The similarities between Honus Wagner and me may not all be obvious so let me elucidate them.
We grew up – at different times – about 25 miles apart in southwestern Pennsylvania.
We both played baseball in our youth.
We both spent a lot of time at Forbes Field.
After graduating from high school, my sister Irene worked as a secretary at Honus Wagner Sporting Goods Company.
The elderly Wagner gave my sister a shakily written autograph for her little brother on a small piece of paper (no, I don’t have it; my mother, cleaning my room – what else? – tossed it out).
Our likenesses (mine a black and white photograph, his a bronze plaque) are in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
We are both part of the Panini Cooperstown collection of baseball cards that was released late last year.
Beyond our mutual presence in the Cooperstown collection, we enjoy another similarity with cards. Baseball cards of us were recently sold, within days of each other, at auctions.
Here, however, is where Honus and I part company:
My card was autographed; his was not.
My card was sold for $9; his was sold for $2.1 million.
The only similarity I can find in that latter development is that I couldn’t afford $2.1 million for my buddy Honus’ card, and I wouldn’t have spent $9 for my card.
Let’s be honest here. The Wagner card is probably the most famous baseball card in existence. Nobody knew mine existed. Why it exists I don’t know.
Last year Panini America, Inc. decided to publish a set of cards of Hall of Fame players, Wagner, who was among the first five players elected to the Hall in 1936 among them. But the Panini people decided to include broadcasters and writers, too.
Peter Gammons and I were the two writers selected, and our autographed cards were distributed among the packs otherwise filled with Hall of Fame players. It was unusual enough that the cards existed. But then things got even more bizarre.
One of the recipients of the cards had no use for the Murray Chass card – hey, I don’t have a problem with that – but why he took the next step defies reality. He posted the card for sale on eBay. Why, I asked myself, did he think anybody would bid for the card?
My wife does not frequent eBay (fortunately). My children have better things to do with their money. There were, however, several bids ($2.00, $5.55, $8.50), and the winner was a mind-boggling $9. I hope the seller spends his windfall wisely.
As far as I know, no one put his Panini Wagner card on eBay. But a 1909 Wagner card and its owner did all right without eBay, which wasn’t functioning in 1909.
In the online auction, the card drew a winning bid of $2.1 million, which is slightly more than $9. In fact, you could buy 2,333,333 of my cards for that bid. Actually, they could be far more useful than the Wagner card. You could paper all of your walls with pictures of me. On second thought…
The new owner of the Wagner card is only the latest owner of a Wagner card. There is more than one card; no one knows for sure how many there are, but 40 and 100 are the low and high figures of speculation. Some are in better condition than others, and condition counts in card sales and auctions.
A year ago another Wagner card was auctioned for $1.2 million.
Earlier this month, federal prosecutor sin Chicago said a Chicago-area memorabilia dealer, Bill Mastro, admitted that he altered a Wagner card to enhance its value. In a federal court case in Chicago, Mastro, whose brother Randy was a deputy mayor of New York under Rudy Giuliani, is accused of cutting the sides of the card, creating the appearance and value of a near mint condition card.
In 2007 Ken Kendrick, an owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, paid $2.8 million for the card, which was once co-owned by hockey great Wayne Gretzky.
The card that was auctioned earlier this month and sold for $2.1 million is another of the Wagner cards that exist. The value of the card Kendrick bought was said to have been inflated by $2 million as the result of Mastro’s manipulation.
Kendrick has said he was aware of what Mastro did before he bought the card and that he didn’t believe it would affect the card’s value.
Collectors refer to the recently sold card as the Jumbo Wagner because it apparently is slightly larger than most of the Wagner cards. I don’t know about the other cards, but I can understand why this one is larger than the $2.8 million card if Mastro cut corners.
Wagner himself created this whole mess. He objected to his picture appearing on the cards, which were inserted in packages of American Tobacco Company products, and the company stopped printing them.
His explanation was he didn’t want to be a role model for children smoking. However, it has been said that Wagner smoked and endorsed other tobacco products so maybe he wasn’t happy with what he was getting from American Tobacco, if he was getting anything.
I am not a collector and have never understood the ravenous thirst memorabilia collectors have for sports items.
I suppose that lack of interest in collecting adds to my reaction to people bidding for my card. However, I will refrain from making any additional comment because the buyer might be a reader and I don’t want to antagonize a reader on the unimportant subject of baseball cards.