just get them as any kid who wasn't like, oh I need to start collecting something gets them, which is like, oh, sure they're in the stocking, or might

buy one here or there. But to answer your question, no, I was never like a collector of baseball cards or any card. That Star Wars card thing. Sounds familiar. I think you talked about did you discover your collection again recently in the last couple of years or something? Not recently recently, but I could see we've been doing this a long time, my friend. Yeah, recently, meaning like since two thousand and eight. Yeah, we've been doing how long

have we been doing this show Governor's Award? Long? Is what I'm just gonna say from now on. So okay, So I actually was a collector. I was a kid collector in that like every month I could not wait for the new back Price Guide to come out. That to me was like the Bible. Wow. Um, I had friends that would like steal cards from me, like a real collector at like age eleven twelve? Right now, Why because you weren't that into baseball, were you? No? No, No,

I wasn't. There's something different. You don't have to be into baseball to really be into baseball cards. It's a really weird thing. Like it's impossible not to know a lot more about baseball than you otherwise would if you weren't collecting baseball cards, but means, well, no thing about it. So like if you weren't, if you were, if you were just into flying kites. Okay, you'd probably know almost

nothing about baseball if you weren't into baseball. But you can collect baseball cards and you're gonna know a lot more about baseball and baseball players, and you would if you were just into kites. But that doesn't mean you're actually you want to sit down and watch a baseball game given time. Yeah, yeah, I get you. Baseball cards are like that. It's really weird. I think that the majority of people who collect baseball cards are into baseball,

but it's not requisite. Yeah. When I went through mine recently out because I guess it was semi recently, because I was like, I wonder if you know I have some gem in here worth twenty grand and I didn't. I think the best card I had was a Wade Bogs rookie not wasn't a rookie, but it was like a first year card. But that's a no. No No, no, a first year like in the big league's card, not like their rookie Minor league card or whatever. No, it was the first year in the Big zis the rookie card.

It wasn't worth anything, Let's put it that way. So you're like, please, don't want to end this conversation. Yeah, because I looked it up and I think I sent it to my friend who's a Red Sox fan. I was like, here you go, you can have this. Oh that was kind of you. Yeah. I discovered my old collection. I had several hundred, and they were just loose. Any

good ones I started to go through. I was like, I don't feel like doing this, so I just donated, well because I knew that they there weren't any like amazingly ridiculously valuable ones, in part because when I was collecting it was smack dab in the middle of what's called the junk era of baseball cards. Yeah, because the

market was so flooded. We'll talk all about it. But to me, Chuck, just researching this and going back and seeing like the design of some of those cards, like seeing how Don Mattingly is like like just in the midst of like tossing his bat to run to first base, and like in nineteen eighty eight tops card, Like just seeing these things. It's just these neural pathways that haven't been like stimulated in decades are going off, and I'm just like in nostalgia Heaven looking at all this stuff.

Because I forgot school. Well all of it looked like. So it's been kind of a nice little journey down the yellow brick road. But I want to circle back to our CoA and say that doesn't mean that I remember like all the ins and outs either. Yeah, I'm no expert. I just was a big time fan back in the day. That's cool. That surprises me too, but I love it. Another little Josh factoid to stick in my hip pocket. We need a little jingle for that,

like we have for Colon. So we're going to kind of breeze through the earliest days of baseball card trading. So we're not in here for two hours. But the earliest, earliest sort of ancestors of baseball cards were trade cards that you know today you might see a business that hands out a calendar with like the local sports team or something, or refrigerator magnet or something. These are kind

of what trade cards were. They were business cards and they said, hey, why don't we just stick something interesting on here so people will keep it. And sometimes that became a baseball player or a baseball team. And these cards weren't. I mean, I guess there may be a market for them in some circles. But it's not like

this is considered like a tradeable baseball card today. I don't think, right, No, I think that there's probably there's collectors out there who collect that in the same way there's people out there who collect like old timey potato chip tunes, you know what I mean. It's like super antique, and I think it's probably a niche market in the baseball card market, you know what I mean, Yes, but

they are. It's questionable whether you can be like, this is a baseball card, and there are a lot of people kind of putting baseball teams and baseball players on things at around the same time. So there's a lot of different competing first baseball card ever, but the one that usually gets pointed to is an eighteen sixty nine Cincinnati Red Stockings card by Peck and Snyder, who were and apparently still are a sporting goods manufacturer who took

a team photo super Victorian. There's like heavy curtains on the edges of the photo and everything super Cepia, I mean, just Cepia to the max. And then on the back there's like a drawing in an advertisement for Peck and Snyder's location on Nassau Street in New York, and a lot of people are like, this is this is really it? This is the genuine progenitor of the baseball card. Yeah, and that one, I believe, and Ed helped us out with this one he found that was valued at a

couple hundred grand. Certainly no slouch card wise, right if you happen to have this one. In the eighteen eighties is when things really kind of started taking shape, and that's when tobacco got involved. There was a farmer named James Buchanan Duke who started putting just cardboard cards and cigarette packs to keep them from getting you know, bin up and stuff when you sit on them. And they started printing pictures of things on those cards to make

them interesting. And sometimes it might be a movie star and sometimes it might be a sports star. And I believe in eighteen eighty six is when the old Judge cigarette company started including baseball players. And this is also looked at as a kind of a milestone for a couple of reasons. One was because you got a random card that you didn't know you were going to get. It's not like it was a cigarette pack for you know, I know it was I can't name a baseball player

from Beckton, so I'm not even gonna try. It was random, just like kids like you later on would buy packs of cards, like not knowing who you're going to get, and the other thing it was called a premium, which is basically like this is just an extra thing and something you were already buying, right, although I will argue that the gum part was not White kids were buying baseball cards, right. That gum was not good. No, it wasn't.

But that's how baseball cards later on would kind of get their their restart well as we'll see, but that I mean. But so that's kind of how it went for about a century. Like they were random and then they were extras to what you were buying. An old judge. Actually, like you said, I think it was eighteen eighty six that they were released their first That set, it's called the N one sixty seven set is considered the first

official set of baseball cards. Pretty cool. Yeah, so you can thank cigarette manufacturers for introducing baseball cards to the world. But the thing is, it's not like it was like, okay, it it just started from there and it just kept going and developing. That's not the case, because baseball wasn't the only thing that you would find on these cards and cigarette packs. Eventually, because they were a premium, they were like, well, here, we want you to have something

that you actually want. So here's a movie star who you've never heard speak out loud. Here is a bird, Here is a train. You don't know what train is, Well, buckle up because you're going to within the next few years. It wasn't just baseball players, and it wasn't just baseball card collecting. That kind of it didn't develop immediately, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. There were other like detours and side tracks and stuff like that. Yeah, and they you know, these early ones kind of look like

you would think they were black and white. Sometimes they had a cepia tone. Color. Photography wasn't really a big thing, at least a widespread thing at this point, and so these cards didn't last long. They faded out in sunlight and just basically being you know, on planet Earth. They would degrade because they weren't very high quality, and a lot of times they weren't even prints. They were actual

like photographs that were glued to cardboard. So it's it's kind of a quaint early days of baseball card kind of thing. The Library of Congress. If you ask them, they will say that the first baseball card was a printed photograph of a baseball team that was a souvenir handout. And I'm not one to usually quibble with a Library of Congress, but I'm not sure I would count that as the first baseball card. Some people do, some people don't.

I think the one from Um Snyder or Peck and Snyder's typically the one that, as collectors think of as the first one. I'm sure we'll hear from people for sure. You so yeah, oh, I know, so Um. There are a lot of different um eras in baseball card collecting, and they're not they don't necessarily follow chronological order. Weirdly, they more are referred to by where the cards came from. And like I was saying, there are a lot of blind alleys and sidetracks and just weird, weird evolutions of

baseball cards. And one of the ways that's evident is that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, there were a lot of different random places that you would get a baseball card. It wasn't standardized yet, so you might get one from the magazine that you subscribe to, or from your cigarette pack, or you bought like a box of biscuits and a baseball baseball card fell out.

So I think I think people who collect those kind of cards are okay with things not being particularly standardized and kind of hurly burly instead, because that's how baseball cards were kind of kind of like a train just is kind of like chug, good chug, chug chug, with each like additional chug. A bunch of new baseball cards spat out in different, weird, random places from non existence, a lot of train refs so far today, Well, there's a lot of train stuff going on at the same time.

Sure it's of the era. Should we take a break? Oh yeah, all right, I'm gonna go study trains, I guess, so I can keep up and we'll be right back, all right. So, if you're looking at a modern baseball car card, and you know, we're not jumping forward in time that much yet, I'm just kind of talking about the labeling of the cards. You're gonna probably see the

company that made it. You're going to see the player's name, maybe a collector's number on the card if there was one, there might be some additional things on there, like you know how many sets were made that year. It might be a set name or a subset name, so you might see something like Ed gave an example two thousand and four Bowmen Chrome number two sixty four. Hector Himenez is like the official sort of name of the card, right, so what your god is? The bowman is the maker

of the card. Chrome is the type of card of the addition number two sixty four. I'm if I remember correctly, that would be Hector Jimenez. Card was two sixty four in the set of say like three hundred or something like that. Okay, Those tobacco sets so we were talking about that came with cigarettes are very popular. It's called the Tobacco era T sets. So for instance, a list of the T two O six, very famous set from

American Tobacco Company. And this was for a couple of years between O nine and nineteen eleven, and this has the very legendary the card that you may have heard of. Even if you know nothing about baseball cards, you've probably heard of the Honus Wagner because it is I guess not the most expensive or valuable baseball cardot all time, but maybe the most well known, and it's certainly up there.

I think it was the first baseball card to crack one million dollars sail, all the way back in two thousand. But one of the reasons why it's so well known is because there just weren't that many of them. The legend goes that Honus Wagner said that he didn't well, some people say that he was a posed to tobacco product, so he didn't want his card being sold within packs of cigarettes, And he may or may not have been opposed to tobacco. He just said that he didn't want

his picture in cigarettes. But the real truth is probably that he didn't like not being paid for his likeness, which was being used to market and sell cigarettes. Now, regardless either way, there are not that many Honus Wagner cards T two o six Honus Wagner cards. And then one of the other reasons that it's really valuable and probably overvalued is because of a price guide from nineteen

thirty seven. Right, yeah, there was a price guide that it seems like the author who wrote this just himself could not find this card readily and kind of I guess misstated it's rarity because of that, because there are other much rarer cards that from those sets even then

aren't worth what the Honus Wagner's worth. And then it just kind of became one of those things where the legend grew of the Honus Wagner card, and it kind of became famous invaluable because people said it was famous invaluable right exactly because that T two O six set, which was I think from nineteen o nine. You can get cards from that same set for one hundred bucks or less today, but then it was yes, but that Honus Wagner sold most recently for seven point two five

million dollars in the last few years. So it really is just basically it's it's become iconic and legendary just because people thought it was rare, and even when they found out it wasn't that rare, it doesn't matter. It's still a Honus Wagner card. Should I buy you a T two O six card for eighty bucks online? Sure? A stretchy brown Stash card. Stretchy brown sash. Oh man, I'm glad we circled back to that because you were,

like I can't. I can't hazard a guess at a name of a player from back then, and I was like thinking about it, but then the time had passed and then bam it came back again. So it's way Brown Stash time. Okay, So that was off the eight minutes ago exactly. Okay, very nice way to hang onto that. See, you don't throw away jokes, not if they're okay or better, because you never know when it might come up. That's exactly true, man. And that's not just the case with

jokes too, Chuck. That's the case with just information in general. Something that may seem trite or boring. Even at one moment down the road, you might be like, oh, I know the answer to that, and then yam, someone's fallen in love with you. Well, you know it's funny too, is you know. I've never done improv, but I know a lot of improvers, and they all have a little hip pocket stuff, you know, like they're they're certainly improving, but they all have their little bag of tricks that

they keep in, little gags and jokes and names. And when we did our TV show, Caitlyn Bits, a guy who was played our boss Steve on the show and was one of the legit talented actors that surrounded us. Caitlyn, I don't know if you remember this, but in one of the episodes, she she threw out the name Mike Vlasney and that's stuff with me all these years as somebody's who's like something something Mike Lasney said? And I asked her it just killed me for some reason. It

was just to had a funny ring to it. And I asked her after word if she had just made that up, and she said, uh, She's like no, She's like, I've been using Mike Lasney for years. Good. It's a good one. It is a good one. It's like my Todd. Yeah, well you true Todd. But now you've got stretchy black what black brown brown stash. It's good stuff. Hang on to it, thank you. Ironically, he was blonde. Oh wow, See this story gets richer and richer. Yes, and so um,

let's get back to baseball cart shall we? Yeah? Um? Oh well hell go ahead? No, no, go ahead? Uh. The T two O six was one of the ones we were mentioned with the Honus Wagner Uh card. Included was one of the last tobacco sets and then World War One comes along and kind of puts a halt on production, because it seemed like warriors back then put a halt like World Wars put a stop on lots of production of things that weren't needed when you needed

other things. Not to mention the nineteen nineteen flu pandemic too, right, Sure, So I saw Chuck somewhere the time between basically nineteen hundred and World War One as the golden era of baseball card collecting between Waight Ears nineteen hundred and basically nineteen seventeen nineteen sixteen. Oh. Interesting. Yeah, I thought that was interesting too, because again, these are the ones that are like, they follow very little rhyme or reason, like

Nibisco was putting out like baseball cards. It's just weird. Yes, they called they're notated with the D and that's your bread baseball cards, yeah, or bread like products whatever. Um. But apparently that's the golden age of baseball card collecting. I disagree. I think when I was collecting, it's the golden age of baseball card collecting. But it could just be my skewed opinion, your first person point of view, right.

But the thing is, around this time, people started saying like, oh, kids, maybe we should stop forcing them to start work at five, and maybe we should have a problem with them smoking tobacco. And about this time, people said, well, these kids are starting to really get into this baseball card thing. They like baseball, they like things that remind them of baseball, so hence their fascination with baseball cards. But I don't really think we should be pushing old judge cigarettes on

them so that they can get their baseball cards. What if we package these things with candy? And here was a huge, huge step in the evolution of baseball cards. Yeah, they said, why try and sell cigarettes to ten year olds. They shouldn't start smoking till they're twelve, so let's start putting them in caramel packages and things like that, and that kind of birth, some real kind of fun oddity, is at least fun to me. Yeah. I don't know how the baseball card community looks at this. I can't

stand it. Oh really, I like things to be standardized and follow like a set of rhyme and reason. So sometimes these things were round, which is kind of fun, I think. And then sometimes, like in the case of the nineteen twenty American caramel or caramel set, they were die cut cards that were just in the shape of the player. It was a little cut out of a player. Ah, well, hurt your sensibilities. I just don't like it. No, I don't like it at all. It's just too random. I

think it's neat. I know, and I can understand how some whoult would. It's my own foible for sure. Yeah, I got you. So it was basically like the Wild West for baseball cards all the way until about World War two, and actually passed World War two. But a little after World War two, Bowman, a gum maker, started taking over baseball cards. They started adding baseball cards sets, they started kind of professionalizing the whole thing, and in very short order, another gum maker called Tops said, oh,

I like what Bowman's doing. They're really like increasing their sales. Let's see if we can figure out how to build a monopoly out of this, And they actually did. Tops had a monopoly on baseball cards, like literally, you could not get a baseball card that wasn't a Tops baseball card from about the early fifties till about nineteen eighty.

They were all that they had because Tops had figured out that they could go to individual players and say, hey, sign this contract so that we're the only one who can reproduce your likeness, and we'll give you X number of dollars every year. And players would be like, sure, why not, I don't have any allegiance to bowmen or flear or anything like that. And Tops just dominated the market somehow survived an FTC investigation. They were a literal monopoly.

They would get sued all the time, and they just withstood all of it until finally the players Union was like, hey, guys, these other companies are willing to pay way more stops signing these Tops contracts. And it wasn't until the players themselves stop signing these contracts with Tops that the monopoly ended up getting broken up in that way. Yeah, I think it was just kind of what you did, Like you got you went to Major League Baseball and you

signed with Tops. Was just part of your deals, like signing with an agent or whatever. Right now, were there not any other companies making cards for nobody baseball players? Even I don't know if they were for nobody. The way that Ed puts it is that basically you had to not even be a prospect in the minor leagues, like maybe a mascot level player, right. I'm just wondering if there were any other Baseball cards aside from Tops during that thirty year period. Surely there was something, right,

not that I understand. There were like football cards, there were hockey cards, but Baseball seems to have been totally locked down by Tops, essentially because think about it. If you're safe fleer arrival the Tops and you want to put out a baseball card set, but you can only sign seven players out of all the players in Major League Baseball, Like, you're not even gonna go to the trouble.

Nobody's gonna buy it, right, right, So I would guess No, I think that it was basically just Tops this whole time, as just exclusively with baseball, is all I'm saying. Well, what was flearmaking? Were they making other sports cards? Probably hockey and football, Yeah, and maybe basketball, because those those cards have been I think hockey cards were almost as old as baseball cards. They were put in tobacco packs too. Yeah.

You know what's funny is now that I'm remembering my pseudo collection, I had a few NBA cards and a few NHL cards in there too. Everybody's I know. I remember seeing the random toothless hockey player. Uh, you know mulitied toothless hockey player. Yep, that is standard issue stuff right there. It's pretty good. And I also get the same neural pathways when I opened that box. It's like

it's the best. That's pretty strong stuff. One other thing I ran across the chuck is that, ironically, there's a company from Italy called Panini, and Panini has a lock on the licenses for NBA and NFL until twenty twenty six. So Tops got beaten at their own game. They can't produce an NFL or NBA official cards until twenty twenty six. Now we look at you, Panini locking down the sandwich

making process and the football cards right this. There's a little sidebar it included which I think is interesting, which was that you know you mentioned I don't know if you actually said it, but Flear sued Tops in nineteen seventy five, and a lot of case law has to do with baseball cards, including a very interesting side note that the whole idea of name and likeness and like owning your image and being able to profit from your own image and keeping people from profiting from your image

came from a baseball card case in what nineteen fifty three? Correct, Yeah, Halean Laboratories, which is a terrible name for a gummaker, but that's who they were. They bought Bowman and Tops was poaching their players that they had contracts with, and they sued Tops, and Tops argued, look, Bowman doesn't own the person's likeness. Yeah, they have a contract with the player. But what the player was saying is I won't sue you Bowman for making a baseball card with my likeness.

Not that I'm giving you any ownership over my likeness. I'm just waiving my right to sue you with this contract. And Top said, you can't see us because you don't own the likeness. You can go sue the player, but you can't see us. And the court said, you know what, You're absolutely right. It resides in the person, and the person not only owns their likeness, but they're able to sell it or lease it to third parties. And it was all because of baseball cards. It took a little

while to develop. Remember our legal precedent episode. Oh yeah, I think the decision came from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Um, so it wasn't binding in other courts, but it was eventually cited as precedent and spread and spread and spread, and then in the seventies it was like a thing. Yeah, and boy, talk about a monumental case. Yeah,

especially these days. I mean, they're the human beings are brands these days with influencers and not just influencers but I hate even saying that word, but just celebrity image or whatever, and that that was a huge, huge case. And I think, you know, one of the most important reasons is it kept like it meant you could profit. But I think the big thing was it kept other

people from being able to steal your image. So if you just want to be like a George Clooney class act and not put your face on a he probably does those ads in Japan and stuff. Though, I bet he does presso adds here, Oh does he? Okay, it's so weird. It's so random because it's like the only thing he does. Yeah, that is weird. Maybe he's just into it. I guess I just think classy. I think Clooney, that's it just comes out of my mouth. He's cold. Uh.

Should we take another break on that wonderful joke? Yes, all right, we'll talk about the kind of getting into the modern era right after this. Okay, Chuck, So this guy is my guy that we're going to talk about. His name is cy Burger. I say Burger. He codified things and you love him for it. He did. That's absolutely right. He said, Hey, everybody, let's start acting like we actually care about the product that we're putting out and standardizing some of this stuff. Let's get the look

up up to date. Let's, oh, I don't know, put the logo of the team on the card, right, Let's start using color in normal, coherent fashion, like we are all sane. Um. So, Cyberger he was the one. He worked for tops appropriately enough, and he did such an amazing job that he's set just basically standards that are still around today. Yeah. The those stats on the back that you love so much, that was Cyberger, the little printed signature Cyberger. Yeah, well he wasn't signing them Cibergers

a card. The size, the three and a half by two and a half size became standard in nineteen fifty seven because of Cyburger. Well that was a cost saving measure too, right, Well, yeah, I mean it, it definitely made sense because I think it just that was less less waste right on the printing sheets. Yeah, you could just more cards per sheet, so you could save some

money with printing. When you're printing millions of cards, you know, the thing is, Chuck is I think also that's another reason why I love baseball cards starting in this era, because they're all the same size too. It's very much like my love for the right size g I Joes and not the overly large, weirdo g I Joes of the days of your as you hunting me, well, I mean I think there's I'm not like particularly m OCD, but I have a little bit of that stuff. We've

talked about it before, and a stacked thing. If there are irregularities in that stacked thing, it drives me crazy. So I kind of get where you're coming from there. Yeah. Imagine like a die cut arm sticking out of your Oh my god, you know how I feel. Oh geez. One of the other things about Cyberger's success, Chuck, is that it was his transition. This is the nineteen fifty two set that his first that debuted his work. I

guess the first one. Yeah, he was so successful that TOPS was like, oh my gosh, like this is amazing. Our sales are through the roof. Let's release a second set in nineteen fifty two. We'll catch everybody just in time for the playoffs, so they'll be all super psyched about that, and we'll just sell even more than we normally do. And they missed the mark. I think they came out a little late. They missed playoff fever and instead ran into base or football fever, so people weren't

really interested. So they actually took all of these leftover remnant This is like the et the game version of baseball cards. They took all of these just overstocked leftover sets, and they warehoused them for a few years, I think, and finally in nineteen sixty they're like, we're paying for these cards that we're never going to do anything with. Let's just put them on a barge and dump them in the ocean. And they did. They dumped him in

the ocean. It's so strange, like little decisions like that, like not to bury them, not to incender him to dump them in the ocean, so yeah, not to go through them and maybe pick out ones that might be valuable. Exactly, Well, that's the thing they didn't know that any of these things were going to be valuable, but it just so happened that the most expensive, the most valuable baseball card of all time, the nineteen fifty two Mickey Mantle, is down there at the bottom of the sea in droves.

But because they're at the bottom of the sea, the ones that are top sides still are incredibly rare and incredibly valuable, so much so that the nineteen fifty two Mickey Mantle sold for twelve point six million dollars last year. Yeah, that was a nine point five on the condition scale, and it is not even a rookie card, but it is that first TOPS card that had that sort of

modern baseball look in nineteen fifty two. Yeah, so it's considered, you know, or at least valued as the most expensive you know, topsnas Wagner even Yeah, yeah, it topped Honas Wagner, and I think the nineteen thirty three Babe Ruth is

third for most valuable card, right, which makes sense. So now we're going into the next era of trading and collecting, which was Hey, you kids, I know you're kind of into this thing, but you know, you put them in your bicycle spokes and you play games with them, and you handle them and muck them up. Adults are going to start collecting these and keep them in pristine condition because there's an actual trade and buy and sell market here.

And we'll even have a convention. And the very first West Coast Sports Collector's Convention was in Brea, California in nineteen sixty nine at a guy's house named Jim Knowle because he was there wasn't enough people basically, I think a couple of dozen people, and he was a prominent

collector who I guess had a good enough house. Uh. They point to nineteen eighty eleven years later is the first true convention, and then I guess they held it at a hotel, the National Sports Collector's Convention, and you know they were there between that time, there were little shows here and there. But they point to nineteen eighties

the first like real deal convention. Yeah, totally. And I saw an article on counterfeit cards, which we'll talk about in a little while, but just right off the bat, I mean, within a year or two of that first convention, counterfeit I think Pete Rose rookie cards started showing up. Yeah, just almost immediately. But it's like you said, like it went from just something that kids got, as you know,

kind of like um, imagine collecting ring pops. Okay, okay, it's virtually the same thing, where like like kids would just go buy it and you know, mess around with it for a little while, and then that was it. It It was discarded. Whatever. Imagine if a adults suddenly were like, we want to buy those, Sorry, you don't have adult money. Maybe you shouldn't have stopped working starting at five years back and you would have adult money, but you don't. So now these things are really going to go up

in price. And it didn't happen immediately chucked, but slowly but surely, starting around nineteen eighty and then onward, it went from a hobby or something fun for kids in grown up to like to something incredibly amped up and

almost on cocaine. Yeah, that's an interesting way to put it, but I think I agree the market is generally driven by exactly what you think, which is rarity, which we'll talk about, and condition, because you know, like I said, kids actually played with the cards and things like that and traded them and touched them, so a lot of these cards were not as valuable because they were mucked up. Sometimes these little cards were designed to be folded as little stand up things, and like, this is one of

the things that can drive a rarity. So if you have a card that was supposed to be folded in half as a little stand up tent or something like a little pop up, but you never did that, it's like the grido that you never opened and played with as a kid or whatever. That means. It's a low supply. It's just very simple supply and demand kind of thing.

And Ed very stutey points out it's not exclusively but a lot of baby baby boomers and their kids are the ones that are really into this community, and they created a very big demand in those two decades in the seventies and eighties, and manufacturers were like, hey, we can make more money here, so then they ruined it by over producing. In the nineties, Upper Deck came along and did a really good job of debuting like next

level cards that just looked awesome. The photos were better, they were on higher qualit card stock as opposed to just like junkie cardboard. Sometimes they were hand autographs. Those are the really really expensive ones now, and they would include little bits of like a shard of a baseball, a splinter of a baseball bat that was used by a player, or a little tiny little thing of a

baseball jersey. So these little extras started popping up, and it was really cool, but they not upper deck, but just the market was flooded overall, and there were just too many baseball cards. Yeah, there's one with like a lock of Jose Canseco's hair. Just oh, really, is that one you do? That would not surprise you. It wouldn't me either, man, after reading this, I had no idea that this was the state that baseball cards were in. But they just embed the weirdest stuff into cards now

and it makes them just incredibly valuable. So what's happened is the companies that make cards have they used to just make cards? They said, oh, there's X number of Major League Baseball players, we're gonna make x number of cards. And then for some of the ones that are stars, well we'll put them in a different outfit. We'll say, here, hold this feather duster like a bat for this one. We'll use like slightly different colors and things like that

for a few of them. So and those will be produced in you know, a little lower quantities, but they it's just been so juiced now that they're like, yeah, give me a little bit of Brett Farve's game Jersey and we're gonna embed it in a card and there's um, you know, we're gonna make two of them. And what's interesting is they put them in packs. Still, it's not like you can only you have to walk on foot to the company's factory and buy this thing with gold bullion.

They put them in packs, but then they automatically become incredibly valuable on the secondary market, and so people buy packs in the hopes of like they're about to like strike it rich because there's a million dollar cards stuck

in there. Yeah, it's I mean, it's hard not to be a little cynical as a as a non enthusiast and be like they they kind of ruined it in a way in my opinion, because it's you know, the old days, it was like you you would open a card or open a pack or whatever, and it was that, um, what you wanted to find was a player that ended up being really good and you're like, wow, I've got this thing now of this Ken Griffey Junior rookie card, while they kind of knew he was going to be

because of his dad and his legacy or whatever. But you know what I mean, like Mark the player that kind of yeah, sure, why not Mark Grace? Is that the only baseball player you can think of? No, No, Mark Grace's I think eighty eight rookie card was just yeah, and I interest it was very sought after at the time. Okay, I thought you just like pulled that out of your back end. I thought that was pretty good. Oh thanks, um.

But anyway, now it's become like almost like gambling, like buying a like looking for a lottery ticket or something that's a winner. And because of that, there have been rico anti trafficking laws and like lawsuits brought up saying the same thing, which is like you're kind of running a gambling business these days. And all those lawsuits have failed. But Ed pointed out there was one against Panini just

like a few months ago this year. So people are still trying to to paint them as you know, gamblers or not gamblers, but whatever. It's called casinos, no lottery ticket printers, card sharks. No, that's not it either. You know what I mean, everyone knows what I mean. I think the card sharks so one of the things that's

lost though, chuck it. I don't mean to get cynical about, you know, the present or the future in favor of the past either, but it's hard not to because as a kid, you could go to the grocery store on your bike and buy some packs of baseball cards and go have fun opening them. Good luck finding baseball cards in the store these days. No, really, you, yes, you go to a really well outfitted hobby shop, or you're just buying it online basically immediately from the secondary market.

And yes, you can still have the thrill of like buying an unopened pack or whatever, but you have to buy it online and wait for it to arrive in the mail. And it's just it's just a different thing to me. I guess it's not necessarily worse, it's just the reality now, but I just feel like kids in particular, and then also like people who just don't have nearly

as much income are having trouble keeping up. You can't buy baseball cards unless you're fairly well off these days, because the possibility of buying a really valuable one is very high, or getting a really valuable one, and then you can just buy valuable ones right out of the gate too, off of the internet, So it just seems different to me. Well, it's it's less magical, for sure, and it is hard not to say that it's worse. Yeah,

go ahead and say it. Sorry, everybody. We try not to be terribly opinionated, but this one, this one really was pretty opinionated if you think about it. Yeah, you know,

we talked about rookie cards. They're usually the most valuable and sought after, and one of the reasons is because, like I was mentioning earlier, you don't know necessarily you might get a King Griffey Jr. That you have a pretty good idea that he's going to be a great player because of his family, but usually it's like, well, you know, baseball is a hard sport and a lot of really good prospects don't pan out, so you don't know for sure if a player is gonna pan out

and be a hot commodity as a baseball card. So that's why rookie cards are worth more. And then also Ed points out too, there's just it's sort of the tradition, like the rookie card is more valuable because we say it's more valuable. It's not necessarily because it's the rarest thing out there, right, it's just very collectible. Yeah, and then Chuck, we talked a little bit or I mentioned counterfeit cards. Yeah, being a thing. I mean, they were a thing back in the day when you know, the

first convention started. Now that cards have gotten like ultra valuable, the counterfeit are becoming even more difficult to detect, in part because it's just worth the effort now because of the payoff. And then secondly because the technology to make really good fake cards is becoming more widespread and cheaper, so there's more people putting more time into counterfeit cards. So as a result, there's um in a cottage industry

of basically valuators and what's the word where you verify indicators. Yes, authenticators has grown up as well, and there's one company called Professional Sports Authenticator. They're not the only ones. I think Beckett who used to make my I think still do make my beloved Beckett price guides they also authenticate too, But these there's a need has developed for professionals who employ experts to look at these things say yes, this thing is for real and all the and by the way,

it's also a nine in mint condition. Basically, I'm surprised they haven't started putting like a you know, a chip or a little stripe that the money has the little when you hold it up to the light, you know, stuff like that to legitimize it. Because it's such a

big money industry. I guess maybe the Professional Sports Authenticator company that's a great interest in that not happening because it would well, I wouldn't drive him out of business because of all the previous cards, I guess, but I'm surprised there isn't something like that embedded in the card these days. I think that they're the really high value ones do have some sort of security measures. I know they have things like holograms and foil like printing and

stuff like that to duplicate. It is hard to duplicate, but it is possible too, especially if you're not a professional authenticator. There are it's probably harder to detect. But I think if you are a professional, it's probably not that hard. Like I said, for example, um on, I think a PSA slab so if you if you have a card that the PSA is authenticating, they encase it in plastic and basically say like this is forever more verified. This card is verified. They call them slabs that you

can buy um on PSA slabs. It has like their patent number for the case that they use, and there's there's a counterfeiter out there who uses the same patent number, same thought and everything embossed on that plastic case, but they forgot the period after pat And that's the way that you tell that it's a counterfeit. Everything else is

like that, amazingly well done. And instead of spending so much time trying to rip people off, yeah, it seems like you have enough ingenuity to make money, you know, doing something else. Yeah, you're good enough to be a counterfeit. Or maybe it's the thrill of yeah crime or something. I don't know. I think for some people, crime is

very romantic, especially baseball counterfeiting very romantic. The last thing I have is just a kind of cool little footnote that Ed points out, which is in a lot of trading markets, the or collectible trading markets, the rarity and value comes sometimes for mistakes and errors, like the stamp that is misprinted, or the java that looks like it had an erection that they quickly like stopped on the

assembly line. Not always the case with baseball, and there are exceptions, but generally baseball card errors are not so valuable. There is at least one exception that I came across, um Billy Ripken, Cal Ripken's brother, his nineteen eighty nine Flear card. He's holding a bat and on the bottom of the bat written it looked like a sharpie it said F face, but it was all spelled out. It was not And he basically just trolled the Fleer company

and they printed it. No one noticed it for a while, and they finally I think, I'm not sure what they did with it, but that's a very highly sought after card too. The face. Yeah, they call it the Billy Ripken F eighty nine Fleer or something like that. Oh wow, I love that. The triple F. Yeah, yeah it is. I didn't notice that third F. You got anything else? I got nothing else. This was fun. I hope we got it mostly right. Yeah, and don't forget. I mean, like,

there's podcasts out there dedicated to baseball card collecting. We're just doing a general view of it. So if you like it, go seek out some of those baseball card podcasts and enjoy those as well. And since I just said that, of course it's time for a listener mayl. I'm gonna call this a follow up on them the Catherine the first lineage. Remember I couldn't quite remember all that stuff from the Amber Room. Yeah, from the Amber Room.

And I'm a big huge fan of the TV show The Great and it comes back first season three, I believe in May Okay, So it's also a good way to plug that show because this will come out kind of closest to them. This from Rebecca. Hey, guys, been listening for quite a few years now. Very informative and I'm not generally one to write in with corrections, but the Russian succession in the Amber Room areas such a

good story could be an entire episode. Peter the Great imprisoned his son an heir, after a failed revolt, and he died after torture. After Peter died, the crown bounced around various family members, including the wife that survived him, the Peasant, to born Catherine, the First, for whom the Katherine Palace is named for. Finally, Elizabeth secured the throne, ruled for many years. She apparently lived extravagantly with something like two hundred shoes or I guess one hundred pairs,

never wearing the same dress twice. But she never married, so to ensure the succession, she named her nephew her heir, and also arranged his marriage to a German prince's named Sophia, who converted to Russian Orthodox and took the name Katherine. Wow. So, after Elizabeth died, her nephew was so unpopular that only a few months later he was thrown overthrown by his wife, who ruled is Katherine the Second aka the Great? And

that is wherein the TV show takes place. Had a chance to visit the Catherine Palace a few years ago. See the recreation of the amber room. It's smaller than I imagine, but still beautiful. Picture frames and tables are also made with amber mosaic. Thanks for the podcast. P S. If you're not ps, you're not supposed to take pictures in the room, but I attempted to sneak a pick before I was called in sculpted. Oh wow, lucky, just

scolded and not thrown into the good Rebecca. I'm pretty good about rule following in those cases because I like to I'm a rule follower generally, but I snuck one photo in of one of the Elvis's jumpsuits in Graceland. Oh yeah, yeah, you know. I was like, I did a quickie and that was it. I wasn't trying to get too greedy, but I had. And you took a photo too, you may said on his bed. I think I told you on the seven forty seven and set the alarment. Oh I don't think I remember that story.

Did you get off that plane pretty quick? That's so just one thing that we're talking about Russia. I want to make a correction from way back in the past. I think in our Louisiana purchase episode, I mentioned that NATO is fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine. Right, I grossly misused the term proxy war. I did not know that proxy war in every case means that the person fighting the proxy war started it. I do not

think that NATO started this war at all. I think Russia was the aggressor, and I am definitely not pro Russia in any way, shape or form. As a matter of fact, I have a tremendous amount of admiration for the Ukraine, and I hope that dumb American politics don't get in our way of continuing to support Ukraine. F YI, yeah you were. You were very misunderstood, and I felt terrible for you because we got quite a few letters and that is is not what you meant. But also

I learned my lesson too. I should probably double check um big words before I used them. So yeah, apologies to all um Ukrainian Canadian listeners. Apparently there's a bunch of you um for any offense I caused. Yeah, uh, good stuff, Yeah, good stuff. Indeed, if you want to get in touch with us, like any of our Ukrainian Canadian listeners or Rebecca, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should

Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.