Burn your rare cards?

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Posted By: Jimi

Here's a crazy off the wall scenario for you all that I have often pondered. Let's suppose over many years of collecting you obtain several duplicates of the same rare card (ex. Magie T206 error). You then knowing that you have a lot of money invested in these decide to publicly (as in so people of the card world would know) burn all of them except for one. Are you suddenly richer because you have one of the last cards in circulation, or have you just commited a huge error!?!?!

This question was brought up in another group I am in and I thought I'd share it with you. We were trying to think of a way to restore the thought that our 1989 Topps cards still in the bottom of our closests may actually be worth something someday if we collected a billion of them and simply burn them! Fat chance right?!

Jimi

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Posted By: tbob

Let's say a guy corners the market on E94 Speaker cards and then destroys them all but one and that destruction is made public, I think the value of the Speaker would zoom. Whether it zooms proportionately or exponentially, that I am not sure of, and collectors would probably be so incensed they'd never bid on the card during their lifetimes.

I recall that an outfit called T206.com or The Tobacco Card Company or something like that, tried in the 80's to corner the market on T206s without success.

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Posted By: Rob L

Isn't there something about the Topps 1952 Mantle having the high price because a large portion of the high numbered cards were destroyed or lost by Topps?

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Posted By: dennis

If you cornered the market,there would be no need to destroy the cards. the 52 mantle card was double printed.it has a high demand no matter how many are out there,but,that said it was in the destroyed high # series.

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Posted By: Richard Masson

I was involved in the Pinnacle/Score bankruptcy. Their last significant asset was significant (by both dollars and weight) of unsold sportscard inventory. They couldn't sell it because the amounts owed to the players unions (royalties) exceeded their expected liquidation proceeds. The inventory was destroyed, yet I don't think it had any impact on the value of their cards as collectibles, there were just fewer of them.

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Posted By: tbob

Supposedly Topps took tons of boxes and boxes of high numbered 52 cards and dumped them in the ocean. Mantle was a high number card in that set. I don't know if that story is apocryphal or not but I seem to have heard it more than once over the years. Topps then wised up after the '52 fiasco and started issuing their high numbered card sets in lower numbers because come fall kids were starting to get revved up and buying football cards and losing interest in that year's baseball set.

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Posted By: Richard Masson

the Kentucky Fried rat. But I still believe it. There was a similar story related to the 1967 high numbers and a fire in the production plant that limited output. I believe that too, because I want to.

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Posted By: dennis

but it sounds good,i want to believe too!

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Posted By: Scott Elkins

that Tbob is going to do something like this with all those E94's and E98's! Make sure you burn a lot of Old Put's as well Tbob - that way my Cobb will be worth more.

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Posted By: warshawlaw

Sy Berger of Topps has confirmed it in interviews on many occasions. The cards were stored at Topps' warehouse for 8 years while they tried to figure out ways to use old inventory. They even tried to offer them to carnivals and when that failed, had them barged and dumped in the Atlantic.

BTW, a great book on the underbelly of the hobby is "Card Sharks" by Pete Williams. You should be able to find it on Amazon.

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Posted By: Richard Masson

Won't be too eye-opening for the cynics on this board, but gives an early account of the maestros at Upper Deck and what happened as our hobby went from Geek Kingdom to mainstream.

Card grading in vintage material, and its attendant issues, is a natural outgrowth of the Upper Deck story, as baseball cards went from being a kids pastime to a low-end lottery for adults. I still can't believe it when I hear current stories about the new card market. Chase cards with bat splinters and chopped up jerseys! Just incredible.

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Posted By: barrysloate

Here's a related dilemma- let's suppose the real reason the T206 Honus Wagner is rare is that when the card was pulled someone at the factory took a thousand of them and stashed them away in a box somewhere in the depths of the factory. It's now 2005 and somehow you find that box and inside it are the thousand T-206 Wagners. What do you do? If word gets out, it becomes about as valuable as a Matty black cap (not that a thousand of those would be the end of the world). In one sense you are a multimillionaire, but at the same time you can't flood the market. What is the best way to liquidate?

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Posted By: Billy

You never could. Id sell one and keep the rest

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Posted By: Richard Masson

I think the Wagner and Plank were chase cards.

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Posted By: barrysloate

Richard, you're thinking of the T206 Hal Chase. That was the chase card.

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Posted By: Julie

to keep you from getting some kind of premium--why is it not within the realm of reason (wherever that is) that the t206 people made some ultra-rare cards, so people would chase them? Or--=didn't anybody think like that back then?

Ol' Chase managed to get his puss on more cards than anybody, you know? Good grief, what a surplus. Nice cards, too.
T206s, T202s for a couple...

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Posted By: tbob

<<If you cornered the market,there would be no need to destroy the cards.>>

If a prospective buyer believed only one, say T213-3 Matty existed, the price would be astronomical. If he knew you had all 10 and were just sitting on them, the price would be much lower because of the fear you might sell 4 or 5 of them and the price would plummet.

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Posted By: Richard Masson

But isn't it true that Plank exists with two different backs? Why the scarcity, then? Chase card theory has been around a long time. The Patterson Stengel (I think that's the set), the US Caramel McKinley, that George C. Miller card...why not the Plank and the Wagner?

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Posted By: warshawlaw

The other examples mentioned had contests attached to them. I don't know of a T206 contest.

Wasn't there a permission letter than the ATC had players sign? I recall seeing one auctioned some time ago. Perhaps the clearance department at the ATC got a little sloppy and ended up pulling the Honus as a result of lack of clearance?

Plank I cannot figure, unless they had the same problem twice or someone accidentally ran the plate twice.

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Posted By: Rhett Yeakley

Richard, The Stengel card is from the Maple Crispette set.

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Posted By: Brian Weisner

52 High Number.....


Hi Guys,
The famous dumping story is true, but many of the cards were also dumped in Canada. And that's where most of the really sharp 52's have been found. Be well Brian

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Posted By: barrysloate

There is another theory about the Plank scarcity. There are a number of A's missing from the set- Mack, Coombs, and a few others who escape me; someone once suggested that there may have been a team boycott because the players weren't compensated, and Plank may have joined in a little later than the others. I'm not saying that theory is totally satisfying, but it is interesting.

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Posted By: Rhys

Were the 52 topps cards dumped in packs or just stacks of cards. If the entire wax box was dumped, there is still a fortune worth of 52 Topps wax wrappers at the bottom of the ocean. They should still be ok from the water resistant wax paper even though the cards would be mush by now. I am sure several thousand of those babies would be worth the cost of a few deep sea divers. I think it was just boxes full of the cards though if I remember right.

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Posted By: Steve Dawson

A collector made the cover of SCD when he protested the MLB players' strike that year by burning a huge pile of baseball cards. What made it so noteworthy was that the first card he lit up was his 1952 Topps Mantle.


Steve

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

that guy burned a real 1952 Topps Mantle. As I said in a column back then, it was just too coincidental that the card he was shown holding to the match was centered exactly the same as the full-size, full-color picture of the card we had recently published in the first issue of Baseball Cards Magazine.

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Posted By: Adam J. Baxter

Adam (Warshawlaw),
There was an ATC permission letter auctioned by REA in 1997, lot# 20. The letter w/ envelope was sent to Neal Ball. The story is that sportswriters from various cities would contact the ballplayers and request their permission to use images of them in the T206 set. In all likelyhood ATC also compensated the writers for doing so. The letter sold for $3,795.

Best,
Adam

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Posted By: Kevin Cummings

I am reading a Honus Wagner biography and it says the following:

"In 1909, the company (ATC) offered John Gruber, a local sportswriter and the well-respected, longtime official scorekeeper of the Pirates, ten dollars to secure Wagner's written permission for the use of his likeness in this set of cards. Gruber sent the letter to Wagner, who wrote back that he didn't want his picture in cigarettes, but enclosed a check for ten dollars so Gruber would not miss out on the opportunity. Gruber saved the check and framed it.

There has been much speculation about what possessed Wagner to reject this offer when he had accepted many others. Some people assumed that he must have had a disdain for tobacco, but he was an avid cigar smoker and more often than not had a chaw in his mouth........

However, until World War I, cigarettes were held in much lower esteem than cigars, which were often viewed as a symbol of self-assured manhood. Dreyfuss (Pirate owner) and Clarke (Pirate manager) despised the use of cigarettes....Dreyfuss was even wary about procuring players who smoked and for that reason missed out on signing Hall of Famer Tris Speaker as a youngster.

At the time of Wagner's decision, many politicians were being asked to take action on smoking by minors. In 1910, Pennsylvania passed a law prohibiting the sale of cigarettes to boys under twenty-one.......He (Wagner) simply did not want these youths to be lured into purchasing cigarettes just to get his picture card."

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Posted By: Steve Dawson

I never believed . . . January 31 2005, 1:56 PM


that guy burned a real 1952 Topps Mantle. As I said in a column back then, it was just too coincidental that the card he was shown holding to the match was centered exactly the same as the full-size, full-color picture of the card we had recently published in the first issue of Baseball Cards Magazine.



Wow...thanks for the insight Bob. To this day, I've always thought he lit up a real one.

It's kinda funny, three of my most distinct memories involve the '52 Topps Mantle...that incident, the guys who bought/sold three '52 Topps Mantles for $3,000 each at a Philly show back then (and not too long afterward the card dropping below $1,000 each), and a dealer accidently putting a '52 Mantle in a Dominos Pizza box and tossing it in the dumpster, and when he realized what he'd done, finding it with pepperoni stains on it.


Steve

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Posted By: Glenn

I'm sure the value of the individual cards you didn't burn would increase somewhat, but it wouldn't make up for the value of what you destroyed. If there are, let's say, 50 legitimate T206 Wagner's around and you owned 40 of them and decided to destroy three-fourths of the ones you owned, you'd have gone from owning 80% of the Wagner's to just half of them. No way the prices would jump enough to make that profitable (except from the perspective of all the other owners, who would surely applaud your actions). Even if you owned all of them and destroyed all but one, I can't imagine anyone would pay $10 million for it.

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Say, did you hear about the Norwegian who won an Olympic gold medal? He was so proud of it, he had it bronzed.

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Posted By: Bob

If there's any justice in the world, as the bonfire of burning cards is at it's peak a gust of wind would blow the one you kept out of your hands into the pile.

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Posted By: Darren J. Duet

Anyone caught burning or destroying prewar cards in any manner should be subjected to capital punishment.

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Posted By: Gilbert Maines

If all of the above is true, then why would anybody try to corner the market on OJ Corcorans?

Or as has been speculated:

Here's a related dilemma- let's suppose the real reason the T206 Honus Wagner is rare is that when the card was pulled someone at the factory took a thousand of them and stashed them away in a box somewhere in the depths of the factory. It's now 2005 and somehow you find that box and inside it are the thousand T-206 Wagners. What do you do? If word gets out, it becomes about as valuable as a Matty black cap (not that a thousand of those would be the end of the world). In one sense you are a multimillionaire, but at the same time you can't flood the market. What is the best way to liquidate?


If I had a box of mint and near mint t206 Wagners, I would post full page ads offering to buy one. Now I don't know how many mint t206 Wagners exist, but it is my guess that they rarely come up for sale. After a while Id get one graded, then sell it - while continuing my advertising.

Once my name was established through all of the advertising and multiple sales Id be getting discreet private requests for more. But how many can there be? 1000 according to Barry's hypothesis. I wouldn't be able to sell them all this way, nor could I liquidate them very fast, nor would I have to.

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Posted By: john/z28jd

Man i shouldve read the thread before i went and burned all my rare cards.Fool me once shame on you,fool me 100+ times i end up losing alot of cards

Oh well,from now on ill read the thread first before following this board like its a cult leader(meaning i just do what is says without thinking,instead of looking for an explanation)Lesson learned

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Posted By: Jay Miller

A similar story has been told about the "world's most valuable stamp" the British Guiana One Cent Black on Magenta. This stamp is thought of as unique today. However, as the rumor goes, a second example was found early in the last century. The owner of the first copy secured the second copy and distroyed it thereby maintaining the uniqueness of his copy.

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Posted By: barrysloate

Jay- That makes no sense if it is true. Isn't the cumulative value of both stamps worth more than the value of a single unique one? Larry Fritsch had or still has both Lindy Lindstrom cards after he purchased the one we auctioned- do you think he will tear one up to preserve the value of the other? I say the stamp rumor is false.

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Posted By: Jay Miller

Barry- You may be right although I'm not 100% convinced. If Mastronet auctioned off a unique T206 (case 1) or auctioned off the only 2 known copies of a T206 (case 2) which would yield more? I'm not sure of the answer. However, it is an ego thing to have a unique item and perhaps that entered into the owner's thinking.

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Posted By: john/z28jd

It may make no sense value wise but if the one guy had the stamp for a long time thinking it was the only one he mightve taken alot of pride in that and he might be so rich that the monetary value is a distant 2nd to rareness in this case.Think of how disheartening it would be to find out a one-of-a-kind card isnt really that at all,and if youre rich and the person who owns that card finding a 2nd copy exists might make you do something drastic like buy the other copy and burn it.

I thought about people doing that for newer cards like late 80s topps that are so plentiful.I dont think enough moms throw away cards anymore because they think they are worth something.AS couple years ago i went to a ladies house,shes a friend of my fathers,and she and her husband have a lot of money,definitely millionaires.Anyway she had some cards in her summer house that belonged to her nephew who didnt want them anymore and she was treating these things like gold when i went there.Ive known her for a few years but she was handing me stacks at a time instead of letting me look thru them and when i told her the whole shoebox was worth about 20 bucks on a good day,she said she would just put them back in the closet and hold onto them for awhile

I for one would certainly appreciate a large group of people getting together and burning some 87-91 topps cards.I do have a friend that helps out tho.He buys boxes of cards and pulls the good cards(maybe 4-5) and throws out the rest.I also remember going to a card store as a kid and seeing cards in the trash and the lady running the store said,yeah kids throw away the commons all the time.
Basically tho,without the big public burning,cards that were made recently in high supply wont be worth anything for awhile eventho im sure alot have met some sort of demise just because the value seems to have been stagnant for the last 15 years

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Posted By: barrysloate

Whether or not one unique item is worth more than the sum of two is debatable. What I'm talking about is physically taking the second item and going through the process of tearing it up. Jay, you have at least a few Old Judges that are unique. If you found a second, would you then tear it into little pieces and throw it in the trash? Of course not. How could anyone do that?

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Posted By: Gilbert Maines

Can it be more of an ego thing to have a unique item than to have the only two? I would prefer the latter - it seems like more of an accomplishment.