T206 & E95 Baseball Cards, ca. 1910
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GUEST:
These are a collection of what I think are tobacco cards. We found them in the home that we purchased in 1973. We bought it at auction as a house and contents and we paid $16,000 for the house. And in the process of renovating that place, we discovered these in a closet in this little tin, all secured inside of there with this little container of mothballs. The gentleman that owned the house was a volunteer coach. He founded a youth baseball league that still carries his name...
APPRAISER:
Oh, that's...
GUEST:
...to this day. And he was also inducted into the Eastern Shore of Maryland's Hall of Fame for Baseball.
APPRAISER:
Oh.
GUEST:
He was a bachelor and that was his passion. He was born in 1895 and he died in 1983.
APPRAISER:
Okay. 1909 to 1911, the American Tobacco Company issued the T206 tobacco cards. These came in cigarette packs as well as loose tobacco packages.
GUEST:
Oh.
APPRAISER:
And the American Tobacco Company advertised 16 different brands on the backs of these cards. And here we have the Piedmont. Most of yours are the Piedmont brand. How many cards total are there?
GUEST:
153.
APPRAISER:
Yeah, I'm like a kid in a candy store. When did you look at them again and say, "I might have something here"?
GUEST:
Off and on we would go back and revisit them. And then my son got into baseball.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
So he actually was the one who said we should put these in sleeves and we should probably put them away in a safe deposit box. And that's where they've been for about 20 years.
APPRAISER:
So they've rarely seen the light of day.
GUEST:
That is correct.
APPRAISER:
And that's what's amazing about this.
GUEST:
They, that is correct.
APPRAISER:
They don't all have perfect corners, but the color is phenomenal. The quality of their printing process was far beyond the competitors of this era. So the first Ty Cobb card is the Ty Cobb bat-on-shoulder variation. Now, the Ty Cobb red portrait, which is the most valuable of the Ty Cobbs in this set-- you have two, that one and this one that we've turned around, also is a Ty Cobb red portrait. And then what's interesting is, among this, you have the Ty Cobb card in the middle. That's actually an E95 put out by Philadelphia Caramel. So it's not done by the American Tobacco Company. It's, uh, classified as a, at the same era, it's a 1909, uh, E95. So the Ty Cobb bat-on-shoulder, on a scale of one to ten, it's probably a two or a three. That one would sell at auction for $3,000 to $5,000. The E95 Philadelphia Caramel, also $3,000 to $5,000 at auction.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
The red portrait, that's the most popular of his T206 cards, you have two of those. Those would sell at auction between $5,000 to $7,000 each.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
The other thing about the T206 is, they have what's called the Big Four: the Honus Wagner, the Eddie Plank, the Sherry Magee, and the Slow Joe Doyle. You have one of them.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Okay, we don't have the Honus Wagner, unfortunately-- one recently sold for over $6 million.
GUEST:
I know... (laughs)
APPRAISER:
The Sherry Magee and the Slow Joe Doyle are actual error cards. Now, the T206 set is full of errors, but there's only those two that were corrected for some reason. So, in your card here, we see Sherry Magee is spelled wrong. His name was M-A-G-E-E, and they did correct that. So the current population count for the Sherry Magee error card is that there's about somewhere between 112 to 115 that have ever been graded. So it's easiest to attain of the Big Four, but it's still considered one of the Big Four because it was an error card that was corrected. I would put an auction estimate of that one at $15,000 to $20,000.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
You have 153 total. I would put a value on this at auction, for the entire group, of $45,000 to $65,000.
GUEST:
Very nice, thank you!
APPRAISER:
Not bad, since it came with the house.
GUEST:
I got it for $16,000 and a house included.
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