OT: Mickey Mantle '52 rookie card destroys T206 Honus Wagner

I’ll have to look and see if I have any of these in my basement… oh wait all I found was Andy Van Slyke’s rookie card. That’s gotta be worth at least $2.

Here I was thinking baseball cards tanked.

$12.6 Million would buy me two VIP sessions each day for the next 30 years.

I'm amazed at the value of the shit we threw away, back in the day, being worth so much to some, but because of the value of things like baseball cards and comic books, today, I'll bet a lot of useless junk will be saved, making this stuff less valuable in the future.

It’s amazing that someone would pay so much for a baseball card! I know some folks are crazy when it comes to buying sports memorabilia.

Being an old guy, it’s not practical to spend such high amounts on sports items. I have seen the prices of NBA jerseys and they are over $200! I don’t like any player enough to spend so much to spend that much for a jersey. I think the manufacturers know some folks spend a lot on sports merchandise - and they milk that niche demand.

Sometimes you get lucky. My dad left me some old lebron James memorabilia from when he first started playing. He met lebron at the restaurant he worked in and he gave him a lot of shit coz he liked it so much. My dad kept it coz of the gesture and look at lebron today.

$12.6 million for a piece of cardboard. one could literally buy 2 mansions in california or nyc, still have plenty enough to retire and get 2 vip fuck sessions a week for life.

someone here mentioned andy van slyke. i have a card of another pittsburgh pirate rookie lying around somewhere: john smiley. the best that could happen with that card is if i put it up for sale on ebay and it gets sold for a $.05. the winning bidder: john smiley.

The market of older or rear/low-serial numbered cards (particularly rookie cards) in high graded condition has been crazy for awhile now. I have a substantial hockey card collection that includes some very nice older cards in premium condition. I spoke to a friend in the industry a few months ago about perhaps sending some in to PSA (a well known grading company) to be graded and was told that they are so backed up right with the high demand to grade cards, that I could be looking at an 18 month turnaround.

I grew up in a house built by my grandparents, and where my mother had lived her whole life. Her sister and brother were 18 and 20 years older and had long moved out of the house before I was born. After grandma died it was just me and my parents. Several generations worth of old stuff, mostly junk, filled the whole attic.

As a child I spent countless hours exploring up there. Among the relics were several boxes of baseball cards that were apparently my uncle's from when he was a kid, so they would have been from around the early to mid 40's I guess. I was too young to know anything about them, but I remember always being careful not to damage them and put them neatly back in the boxes after looking at them.

Fast forward to 1980, my freshman year in high school. Hadn't thought about those cards in years and we moved to a new house in the same town. My parents hired a moving company with a few trucks and a bunch of guys moving shit from one house to the other, and when I say "shit" I mean fucking useless shit. Cardboard wardrobe boxes full of decades-old suits, dresses and coats. Old dishware sets missing half the pieces. Beat up and broken Christmas decorations. Stuff like that. They spent time boxing it all up and PAID MONEY to have all that shit moved from the old attic up into our new attic, where it remained for another 35 years or so.

I never thought of those baseball cards again until my mother died about 6 years ago. Cleaning out her attic required a 40-yard roll-off container and a couple weeks of work. I carefully searched every single box of junk, because my mother (and my grandmother before her) were known for hiding cash in odd places, and I found a few thousand. But as you might guess, the baseball cards were nowhere to be found. They must have never made it to the new house because no one ever went in that attic except me, my parents, and a few of my friends when we would turn on the fan and smoke weed up there.

I'm guessing either the cards were one of the few things my parents threw out before the move (while keeping the collection of 70's era disco clothing) or perhaps the moving men spotted them and figured no one would miss a couple dusty old boxes. I doubt if there would have been a '52 Mantle in that collection, definitely not a Honus Wagner, but DiMaggio, Berra, Rizzuto...??