Rare 1865 baseball card fetches $92K at Maine auction

An 1865 baseball card discovered at a yard sale in rural Maine sold for $92,000 at a Wednesday auction. The seller found the rare baseball card in a photo album, for which he paid $100. 

|
Saco River Auction Co./AP/File
A rare 1865 baseball card of the Brooklyn Atlantics, discovered in a photo album bought at a yard sale in Baileyville, Maine, on the Canadian border. The Saco River Auction Co. sold the card for $92,000 at its Wendnesday, Feb. 6, 2012 auction.

 A rare 148-year-old baseball card discovered at a rural Maine yard sale has been auctioned for $92,000.

The card depicting the Brooklyn Atlantics amateur baseball club was sold by Saco River Auction Co. in Biddeford Wednesday night and it drew plenty of interest.

Bidding started at $10,000 and quickly rose to the final $92,000, which included an 18-percent premium.

The name of the buyer, who was at the auction house, was not released.

"We're happy with it and the consigner is happy with it," said Troy Thibodeau, manager and auctioneer at Saco River Auction.

A Maine man who doesn't want to be publicly identified found the card inside an old photo album he bought while antique picking in the small town of Baileyville on the Canadian border. The man bought the photo album, old Coca-Cola bottles and a couple of oak chairs together in a single purchase for less than $100, Thibodeau said.

The card isn't the same as a modern-day baseball card, which became common in the 1880s. Rather, it's an original photograph from 1865 mounted on a card, showing nine players and a manager.

The Library of Congress said last month it was aware of only two copies of the photo. The other is in the institution's collection.

In its book "Baseball Americana," the Library of Congress calls the item the first dated baseball card, handed out to supporters and opposing teams in a gesture of bravado from the brash Brooklynites, who were dominant and won their league championships in 1861, 1864 and 1865.

It was impossible to predict what kind of price the card would fetch because of its rarity, Thibodeau said, but he guessed before the auction that the winning bid would fall somewhere between $50,000 and $500,000. The priciest baseball card ever is a 1909 Honus Wagner card, which sold for $2.8 million in 2007.

Tom Bartsch, editor of Sports Collectors Digest, said $92,000 is a good price for a pre-war card without a Hall of Famer's picture.

"There are very few artifacts around from the 1860s," he said. "Baseball was near its infancy in that time."

Chris Ivy, director of sports auctions for Heritage Auctions, said there's also only a small pool of buyers for such an esoteric item.

Both said the story of the card's discovery remarkable is a reminder to collectors of all kinds that a rare find can easily be missed among otherwise unremarkable items.

"It's what keeps those treasure hunters out there going," Ivy said.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Rare 1865 baseball card fetches $92K at Maine auction
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0207/Rare-1865-baseball-card-fetches-92K-at-Maine-auction
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe