this eBay item made me weep...

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Posted By: Dan Mathewson

I have been trying to get the 2 Cracker Jack Mathewsons in (at least) VG condition for as long as I can remember. I see this one, I get excited, then I read the "disclaimer"...

"Although it is belived to be a reprint made in the 1950's it still looks very real..."

It is "believed" to be a reprint?? Yeah, alright. in other words, it IS a reprint...

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1842686396

At least I didn't bid on it....

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Posted By: Marc S.

Dan:

Here's the thing: The 1915 Cracker Jack Mathewson card can pretty much be had if you have enough money. There are enough authentic examples floating around that you should be able to locate one within 2-3 months (at most) if you have the time to look and the money to pay fair value.

As for the 1914 Cracker Jack Mathewson, join the line. There has not been any examples sold as a single in at least 3 years (though it is probably longer than that). There have been one or perchance two examples that have been sold as part of Cracker Jack collections -- and even those were beat up.

The 1914 Cracker Jack Mathewson card is one of the top cards on many advanced collectors want lists. If one would ever hit the auction circuit, even in Good condition, it would most likely be a feeding frenzy, with bidding in the thousands and many bidders.

Good luck in finding both of those cards. The 1914 is an absolutely beautiful card. For now, you can at least look at the scan Peter Garcia has up -- and that is probably the closest you will get for a while.

MS

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Posted By: Dan Mathewson

Thanks Mark. Actually, I guess it's good to know the reality of things like this. It probably will be a while before I can afford to get one (or never) short of winning the lottery. I s'pose there will be a few Matty cards that I can probably assume I'll never get because of scarcity/cost.

I agree that these cards are the nicest ones I know of. I absolutely love the colors and the portrait portrayal of Matty on both of them. Imagine...out of a box of CrakerJacks almost 90 years ago...

-dan

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Posted By: Brueso

that high quality examples exist of caramel cards, etc. when you consider who they were marketed to and how long it was before real collecting of these items begin. I was a pretty collector minded kid when I was growing up, but I still don't have any of those Beatles or Dark Shadows cards I collected when I was growing up, and if I did, they wouldn't look all that great. To think some kid in 1914 might've pulled out a card and DIDN'T bend it up or at best glue it into a book boggles my mind. Add to that the likelihood of getting a 1914 Cracker Jack that wasn't badly stained by the candy itself.

I've always thought what a burn it would be if, for example, you're a kid collecting in the 1950s and you keep buying packs because you WANT that Mickey Mantle card- then maybe you actually get on in a pack, but it's got gum stains on it. I know a local dealer who said he collected 1953 Topps when he was a kid and was always after that Mantle card. By the time he looked at his cards again when he was an adult, he remembered that he had "failed"- there wasn't any Mantle. But he had a couple of Satchell Paige's.

Someone on E-bay keeps auctioning Topps Rack Packs from the 1950's- They have a Santa Claus on the top of them. I look at those and think, How did any kid who got one of those for Christmas NOT rip it open?!

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Posted By: scott (runscott)

...but the 1915s were available in sets, by mail-in, so most of the great-looking 1915s we find now probably came from broken-up mail-in sets.

--------------------------------------------
Disclaimer
Slab your own disclaimer - please cut from any legal document and place in screw-down. Refer to whenever you have issues with my posts.

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Posted By: Marc S.

<<Someone on E-bay keeps auctioning Topps Rack Packs from the 1950's- They have a Santa Claus on the top of them. I look at those and think, How did any kid who got one of those for Christmas NOT rip it open?!>>

Bruce:

Just so you know, Topps never produced those Rack Packs. Most of those rack packs were produced in the 1960s and 1970s -- and the cards inside them are typically EX/MT at best. A distributor took tons of excess Topps cards (I think he received them from Topps), and made the Christmas rack packs. Someone on another board had an actual date that some of these were released -- but more than anything, a hoard of this crap was discovered in a warehouse about two years ago, and they have been infiltrating there way into the lower echelons of hobby circles.

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Posted By: Brueso

I was wondering how they'd survived since the 50s in such great condition. I had wondered if they were manufactured sometime after the date of the cards, but I thought they might be sometime in the last decade.

I will say that some of the ones I've seen in the auctions do contain big name star cards- it's not just a bunch of commons. So it seems curious that anyone putting together those packs would have put Mantle, etc. cards in the packs when obviously they were valuable in their own right.

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Posted By: Marc S.

Again -- it was done in the 1960s and 1970s -- and if you notice, none of the cards are truly in "great" shape. It was before the baseball card market was truly something to reckon with, and it made sense from the producer's standpoint to put the stars in front -- it's not much different than someone today running an Ebay auction "1989 Topps -- 100 card lot, Ryan and Schmidt included".

A way to market off-condition/factory leftovers from years past to a careless market.

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Posted By: Brueso

why one E-bay seller sold them repeatedly and seemingly no one else had any. Thanks for solving a mystery!

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Posted By: fkw

There are many many reprint CJs that are on eBay auctioned as originals. Id estimate at least 10-15% at any given time are reprint, sometimes more. All E145-2 reprints are from the 1980s and 90s, never heard of any CJ reprinted in the 50s, thast all a bunch of horse@#%*. There are easy ways to tell the difference. Easiest way if you see the card in person, is to look at the back. All cards from the "176 Picture" series (1915) will have a back that is printed upside down. In other words the top edge of the front is the same edge as the bottom of the back. All fakes dont have this upside down back (at least not yet). Anothewr way to tell is to look at the light/white parts of picture (uniform), on real cards the white parts of uniform is the exact same color as the border (natural paper color) and will always blend into the border where they meet. See the bottom of the E145-2 Mathewson card picture enclosed, and compare it with the reprint on eBay.

The 1915s are out there, I see a few every year on eBay, but like everyone has said the 1914s are very tough, Ive only seen 2-3 on eBay in last 3 years, and a couple of those auctions ended early with someone making an offer the seller took. low/mid grade 1914s will go $1000+ in my opinion, mainly because of the attractive action pose. Good luck. Frank fkw707

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Posted By: Brian H

I haven't been paying THAT much attention but it seems to me that the reprints are always of the 1915 set (easily distinguishable by the reference to the 176 card set on the reverse rather than only 144).
This would mean that certain CJs that appeared only in the 1914 set (including the Matty throwing image) weren't even reprinted.

Please correct me (nicely) if I am wrong.