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Anyone find something collectible under the tree this morning they want to brag about share?
Naughty: Mercury Morris – for pretending that his career was anything significant if he wasn’t a player on that ’72 team. He ran for over 1,000 yards once in his career. Perhaps Mercury can be just as ellaborate when he talks on SportsCenter about how he got his jock handed to him by Bob Lilly in Super Bowl VI. Mercury talks like he’s had this great NFL career, but in reality it’s just as brief as his hair club for men commercials.
Naughty: Tony Romo for bringing his girlfriends from American Idol or MTV reality show ex-wife’s club to football games. I don’t know what was more annoying to see 100 times during the game: Jessica Simpson or Bill Cowher’s family whenever his Steelers were on TV!Nice: Pete Rose back in the trading card game.
Naughty: Upper Deck execs for acting like babies with Topps.
Nice: The NY Mets for giving the NL East title to Philadelphia
Naughty: Me for what I did to the TV after the Mets choked the division away!
Guest blog courtesy of James Jeansonne
Beckett HQ is closed Monday and Tuesday for the holidays. Anyone want to be a guest blogger for the next few days? If so, send your blog content to phastings@beckett.com and I’ll post it if it makes the grade.
Keep it short, keep it sweet. Yes, rants can be acceptable.
Filed under: Sports Cards | Tags: Beckett Hockey, Penguins, rookie card, Sidney Crosby
You don’t have to win the lottery to get free money. Sometimes, you just gotta be at the right place at the right time — with the right product.
A guy calls me today from Pittsburgh and asks about this Sidney Crosby Rookie Review card. Says it’s Crosby’s “first card.” I tell him, and Beckett Hockey pricing editor Al Muir confirms, that this card is an unauthorized card that came bundled in an obscure hobby publication.
Obviously, the guy had found a cheap stockpile of these for probably about 25 cents a card. Said he took 200 of them to a Penguins game the other night, stood outside the arena with the cards dangling from the inside of a trench coat and in 15 minutes had $2,000 in cash in his hand. Said he could have sold more if he’d had them with him.
In the end, they guy has sold nearly 5,000 of the Crosby cards and the companion Ben Rothliesberger cards that came in the same magazine. Do the math.
Listen, if for $10 a guy feels like he got a good deal on a card he wants, then so be it. Just don’t try to grade it or look it up in a Beckett price guide. You can’t do either, because neither are licensed. By definition, they really aren’t cards at all, much less “first cards.”
Maybe Dave Byer should explain this one.
– Pepper Hastings
Filed under: Autographs, Upper Deck | Tags: autograph, Beckett, Sports Cards, Tiger Woods, Upper Deck
A reader from California emailed today that he recently bought this Tiger Woods card for $11,500. He sent this scan.
With six days and five hours remaining in the 10-day auction and bidding at $7,900, the buyer took the transaction offline an made an offer to the seller, whom he had dealt with before.
One Paypal transaction later and the 37-year-old state employee was the owner of his 10th Woods BGS 9.5 auto card, this time a 2007 Upper Deck Goudey Tiger Woods Sports Royalty Auto.
“You can tell he took just a little more time and care in signing this one,” said the buyer a few minutes ago on the phone. “I had to pull out the pocket book this time. It’s nice.”
According to most hobby sources, there are just five of these cards in existence, although the buyer lamented that he wished UD would confirm that number.
So, what’s the plans? Flip it? “It’s going to stay in my hands hopefully for a long time, unless I get a mortgage I have to deal with or something,” he said. “If the auction would have kept going, it maybe would have reached $15,000. Or, maybe not.”
BTW, look closely at the auto. The order of the letters are T-G-E-I-R-W-O-O-D-S.
– Pepper Hastings
Filed under: Autographs, Beckett Baseball, Hall of Fame, Memorabilia, Vintage Cards
The famed Barry Halper collection of baseball memorabilia was sold at auction by Sotheby’s for $21.8 million in 1998. He also donated a portion of his collection to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
There is a collection here in the D-FW area that rivals Halper’s, and it is virtually unknown to the collecting world.
I was priviledged to see the collection about a year ago. We have begged the owner to let us do a story in Beckett Elite. He declined our request for security reasons. So, let me try to describe what I saw.
Walking through the front door, the first thing you notice is a vintage Corvette in the reception area. The trunk is open and it is filled with memorabilia including autographed balls, bat, jerseys, guitars. etc. Also, to our left is the first of several large showcases with memorabilia. Picture several Neiman Marcus-type window displays filled with autographed items.
A walk through the various rooms and offices reveals that every space on the wall is covered with bat racks, ball holders, shadow boxes, framed jerseys and collections. We are talking about 30,000 square foot building.
Filed under: Sports Cards, Vintage Cards | Tags: cranberry bog, Green Bay Packers, Larry Fritsch, NFL Championship, Packers, Rose Company Postcards, Vintage Cards, Wisconsin
Larry Fritsch and I used to talk mostly about cranberries, not baseball cards. Despite living in Texas, I made two pilgrimages to the woods in Central Wisconsin to visit with Fritsch, the world’s first full-time baseball card dealer.
Fritsch, 71, passed away over the 
weekend. I’d like to think he was wearing his “Fritsch Cards” gimme hat and plaid shirt all the way to the end.
Fritsch was a wonderful man with which to converse. He was an avid Packers fan, an overall football kind of guy. He loved to talk about different kinds of trees and about the weather. And cranberries — Fritsch loved to describe how the local fields are flooded every fall, floating the tiny fruit off the ground and into the bogs, where the berries are skimmed from the water and processed for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner trimmings.
Fritsch and his progeny helped drive amateur sports in Stevens Point. His son, Jeff, and his grandchildren all contributed to the success of local prep sports teams over the years. A fabric in the community, his portrait should hang in Applebee’s just east of US 51, which is what the locals call I-39.
OK, so what about Fritsch’s collection? Yes, I’ve seen it. Yes, I’ve been in the vault and have walked the warehouses with Fritsch. No, I won’t describe it here because 60 million cards has a certain mystique about it. It defies description, really.
Let’s leave it this way. Larry Fritsch and his business, as Jim Beckett once said, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Sports Collecting World. (Note to self: Ask Dr. Beckett about the other six.) Fritsch had two of about everything except the Wagner, and isn’t one enough, after all?
Grading? Grading’s for wimps, said Larry in so many words, who’s old school condition guide was good enough for most of his mail order clients for nearly 50 years.
My last trip to Stevens Point was around 2004, and as always, there was Larry and crew back in the woods, taking phone calls, filling orders, sorting cards. Larry handed most of the day-to-day to Jeff by then, leaving Larry time to show me his three complete sets of 1908 Rose Company Postcards and explain to me why the temperature could be down to 15 below that night, but nobody worried about pipes bursting in the ground.
“They set them a lot deeper here than they do in Texas,” he laughed when I voiced concern about his house. “You worry too much. Want to see the Plank?”
– Pepper Hastings
The 2007 winter meetings are over and in the end, the hot stove league has turned into nothing more than a bunch of hot air and talk.
The final tally of actual talent that moved, well let’s just say that it was a bit anemic.
Exclusive of a few waiver-wire transactions, a total of 10 deals were swung with all trades becoming easily dwarfed by the Florida-Detroit blockbuster. That swap accounted for eight of the 24 players involved in all the deals combined — barely exceeding the 18 players who swapped organizations during the Major League phase of Thursday’s Rule 5 Draft.
For three full days I scoured the internet for trade rumors, I Tivoed Baseball Tonight with the hopes that my team would make some sort of dramatic, roster changing, headline worthy move.
And come this morning the realization hit me that reality failed to live up to the media’s sensationalism and over-blown hype.
It rarely ever does.
But on the bright side, only 71 days until pitchers and catcher report.
~Sigh~
Our Gold Label Dealers — the elite of our retail partners — will get a behind-the-scenes look at our publishing lineup later today via email.
Ask the hobby shop you frequent if they are “Beckett Gold Label” status.
If they say no, ask them “why not?” If they were, they’d be the first to know.
Filed under: Beckett Basketball
The Dallas Mavericks and San Antonio Spurs tip if for the second time tonight in a game that has become the premiere rivalry in the Western Conference (8:30 PM ET). As of late, the Mavs have had the Spurs number winning the last four meetings by an average margin of six and a half points. The first time the two met this season, the Mavs defeated the Champs 105-92; though the score really doesn’t illustrate how lopsided the game was in favor of the Mavericks.
Can we expect the same tonight? Probably. With Tim Duncan sidelined due to a knee bruise and Manu Ginobili as a game-time decision with an index finger injury, the Spurs could be left without the employ of their two best players. Then again, this is the Mavs and Spurs–anything can happen.
