$100K Baseball Cards are Late Brother’s Legacy
A tin box in a storage unit turned out to contain a card collector’s treasure.
An elderly woman was in for an emotional surprise when she walked into Legends Sports & Games in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a tin box of baseball cards. She was wondering if the cards, which she had found two years before among her late brother’s things, were “duds or diamonds.”
WoodTV in Kent County, Michigan, reports that the woman and the store employees were surprised by the value of the box’s contents. It held almost 200 cards from the historic 1933 Goudey set, including four Babe Ruth cards and two Lou Gehrig cards.
The Goudey set, considered the first great set of bubble gum cards, consists of 240 cards printed from 1933 to 1934 and featured some of the day’s best players in colorful hand-painted portraits. When it was first published, it was considered a gamble; few families could afford such frivolities in the midst of the Great Depression. But, as any devoted collector knows, you can’t underestimate the ability of kids to scrape together a few cents for some bubble gum, especially if it comes with the chance of a great card of a favorite player. Surviving Goudey cards are considered some of the most desirable in the hobby.
The woman, who is staying anonymous, found the box, wrapped in cardboard and tape, in a storage unit belonging to her late brother. Believing most of the unit’s contents were “junk,” she kept the box for two years before deciding to check to see if it had anything of value.
“It’s not something that walks in every day, month, year,” Lou Brown, owner and president of Legends, told WoodTV. The woman’s collection has not yet been graded, but Brown estimates that it is worth at least $100,000, carrying the cards’ value far beyond sentimental.
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