Blog, Batta, Blog!

This is my favorite baseball card.

Actually, not that PARTICULAR Waddell, but this one.


I bought this card in roughly 1983 or so, from a card shop in Ridgewood, NJ, called Dollars and Sense. The owner of the shop was a character named Greg. I used to go there with my childhood friend Dave (who sells cards on eBay for a living now), and Greg knew I liked T206s, as well as 1951 and 52 Bowmans. He used to throw a bunch of those cards in a shoebox, and sell them to me for a buck a T206, and a quarter a Bowman. I pulled the above clipped, beaten Waddell out of the box one day.

My grandfather told me about Rube. He didn't describe him entirely accurately; Rube wasn't a simpleton, he was more of a fun-loving country boy. The stories about Waddell are tremendous. He's my favorite prewar player, and I could sit and listen to the stories all day. My grandfather never actually saw Rube pitch; he wasn't born until 1918. But he was a student of the game, and knew all the stories about all the great players that played before he was born.

I'll have to tell you about my grandfather someday. But I digress.

The Rube card got me thinking about the concept of "value". I bought another T206 Waddell in EX-MT condition in about 1991, to "replace" my old Rube with the clipped corners. Somewhere along the line, I lost it. I replaced the lost one with the one you see above in the SGC holder - nice-looking card, rough back accounts for the grade. I'm now talking to someone about buying an SGC 5 to replace that one.

Clearly the EX-MT version was valuable (although it only cost me $20 in 1991). The SGC 1.5 would also fetch a decent price, due to the eye appeal of the front. I don't know, maybe $80-100. And I'm sure the 5 I'm thinking of buying will run me a few hundred.

But the beater with the clipped corners?

That one got put away through high school and college, when baseball cards were of no interest to me. It was kept in a screw-down for a long time, and then when I got sick of screw-downs it was put in a card saver. It moved with me through 5 or 6 residences, always kept in a special spot so I wouldn't lose it in transit. Today I keep it tucked away, right in the middle of my other tobacco cards. Nothing - NOTHING - could pry it away from me. It is one of the most "valuable" cards in my collection.

All this talk about PSA 8s on the message boards got me thinking about this recently. With such high dollars being spent on cards (I'm guilty of it myself), it's easy to start thinking of these things in terms of their investment potential. It's easy to write off the lower-grade cards as useless, and a waste of money. But how do you quantify the value of that beat-up Rube at the top of this post? As a kid I TREASURED that card. It was a Hall of Famer from 1909! The oldest card in my neighborhood, one that everyone wanted to own. I turned down Schmidt rookies, Rose rookies, Rice rookies, Seaver rookies - all the cards that were huge when I was a kid.

I like having some nice cards, but there's WAY more to the hobby than that, for me.