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

Michael O'Keeffe (Author), Teri Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 22, 2007

How does something go from being a worthless scrap of paper to the multi-million dollar object of desire? Every field of collecting has its ultimate prize, its summa discovery, its Mona Lisa, its Hope Diamond. Aficionados will search a lifetime for the crowning piece of a truly great collection, some sparing no ethical or financial expense to aquire it. For the baseball card collectors it-s the 1909 T206 Honus Wagner. Since its limited release just after the turn of the century, this Sweet Caporal ciagrette card, identified as a rarity as early as the 1930s, has beguiled and bedeviled collectors. (Apparently, Wagner himself threatened to sue the company, so they halted production after only a few hundred were printed.) As the decades unfolded, the Wagner card-s history mirrored baseball and America-s history, its value riding as baseball cards and other collectibles rose in value. Through it all, a T206 Wagner remained the Big Score as collectors logged in hundreds of hours on their quest. THE CARD will document some of the journeys folks have taken to recover this treasure. About 50 T206 Wagners have surfaced, and even dog-eared examples top $100,000...and in the 1980s, along came the legendary -Gretzky- T206 Wagner card-so named because The Great One supposedly once had it in his possesion. However, the -Gretzky- card is of uncertain origin, and questions in the trade persist as to the possibility of tampering. The authors stand a great chance of cracking this case wide open, to reveal that perhaps the card will remain a ghost to even those who thought they once held in it their hands, another mystery in the tale of The Card. THE CARD is a biography of the T206 Wagner as cultural icon, as the hobby gained momentum, from marginalized and juvenile, and ultimately to big dollars and (possible) white-collar crime.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Lively and well-researched.” (Sports Illustrated.com )

About the Author

Michael O'Keeffe is an award-winning journalist who is a member of the New York Daily News sports investigation team. He has been a reporter and editor for more than twenty years. A graduate of the University of Colorado, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; First Edition edition (May 22, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061123927
• ISBN-13: 978-0061123924
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #546,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #22 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Antiques & Collectibles > Sports Memorabilia & Cards > Sports Cards > Baseball

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Very compelling read May 22, 2007

By Cheryl Sears

Format:Hardcover

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.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Follies of Collectors and Investors August 15, 2007

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a good mystery! May 25, 2007

By Sally Otos

Format:Hardcover

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).

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars I've wasted my life July 5, 2008

By Jason A. Miller VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great example of succesful focus on one specific topic February 24, 2011

By Nathan Webster TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

"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.