In the early 1970s my dad took me two of the first baseball cards shows in the country, held on the 11th floor of a union building on the edge of Greenwich Village. Middle-aged men emptied their suitcases, shopping bags, and shoeboxes stuffed with old baseball cards onto old wooden folding tables. I paid $1 for a Topps 1954 Jackie Robinson and the dealer threw in a Billy Martin without me asking.
The New York Times, the nation's paper of record, deemed the event newsworthy enough to cover the shows twice, exploring a novel and curious subculture as Margaret Mead might venture deep into a foreign jungle. The Times posed the fundamental question of why people collect to one of the show’s promoters, Mike Aronstein, a young steel salesman from Yorktown Heights, NY. “Nostalgia, maybe,” he replied. “I don’t know. My wife says ‘I’m crazy and I’ve only got 40,000 cards. I guess you have to ask a psychiatrist why people collect anything.”
At the time, Aronstein owned the world’s most valuable baseball cards, chief among them Honus Wagner T206 tobacco card, the king of the hobby. The T206s (the set’s original catalog designation) from 1909-1911 are the mother of all sets due to their rarity, great players, and the quality of the color lithographs. The Times reported stories floating around that a collector paid the amazing sum of $1000 for one, reportedly selling his car to cover the cost. A college kid shelled out $1500 for his. I remember seeing the ads in Baseball Digest, “One Baseball Card Worth $1500.” With the best examples changing hands for millions today, I think “wow, that could have been me.”
In an another post, I kicked myself a bit for not paying $1500 for a Babe Ruth rookie card 25 years ago; it now commands tens of thousands of dollars in auctions. At least I was an adult at the time with a bit of disposable income. When I was 12 it would have taken me a few centuries of doing my paper route to scrape together $1500 for a Wagner, the equivalent $8000 today.
I’ve been thinking, actually obsessing, about the Honus Wagner lately because SCP, a top auction house has one for sale just in time for Christmas. “It has become an icon, and a part of classic American Folklore,” says the vivid catalog description. “Owning a ‘Wagner’ is a dream for every collector in America familiar with the legend. The known supply will never begin to quench the exceeding collector demand for what is not just the most famous baseball in the world, but one of the nation’s most celebrated treasures.”
There are rarer cards and older cards, but none approaching the Wagner’s mystique and value. The most common metaphor is the Mona Lisa. “The image is so classic, that portrait so regal,” Dan Imler, SCP’s vice president, says. “There are actual similarities. The disinterested countenance of Mona Lisa. Both portraits have a very similar aesthetic.”
Whether the card was pulled from production because Wagner objected to smoking or not being paid, as I wrote in an earlier post about the rare Napoleon Lajoie card, the biggest baseball card scam in history, the card has been a legend since the first day it was printed. Peter Nash found a story from the Charlotte Observer in 1909 showing that at the time of the card’s supposed release, the Wagner was scarce and “more sought after than gold” by young boys who purchased packs of cigarettes for the “pictures of baseball men. The collections have become a mania. Whenever a new shipment of cigarettes is opened, the small boy congregates around the stand and every purchaser is besieged, and not allowed to leave until the picture has been forced from him.” A wildly popular player for the Pittsburgh Pirates in his day, Wagner was one of the original Hall of Famers inductees and is widely considered the greatest shortstop ever.
Although the SCP Wagner is graded as poor, nowadays any sale of a Wagner is a big event because fewer owners are willing to part with them and, from all indications, they are sky-rocketing in value. “I have always said that Wagners have been good to everyone who has owned one,” says Dan Imler, who has handled a half dozen in his career. Echoing similar sentiments, the cardboardsconnection.com reports that, “Regardless of condition, deep-pocketed collectors and investors are willing to pay huge amounts for this rare card.” Goodwin and Co., another auction house, has even created detailed bar graph from 2000 to 2012 to show the “obvious unparalleled investment growth” of the card. “To the best of our knowledge,” it states, “NO individual has ever experienced a ‘value loss’ with this card.”
By contrast, according to Dividend.com, “In the 20+ years Berkshire Hathaway has been a publicly traded company, Buffett has led the company to negative returns just four times. The stock enjoyed an average annual return of 17.41%; the S&P 500 averaged 9.46% over that same time frame.”
On 247WallStreet.com, Jon C. Ogg writes that “Many people say that if they could go back in time into the 1980s or 1990s with $10,000 and make an investment that they would have bought stock in Microsoft or in Apple or in AOL or other great growth stocks. For me, I would have gone back to the early 1980′s and I would have paid the then-unheard-of sum of $10,000 that one of the card dealers was asking at a card convention in Houston [for the Wagner].”
Imler estimates that his Wagner will sell for $300,000 to $400,000, owing to its manifest appeal. (It was up to $253,000 at the time of this posting.) The low grade belies the lack of creases in the face or eyes. “The flaws are there, but unobtrusive,” Imler notes. “The great original color. The nice vibrant hues. That is something you never get back if a card is exposed to sun or light.”
To give you an idea of the lofty heights this particular card has achieved, the unnamed consignor chose to sell the so-called “Chesapeake Wagner” he has owned for 20 years to invest in horse breeding in the Chesapeake region. “It’s been off the grid for so long, a lot of people are seeing it for the first time,” Imler adds. “There’s a very small chain of custody.”
Imler confirmed details furnished by Nash, who makes of a hobby of tracking all 60 or so Wagners known to exist. After the original owner died, in 1993 a bidder paid $32,000 for it in a Connecticut auction to display it in a memorabilia shop across the street in from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. In June of 1995, it was consigned the card to Robert Edwards Auction where it SCP bought it for $39,000. Four months later, SCP sold it to the present consignor for a healthy, undisclosed profit.
At a local show this past Spring I crossed paths with Mike Aronstein first time in 40 years. Since then, I’ve been learning from him and his son Andrew – he sells commemorative US Postal Service event covers on eBay featuring important dates in the history of sports and world events— about the senior Aronstein’s Wagners. “Who would have ever dreamed that a little piece of cardboard would be so valuable?” Mike says. “It’s simply beyond anyone’s imagination.”
From the late 1960s through the early 1980s Mike remembers buying and selling three Wagners. “I advertised in the Yorktown [New York] Penny Saver for baseball cards, and a woman called me and I drove from Yorktown to Mahopac,” he says, referring to his first, “I was an hour early because it was ‘fall back’ time and I forgot to do it. So, I had to drive around and wait for an hour. When I finally got to see the cards there were so many that I immediately rejected the damaged ones. The cards were 20 cents each (I believe the going price at the time) and I had $100.00 budget and I was easily surpassing it. I also turned down all the non-sport cigarette cards she had. I was pretty excited since I had found a “Magie” error and an Eddie Plank in the lot. [the rarest cards in the set beside the Wagner and also worth a small fortune]. I didn’t need them but they were in better condition than the ones I had. When I was about to leave I checked the damaged cards and I found a Wagner with only the bottom border (with his name). So, I paid another 20 cents. I believe it was the first Wagner found in about 20 years. When I left I called my wife from a phone booth. There was no cell phone back them.
I’m not clear on the second one. I believe a dealer in NJ told me about it and said he would take the 3-border card for whatever I paid for the new one with a maximum $500.000.
The 3rd one I got from a woman in NH for $1500.00. I believe Fred McKie [an early collector] told me about it. I was more or less the same kind of deal. If I drove to NH and the card looked authentic and I bought it he would take my other card at the same price. When I drove up and saw the card it was actually a bit larger than a normal card. The top border was slanted to the left slightly. That’s how I know that the card recently sold was mine. Also I used the image on a beer mug I gave away as premium in the ‘80s and you can see the slanted top.”
Aronstein’s sold his first card, costing 20 cents, for $500; the second, costing $500, for $1500; and the third, costing $1500, for $23,000. The card Aronstein recognized in a recent auction is called “The Jumbo Wagner” for its extra size, and it went for $2.1 million in 2013.
I asked Aronstein if he had any regrets parting with that Wagner. “No,” he says. “I love what I did.” He used the money to build his baseball card business and raise his family. In fact, none of the other previous Wagner owners second-guessed themselves, either, for similar reasons. The Honus Wagner has really been good to all who have owned one after all.
