A time to hold them and a time to fold them
Baseball card once worth $1 now estimated to fetch $15,000 to $20,000
In the early 1970s Bob Smith (now 70) saw an ad in the London Free Press offering $1 a card for any pre-1953 baseball or hockey cards. It sounded pretty good to him at the time considering he was making about $1.25 an hour at his summer job.
In the end, he decided to hold onto his cards. And good thing, since his pre-1953 Mickey Mantle card, now coming up for auction at Miller & Miller’s Jan. 25, 2025 Pre-1980 Sports Cards & Memorabilia, is estimated to be worth between $15,000 and $20,000CA.
He has a number of his cards in the auction, but the two most valuable are the 1952 Topps #311 Mickey Mantle Rookie Card (Lot 59) and a 1966 Topps #35 Bobby Orr Rookie Card (Lot 94). Their combined estimated value is between $25,000 and $35,000CA.
Bob, who lives in Kitchener, Ontario, was born in Brantford where his parents built a small convenience store called Smitty’s Variety in the mid-1940s and lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the back until the family outgrew the space. He and his two brothers were too young at the time to collect the sports cards sold in the store, but his mother saved a box filled with “thousands of them”, which Bob didn’t know about until he was heading off to university.
“She told me she’d offered them to my older brothers when they left for university, but they didn’t want them and to be honest I didn’t want them either,” he recalls. “But I said to my mom, ‘I’ll take the 1952 cards’, even though I wasn’t even born then.” (He was thinking about that London Free Press ad.)
He figured his mother must have eventually thrown out the rest of the cards, but learned years later that she had divided them up among his two brothers and sister.
The thing about sports cards is their value is hugely impacted by condition. A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card in 9.5 condition (out of 10) sold for $12.7US million in 2022. Bob’s Mickey Mantle card is graded at a 1 out of 10, hence its much lower estimated value. The market for vintage cards, however, remains hot and values continue to climb, according to Sports Collectors Digest.
Bob knows from experience why so many cards show wear and tear. “When we were five and six years old we played games with them, or attached them to our bicycle spokes so they made clicking sounds when we rode them.” He remembers playing “knock down” where you’d lean cards against a wall and other kids would throw their cards at them. If you knocked a card down you got to keep it. There was also “closest to” where you’d stand 12 to 15 feet back and compete to get your card closest to the wall. “And that’s why there are so few cards from the ‘50s and ‘60s in perfect shape,” he says.
“It’s actually very hard to find any of these cards in a 6 or higher condition,” explains Ben Pernfuss, Miller & Miller’s Consignment Director for Sports Cards & Memorabilia. “Prices go up as condition goes up.”
This is the first auction in this category for Miller & Miller, known for its high-value collections and an international audience. It includes other sports memorabilia just as rare as Bob’s Mickey Mantle card, including a baseball signed by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, expected to fetch between $10,000 and $15,000CA.
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig Dual-Signed Baseball (Lot 130)
How Bob’s cards came to the auction is a story in itself and one that involves friendship, good advice and being at the right place at the right time. Prior to opening Miller & Miller Auctions, Ethan Miller and his brother Justin were buying and selling antiques, as their late father Jim Miller had done for decades. One early winter morning roughly 10 years ago, Ethan was at the City Café Bakery in Kitchener when he met the owner Rudolph Dorner, an entrepreneur and an ‘agent’ who sold businesses, taking a percentage of their values as commission.
“Rudolph became a mentor and convinced me our future would be brighter as agents,” recalls Ethan. The two met regularly at the cafe. To help counter Ethan’s concern about the challenge of getting consignments in the auction world, Rudolph would look around the café and call out to anyone within earshot, “what do you collect?” Bob Smith was there at the time and confided he collected sports cards. Bob and Rudolph became friends and played basketball one night a week with a group of guys. “Rudy had a big personality and would pull up on his Harley Davidson. Not a great basketball player, but a great guy and a real character,” says Bob. And every time Bob came into the café Rudolph would pull him aside and ask if he’d sold the cards, saying “it’s time Bob. It’s time.” Rudolph remained a friend to Bob and a mentor to Ethan until his death from cancer in 2022.
During those years Bob had made it clear to Ethan he wasn’t ready to sell his cards. But last year when Ben Pernfuss was planning the Sports Cards & Memorabilia sale, Ethan gave him Bob’s contact information. This time his answer was ‘yes’.
Bob says his age and the fact he has three kids convinced him it would be better to sell the valuable cards and split the money within the family, rather than have to decide who to leave the cards to when he’s gone.
“No one could have predicted the market for baseball cards would soar like it has,” Ethan admits. “It turns out Bob made a great decision by waiting.”
By Diane Sewell
Diane Sewell has been a writer for more than 25 years, producing feature stories for some of the country’s top newspapers and consumer magazines, as well as client newsletters and commissioned books.
Sale Details:
Pre-1980 Sports Cards & Memorabilia
January 25, 2025
This is an online-only sale with no live webcast portion.
Lots will automatically close in sequential order beginning at 9am EST on January 25.
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