Customer Reviews

The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card

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I didn't have very high hopes for this book, since the subject matter (baseball card collectibles) isn't an area of interest for me, but an associate gave it to me to read on the train. I was very pleasantly surprised. Not only was it highly informative, it was extremely entertaining. I learned a ton about the history of baseball, how baseball cards got started, about Honus Wagner's life and the current, highly corrupted state of collectibles -- baseball cards in particular. This is a must for baseball fans and card collectors, or anyone who is interested in learning something about our national game.

It is the most valuable piece of cardboard in the whole world: the T206 Honus Wagner PSA 8 NM-MT. It was printed in 1909 to be included in cigarettes from the American Tobacco Company, and shows a stiff and blocky young man with his hair parted in the middle, with a "Pittsburg" [sic] shirt buttoned all the way up. It isn't much to look at, but it was most recently sold to an anonymous collector for over two million dollars. This is all true, but also it is unbelievable; there must be something wrong here somewhere. And there is something wrong, all over the place in the world of sports collectibles, according to the story in _The Card: Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card_ (Morrow) by sports journalists and investigators Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson. You don't have to be interested in sports or collectibles to find this book amusing and enlightening, as it profiles collectors and their obsession with accumulation, and as it casts doubt on the integrity of many aspects of the enormous sport collectible market.

The authors admit that "Wagner's baseball card seems to have become more significant to twenty-first century baseball fans than Wagner himself." That's really too bad, for Wagner was a fine baseball player, inviting comparison with Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, both of whom were selected with Wagner as inaugural entries into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. Cigarette companies in the 1880s started putting them into packs of ten cigarettes. Honus Wagner is the rarest card of the 1909 - 1911 set produced by the American Tobacco Company; There are around fifty of Honus Wagner's cards, each of them valuable, but most in poor condition. _The Card_ is about the one known as The Card, the one that is in superb condition; it has bright colors, its edges are clean and white, and the corners are sharp enough to draw blood. And that's the problem; The Card is, in the view of many, just in too good condition. There is a great peculiarity of the baseball card obsession: retouching or repairing a card is forbidden, or if not forbidden, it takes almost all the value of the card away. You can refinish antiques, and even the greatest Old Master paintings get retouched and no one minds as long as the work is done well; but baseball cards must not be doctored. And there are baseball card doctors who remove stains, smooth out wrinkles, build up flabby corners with wheat paste, and scalpel or laser rough edges to make the remaining ones sharp. There are serious doubts about the authenticity of The Card, explored at length here. The Card is now all sealed up in a special case, and no owner is likely to open it up to let appraisers reevaluate it.

It isn't just The Card that has authentication problems. Other cards do, and other sports hardware does; even bats, balls, and mitts that are authenticated by their previous owners as having been used in important games may not be the actual equipment as claimed. There are authentication services that for a fee will grade cards, but like any company, they want to please their best customers and are inclined to look favorably on cards from their favorites. Sometimes the services that do the authentication are also the ones that own the property and are auctioning it. Sometimes there are shills in the auctions to make the price go sky high. There is little policing by dealers, the authentication services, or governmental authorities. What used to be a fun hobby for kids has outgrown kids and has become a playground for rich fraudsters. The authors have hopes for the hobby, and there are those who are pushing for reform. There are some honest brokers profiled here, and maybe they will eventually have their way, but it hasn't happened yet. _The Card_, a brightly written and entertaining look at a unique realm of folly, reminds us that baseball may nominally be the national pastime, but the actual one is making a buck any way one can.

This book was so much fun! I didn't know much about baseball or the hobby/big business of sports collectibles, and I learned a lot. Thompson and O'Keeffe vividly recreate the era when Honus Wagner played ball, when baseball cards came with tobacco, not bubble gum, then track the most valuable card in baseball and ask: Is it real? Did you know that opium and heroin were legal and available over the counter in 1900, even while some people were denouncing tobacco? I recommend this for Father's Day (but read it before you give it to him).

I spent most of the 1980s collecting baseball cards. I started with the complete 1977 - 1979 Topps sets, collected for me by my dad as a failed attempt at giving me an inheritance. Most of what I bought and traded for later I stored in shoeboxes (the 1980 Topps set is in the cigar box that originally heralded my sister's birth). My mother never threw my cards away; I still have them all, many creased from having been transported to summer camp in my pockets.

"The Card" is a fast, revealing read, and having lived the collector's life (in a penny-ante kind of way) I can say this is a must-read book for those of us over a certain age. It seizes on a single surviving 1909 T206 Honus Wagner card that recently re-sold at private auction for nearly $3 million, and how, through years of investigative journalism, the authors have fairly well proven that the card is not exactly what it purports to be.

Apart from the hours I wasted cataloguing and re-cataloguing my meager collections (I once traded the 1977 Chris Chambliss for a 1983 tandem of Ed Lynch and Dave LaRoche; dumb, dumb move) I've never spent a million bucks on a card of dubious provenance. I once laid down $10 for a 1957 Topps Luis Aparicio, too big to fit into the 9-card-per-page collector sheets that housed lots of 1987 Mark McGwires and Garbage Pail Kids at the time.

"The Card" is a terrific look at the dark side of the hobby. Since many of those noted as "villains" by the author declined to be profiled, the book mostly features interviews with collectors who've left the hobby out of heartbreak, or those who run honorable and transparent businesses trying to clean it back up. It's not just about baseball cards: it also touches on the grey market for "game-used" bats, autographs, jerseys and gloves. Billy Crystal makes a poignant cameo late in the story: he spent a quarter of a million collars on an item that isn't what he thought it was.

At a card show last year I got autographs on two memorable cards: Bake McBride signed his afro on the '80s Topps card, and Alvin Dark signed for me his 1955 Bowman TV-set image. I will not be selling these items. Neither card is in near-mint to mint condition, as is the profiled T206 Wagner; neither card is particularly rare; and I got them signed for sentimental value, not for investment purposes.

Confession, however: I did once trim a baseball card. This is part of a run of dubious practices, made easier with the advent of newer technology, where dog-eared cards are made crisp, and where aging borders are pared back to their original white and pristine state. In early 1983 a Junior Scholastic-type magazine I got in the mail came with an uncut partial sheet of eight 1982 Topps cards (I do have a mis-cut, from-the-pack 1980 Topps John Candelaria that's probably worth nothing). Being nine and having never seen an uncut sheet before, I promptly grabbed my safety scissors and got to work liberating the cards from their unified tyranny. Mangled all the cards in the process. Including the Orioles Future Stars card. With Cal Ripken, Jr. on it. To be fair, at the time I couldn't have known I was cutting up a card that, thanks to the hobby's implosion, probably isn't worth more than 20 bucks today, if that.

One final note: the story of the T206 Wagner and its dubious rise to 7-figure investment property, opens in 1985 in a baseball card shop in Hicksville, New York. This is the same Long Island town that for 20 years unknowingly housed the Gospel of Judas. My mother (and all my baseball cards) currently reside in Hicksville. I'm going back to my collection one day and maybe see if I don't have a T206 Wagner myself sitting somewhere in that fated locale.

"The Card" shows that if a reporter has a very narrow, but compelling subject, he can create a really readable narrative - even if the subject doesn't seem all that vital to the larger world.

Anything where that's lots of money at stake often leads to corruption or lies, etc. Baseball cards are no different. O'Keefe does a good job of showing the underbelly of "graders" who carry so much control over what cards are worth. I knew about the Honus Wagner card that's his subject, but I didn't know even slightly the backstory he gives all the detail about.

A previous reporter noted correctly that the card's history prior to 1985 isn't dealt with - maybe because it simply couldn't be. I don't know. But it is a question left unanswered in a confusing way.

This book might be best read in combination with Dave Jamieson's "Mint Condition," which covers the same subject from a much broader perspective. In addition, one of O'Keefe's main characters - Bill Mastro - is only briefly interviewed in "The Card," while Jamieson interviews him quite a bit more in his book. That is probably because Mastro wanted to rebuild a reputation somewhat tarnished by how he comes across in "The Card," which involves potential alterations to the 'card' in question - the rare Honus Wagner card.

It's a detective story, history lesson and solid gumshoe reporting all the way through. We have these pop culture examples that we see in a brief newspaper story - "baseball card sold for record price at auction" but we don't really know the backstory. A book like gives us the entertaining, character-filled narrative to make it worthwhile to learn a little more.

It doesn't really go into the history of The Card (T206 Wagner) before 1985. That's a lot of missing years, and the story could have used more investigation. That being said, this book is a real fun read for people in the hobby. This book details the who's who in the field, and all their positive and negative contributions and personalities. Also, it introduces the reader to both the good and bad of so-called
"authentication services" that perform grading on cards.

Overall, it is an entertaining book that you will enjoy and learn from. I just wish more dirt digging was performed on the true history of the Wagner card.

This book traces the story of the world's most valuable baseball card, the Honus Wagner psa 8 T206. The author did a commendable job of researching the story, and text is interesting, engaging, and has good flow. The author also offers very convincing evidence that this million dollar plus card was actually tampered with prior to being graded and "slabbed." This book is well worth reading for its information about the card, baseball card collecting in general, and Honus Wagner - the man. Every sports card collector should have a copy in their library.

The story of the world's most expensive baseball card, the T206 Honus Wagner PSA 8 NM-MT, isn't very complicated. Unearthed in 1985, it has changed owners a handful of times, netting each one a tidy profit. Its whereabouts for its first 75 years of existence are unknown. The reasons for its rarity have been speculated on, but are ultimately unknown. Whether the card has been trimmed somewhere along the way, a big no-no in the card collecting world and, if ever determined to be true, would permanently mar the hobby, is unknown. While O'Keeffe and Thompson perform an admirable job of attempting to answer these unknowns in The Card, the reader is ultimately left unfulfilled.

What the authors do accomplish, however, is the painting of a vivid picture of the high end of sports card and memorabilia collecting. From the eccentric personalities involved to the back-room dealings to the heinous manipulation of items considered by some to be national or historic treasures, The Card lays it all out in unflinching detail. The king of the hill is Bill Mastro, the uber-dealer whose involvement has touched just about every sale of the Wagner. Surrounding him are other prominent collectors and dealers, some on his side, others attempting to dethrone him. While the authors exhibit a bias in who is "good" and "evil" in this fight, astute readers will recognize universal themes in this battle and be able to make their own judgments on motives. Like the question of whether the Wagner has been trimmed, the heroes and villains in this story are not clear-cut. What is clear, however, is that what used to be a fun hobby for boys and men with a touch of OCD has become commoditized by skyrocketing prices. Along with this commoditization comes all of its associated evils: all-encompassing greed, hubris, the destruction of national treasures. Ultimately, this unfortunate revelation will be The Card's final legacy.

Written in a light journalistic style, The Card is easy leisure time reading and can be finished in a single sitting. While a bit erratic in detail -- the sections on Wagner's life as a player seem scant, while too much time is spent on the purported Wagner card owned by Ray Edwards and John Cobb -- the narration nonetheless flows easily from one topic to the next. Longtime hobbyists will probably find very little new information in The Card, though, and may even be distracted by easily quashable errors such as Alan Ray's assertion that the red printer's mark present when he owned the Wagner is now missing. However, this book was more than likely not written for hardcore collectors; its target audience being laymen with a passing interest in the hobby and its most expensive artifact. That being said, though, The Card does provide a decent aggregation of many of the tidbits of information on the Wagner that have been scattered amongst Internet message boards and whisper-filled back rooms. Advanced hobbyists may find it useful for that reason, although the lack of an index may at the same time hinder it. All in all, The Card is a decent book for card collectors' reference shelves, and as an exciting read for everyday folks.

First and foremost, I enjoyed reading this book -- I enjoyed learning about collecting baseball cards and also enjoyed learning about how some people doctor the cards. However, there were many times when I was reading the book that it wasn't clear to me who got the card in question from whom: the names of the real-life characters were just tossed around without really establishing in the reader's mind who they were. That came later, but should have come earlier to avoid confusion. And, I wasn't satisfied with the seeming lack of investigation about the origins of the card. I liked this book, and I think most readers will, but I often found myself wishing the authors had investigated more and written better.

This book, written by two New York Daily News sportswriters, provides what is likely to be the definitive account of the Honus Wagner T206 baseball card. The card, once owned by Wayne Gretzky, is probably the most famous baseball card and is certainly the highest priced. In 2007, it was sold to an anonymous collector for $2.35 million. The Wagner cards were originally issued in 1909 in packs of cigarettes by the American Tobacco Company. Fewer Wagners were issued than other cards in the set, either because Wagner objected to being associated with cigarettes or because he hadn't been paid enough for the use of his picture -- the authors aren't sure which. The "Gretzky card," as it has come to be known, first surfaced in 1985. The authors quote a number of people who believe that the card was never in a cigarette pack but was instead cut from a sheet of cards. This difference matters because Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) the leading card grading company refuses to grade cards that have been cut from sheets. Nevertheless, PSA graded the card in 1991, giving it a grade of 8 (Near Mint-Mint), which is by far the highest grade ever received by a Wagner T206.

Tracing the fairly brief history of the Gretzky card would not provide enough material for a book. So, the authors devote significant time to recounting Wagner's life -- which is fairly interesting -- and to describing the often unsavory machinations that go on in the sports collectibles business. Apart from the leading card grading firm having possibly violated its own rules by grading a card cut from a sheet, the book discusses many other even worse shenanigans carried out by dealers and collectors. Suffice it to say that after reading this book, any inclination I might have had to spend a significant amount of money on a sports collectible is dead.

The book is well written and fast paced -- as we might expect from a book written by journalists. The lack of an index reduces its value to anyone who might want to use it for research.