Family discovers 7 baseball cards worth millions, then they find 8th card
Here’s a helpful tip: When you’re cleaning out your attic, look through all the boxes and bags before throwing anything out. You just might find a fortune.
For one southern family, this proved to be very good advice — not once, but twice.
A few years ago, the family, which prefers to remain anonymous, found seven rare Ty Cobb baseball cards dated between 1909 and 1911 in a rumpled-up paper bag. These rare cards said “Ty Cobb — King of the Smoking Tobacco World” on the back, as they were given away with tobacco back in those days.
The seven cards were found while the family was cleaning out the home of their deceased great-grandfather.
Together, they were sold on behalf of the family for $3 million, according to Sports Collectors Daily.
It’s a once in a lifetime find, right?
Well, make that twice in a lifetime.
This week, it was learned that the family stumbled across an 8th version of that card while they were cleaning out the same house. This card — found in a dusty old box — is valued at $250,000, though the family says they are keeping this one as a memento.
Including those eight, there are currently only 24 versions of the cards known to be in existence.
“It falls under the category of ‘you can’t make this stuff up,’” said Joe Orlando, president of Professional Sports Authenticator of Newport Beach, California, according to The Associated Press.
After the initial discovery, the family put the estate cleaning on hold. But then when they went back in, they were sure to look in every box and every bag. That’s when they found the 8th card — in a box between two books.
“He wasn’t even a collector,” Orlando said of the family’s great-grandfather. “He just held on to these cards that were most likely given to him after buying a particular tobacco product.”
The 24 known versions of this card are still only about half the number of surviving Honus Wagner cards from the same era. The Wagner card is considered the holy grail of baseball cards.
And though it’s possible the Cobb cards will go down in value — as more of them have been discovered — the fact that people are so excited about them could “have made up the difference,” according to the AP.
“Sometimes a card can be so rare that no one bothers to talk about it,” Orlando stated.
“This raised the importance of the Ty Cobb card.”
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