Insight: A Flattened Treasure Hunt

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

In the 1950s Johnny Carson used to host a television game show called “Who Do You Trust?” and I was thinking about that program recently when I drove to Kittery to have some old baseball cards appraised by a prominent antiques business.

Ed Pierce had his collection of 1960 Topps baseball
cards appraised last week at an event in Kittery.
PHOTO BY ED PIERCE 

For some years now I have been working on collecting every baseball card issued in 1960 by the Topps Chewing Gum Company. I’ve been a baseball card collector since 1964 but didn’t start working on my 1960 set until about 12 years ago.

There are a total of 572 cards issued in the 1960 Topps set and several years ago I completed acquiring all the cards when I purchased a Mickey Mantle card for $350 on eBay. Mickey Mantle’s 1960 card is deemed as the most highly valuable card in the entire set although Carl Yastrzemski’s rookie card, and other Hall of Famers such as Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax fetch a large sum too.

About a month ago I saw an ad on Facebook saying an antique business would be appraising collections and so I signed up to see how much the cards would be worth.

I keep my cards in a three-ring binder in plastic sleeves and the majority of my 1960s are in Excellent to Near Mint condition. I know this because many of these cards were purchased through a reputable card shop in Ohio and none of them arrived in less than Excellent condition. Cards are professionally graded by the sharpness of the corners, creases in the cardboard, paper loss, writing on the cards, photo centering and coloring.

When I was just starting out in baseball card collecting, I’d add cards in less-than-ideal conditions, and after a while I discovered that a card’s condition is crucial to its overall value.

Through the years, I have upgraded and replaced many cards in my sets, and such is the case with this 1960 collection.

When I showed the cards to the appraiser, his expression was priceless. He looked at each page in the binder with amazement at the condition of the common cards and told me I had done a good job in assembling the complete set.

However, when he extracted the Carl Yastrzemski and Mickey Mantle cards, he informed me that both these cards were slightly creased, detracting from the overall value of my 1960 set. I had purchased both of those cards on eBay and never noticed the tiny creases on each card at the time.

The appraiser asked me how much I thought my set was worth and I told him I thought it was probably in the range of $5,000. Last summer, I had taken the cards to a professional grader at a card show in Old Orchard Beach and he estimated it to be about $8,000 but I did think that was greatly exaggerating their value and he only glanced through the binder quickly.

This new appraiser said it was his opinion that my 1960 cards were nice, but he recommended that I have the most valuable cards in the set graded, including the Mantle, Yastrzemski, Mays, Aaron, Koufax and Willie McCovey cards.

He showed me on his iPhone that some complete 1960 baseball card sets in Excellent to Near Condition are selling for between $3,500 to $5,500 at most. He thought that if I did have four or five of the Hall of Fame player cards from the set professionally graded by a nationally recognized grading company and permanently encased in plastic slabs, that I could boost my set’s overall value.

Driving home from that appraisal, I was sort of shocked and disappointed. I had envisioned that the appraiser would be impressed and would make me a decent offer for them, and I would accept and use the money to help pay for my wife and I to take a trip to England.

Now that I’ve had a few days to think about it, and hearing one appraiser tell me my cards are worth $8,000 and another suggesting $3,500, I’m inclined to take the advice of the second appraiser. That will mean I will have to purchase new 1960 Carl Yastrzemski and Mickey Mantle cards and those will not be inexpensive.

The average going price for a 1960 Carl Yastrzemski graded card in excellent condition on eBay is $300 and a decent 1960 Mickey Mantle graded card in excellent condition is $750. It’s probably better for me to purchase these two cards graded and slabbed than take another chance on cheaper deals of ungraded cards.

And once I do acquire those Yastrzemski and Mantle cards for my set, I will still have to pay a grading fee and send off my 1960 Roberto Clemente, Koufax, Mays, Aaron or McCovey cards for assessment and hope they do not get lost in the mail or damaged in the return shipment from the grading source.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s, I never liked the Yankees so I would often take Mickey Mantle cards and pin them to the spokes of my bike to make a flapping noise as I pedaled along.

If I knew then what I know now, that surely wouldn’t happen. <   

Insight: A collection of random, useless but interesting facts

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Through the years, my knowledge of obscure and totally meaningless facts and information has served me well. Whether it be matching up from my living room sofa against that day’s Jeopardy contestants or competing against family members in a board game, my accumulation of trivial facts has always been a valuable resource for me.

Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox hit
.326 to lead the American League in batting
average in 1967. COURTESY PHOTO 

And why I retain such information is also a mystery. Even given a grocery list, at times I can forget what I went to the store to purchase, yet somehow I can remember the fact that Carl Yastrzemski of the Bostin Red Sox won the American League batting championship in 1967 with an average of .326. And by the way, he also led the league that year in Runs Batted In with 121 and was tied for first in homeruns with Minnesota’s Harmon Killebrew with 44.

Acquiring some sports facts is like second nature to me, having spent a large part of my career covering sporting events for newspapers.

Off the top of my head, I can tell you that Passaic High School in New Jersey holds the record for consecutive high school boys’ basketball victories with 159, a mark set in the 1910s and 1920s over seven seasons. But what’s not commonly known about that achievement is that after losing to Hackensack High School in 1925 to snap its winning streak, Passaic then went on to win 41 more games in a row, capping a stretch that saw the team go 200-1.

Here’s another one you may not be aware of. While bowling backwards at AMF Van Wyck Lanes at Richmond Hill, New York in April 2007, Ashrita Furman established the record for the highest backwards bowling score with a 199.

To retain a brain filled with trivial facts, one must have a curious nature. Perhaps that’s how I know that Joseph Gayetty of New York is credited with inventing toilet paper. “Gayetty’s Medicated Paper” was first sold in America in 1857 and came in packages of flat sheets. The medication was that it contained aloe and each sheet was inscribed with Gayetty’s last name. That product was sold in pharmacies right up until the 1920s. In case you’re wondering, the Scott Paper Company of Philadelphia came up with the idea of putting toilet paper on rolls about 1880 and started mass-producing and selling perforated paper under its own brand name in 1896.

Or how about that author Theordore Geisel, commonly known as Dr. Seuss, wrote his classic book “Green Eggs and Ham” on a bet with his editor, who suggested that Geisel could not complete a book in 50 words or less. “Green Eggs and Ham” clocks in at exactly 50 words.

From my high school biology days decades ago, I can tell you that a spider has eight legs, the spiny anteater and the duck-billed platypus are the only mammals on Earth who lay eggs and that the pregnancy of an elephant lasts 22 months. How I remember those details, I simply can’t begin to imagine.

One of my favorite college classes was Astronomy 101. Along with more than 300 other students in that class, we learned that five planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn can be viewed without the use of a telescope at night if you know where to look in the sky. From viewing a Sean Connery space movie called “Outland,” I learned that the names of the four largest moons of Jupiter are Europa, Ganymede, Callisto and Io.

For movie buffs, I can rattle off that the first film directed by a woman to earn more than $100 million at the box office was 1988’s “Big” starring Tom Hanks. Penny Marshall, who played Laverne on the popular 1970s television show “Laverne and Shirley”, was the director of “Big.”

And speaking of Tom Hanks, in 1995 Hanks was nominated for an Academy Award for portraying NASA Astronaut Jim Lovell in the film “Apollo 13.” Prior to casting the movie, actor Jon Travolta sought the role from director Ron Howard to play the part of Lovell. Also, the famous line from that movie was never spoken in real life. During the actual Apollo 13 mission, Lovell never said “Houston we have a problem.”

Growing up a baseball fan though, much of my trivial knowledge has been derived from thousands of hours of watching that sport on television. I’ve always thought that Joel Youngblood’s feat of getting a hit for two different teams on the same day in 1982 is very odd. Youngblood collected a hit for the New York Mets against the Chicago Cubs during an afternoon game, then he was traded after the game to the Montreal Expos, took the train to Philadelphia, and got a hit that evening for his new team in a game against the Phillies.

Trivial knowledge can be both a blessing and a curse. My wife usually cringes and rolls her eyes when I tell her that the actor Terry O’Quinn, who played John Locke on television’s “Lost”, also was in the 1980 western movie “Heaven’s Gate” with Christopher Walken and Kris Kristofferson.

Someday maybe I can put it all to good use on “Jeopardy.”<