For love and money, it was all in the cards

Baseball cards ‘were always a way to connect as a family’

Collecting rare vintage baseball cards can pay off down the road, but for Dan Spezowka it also helped him speak the language of his heart.

As a kid, collecting cards was a way to connect with his dad and his brother. They would spend “hours and hours” collecting, trading and talking about cards. As he grew older and other demands on his time predictably arose, Dan stepped away. But he came back to it again in 2014 when his father’s health began to decline. By then, they were living 400 kilometres apart, but the cards still had the power to bring them together. Thanks to technology, they could meet online, see each other and the cards they were talking about.

“Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were my guys,” says Dan, now 54, who lives in the Toronto area. “The cards were always a way to connect as a family. My dad could be tough when we were kids, but one day when you’re older you realize your father now relies more on you than you do on him and it feels good to make him happy.”

Over the past 12 years Dan has put together a rare collection of 153 vintage baseball cards. He and his wife Renee shopped U.S. shows “the size of eight football fields”, bought some cards online and others at auction. “The cards came from all over the U.S.,” he says, “from Chicago, California, New York – all over North America really.”

They will all now be sold on Sept. 27, 2026 at Miller & Miller Auction’s, Pre-1980 Sports Cards: The Spezowka Collection. (All cards have been third-party graded by PSA, the Professional Sports Authenticator.)

The collection includes a 1933 Goudey #149 Babe Ruth, a 1933 Goudey #181 Babe Ruth, a 1952 Bowman #101 Mickey Mantle and a 1954 Topps #128 Hank Aaron.

1933 Goudey #149 Babe Ruth (SGC 4.5 VG-EX+)

1933 Goudey #181 Babe Ruth (PSA 4 VG-EX)

1952 Bowman #101 Mickey Mantle (PSA 7 NM)

1954 Topps #128 Hank Aaron (PSA 6 EX-MT)

“This is a very significant collection of baseball cards,” says Ben Pernfuss, Miller & Miller’s Consignment Director, Sports Cards & Memorabilia. “We rarely see such quality collections on this side of the border.”

While his dad, Roy, died in 2018, there are many happy memories that live on. Dan remembers one of the last Christmases with his father where he handed him two envelopes: one containing $1,000 cash and the other containing two desirable baseball cards. He told his dad he could pick only one. Of course it was a joke and he ended up with both envelopes.

Twice a year, his dad would take the train from Chatham to Toronto to meet Dan where they would hit the shows together and look for rare cards to add to their collections. Dan also remembers the last show they attended together. It was the spring 2017 Toronto Sport Card & Memorabilia Expo. It’s Dan’s favourite collecting memory. It’s also where he found the 1954 Topps #128 Hank Aaron rookie card.

But the time to sell the collection he spent so long putting together eventually arrived. “My own collection was always meant to be an investment, but you have to collect the right cards,” Dan acknowledges. “I can remember every card, where I got it and how much I paid. But the beauty of card collecting is in the chase. The hardest thing is not giving up the cards, but finding the cards.”

The Spezowka Collection also features a rare, complete 16-card Fatima Tobacco T200 set, featuring some of baseball’s most iconic names, including Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Still, once Dan decided it was time to give them up, knowing how and where was harder than he thought. He ran into Ben Pernfuss at the Toronto Sport Card & Memorabilia Expo in April 2026 and they got talking. “It was a nice conversation and I liked him,” recalls Dan. “I remember saying ‘you’re making this easy for me to let go’. Ben was someone who helped me to break away and move on. I always knew the cards would only be in my hands for a certain amount of time. I was really more of a custodian than an owner.”

When his mother died two years ago Dan bought the Windsor, Ontario lakefront home his parents had owned. Dan and his wife will be putting the proceeds from the auction towards fixing up that house, something his parents were never able to do.

So even though the baseball cards will soon belong to others, they’ll still be playing a role in the Spezowka family connection.