Ken Kendrick Talks About His Altered Wagner
 

Can't stand the channel and the host but kudos for getting the Kendrick interview. Kendrick talks about how he knew the PSA 8 Wagner was altered when he bought it and how he feels about it. Worth a watch for those interested.

https://youtu.be/5BGoJFENgNo

Isn't Ken Kendrick a part owner of Collectors Universe? Smart guy.

Ken claims there are 30 wagners in the world. Id surmise closer to 70. Additionally, the magnification of the top edge made the card look horrible to me.

He said he has pictures of it in its unaltered state. Would love to see those.

I believe at least one was published in the NY Post many years ago, although it was not high quality.

Apparently someone recently posted a cleaned up (better than before)
Pic to T206Resource - (showing 47 examples)
https://www.t206resource.com/Wagner-Gallery.html

Great video.

So let me get this straight, after Ken purchased the card and the trimming history came out in the Mastro trial David Hall called Ken and offered to refund to him the $2.8 million he paid because PSA had failed to notice that the card was trimmed. But, in a recent podcast David Hall says that the card was agreed by him and his graders to have not been trimmed. What am I missing?

+1 ... also if he accepted the offer would PSA deactivate it and regrade as authentic ?

Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda

PSA would love to get it for 2.8
guessing it is now worth in the area of 30-40 million

I think even if it was changed from a PSA 8 to Authentic Trimmed
it would still retain the same value...the pedigree alone and history of this one
card.

Agreed. At this point the flip is irrelevant.

Wow the inside story

Cool video

Thanks for sharing

Great Video. Just a stunning card and collection. With extra love to the PSA 9 Cobb and JJ CJ's in the video. Good lord.

p.s. I don't mind Geoff Wilson. I appreciate his enthusiasm for the hobby.

Enthusiasm is one thing, but putting out videos telling people (especially kids) who to invest in while he has lost millions with his investments is very irresponsible.

Is Gary Vee still out there?

There are so many stories about the card. What I found very intriguing is what Kendrick said he and the private investigator that he hired found in tracking the history of the card.

Alan Ray has never said who he got the card from but Kendrick said it belonged to a couple in Palm Beach Florida and it was in a shoe box with 30 other cards and after the husband passed away the wife was going to throw the cards out but an emplyee said that he wanted them and that employee was a relative of Alan Ray.

On the other hand Bill Mastro said that there were hundreds of other cards that were with the Wagner when he purchased it but who knows with him in his interview with Brian Gray he also said that his grandmother found a wagner in a shoebox that she had which I find very hard to believe.

I thought the received wisdom is that Ray got it from his father who had found it at a Florida flea market. I don't understand how a p.i. hired 20 years after the fact would be in a position to uncover much of anything about a single baseball card.

Probably got bored and left.

Yeah. Now influencing something else.

Yes that's one of the stories but in his interview Kendrick says that he has a pre-altered photo of the card that he got from the "people involved in the original sale of the card" so if that's true then he or the p.i. he hired must have talked to Ray or Sevchuk.

Maybe Ray fibbed about it back in the day and made up the story about his father, and later decided to come clean perhaps with the p.i. promising it was only to be revealed to Kendrick? Who knows. In any event, there's nothing still back beyond the 1980s.

Has anyone read the book on the PSA 8 Wagner "The Card"? Wondering what info it provides that hasn't been discussed here.

Yes and that's where some of the "info" about the card comes from. In the book it states that Sevchuk told Zimmerman that Ray's father purchased an uncut sheet at a Florida flea market but it also states in the book that years later when asked about it both Sevchuk and Ray refused to discuss the origin of the card.

Yeah I did not understand that, I mean why the cloak and dagger stuff? Especially when Ray was claiming that Mastro had cut the card.

Maybe the trimming isn't the most nefarious thing about the card.

I’m wondering why Ken Kendrick won’t share photographs of the Wags card before the Masteo trim jobs. Yes, I think he trimmed it twice.

Those rumors have been around for a long time, but was there ever any serious substantiation?

The info about how Ray got it seems to be brand new....and plausible. It would explain where the card lived for the 70+ years prior to Ray selling to Mastro. I believe kendrick wouldn't show the photos because they have pictures of possibly now-deceased prior owners holding the card, and maybe he was only given those on agreement to keep them private.

Another interesting aspect is that those original owners had the name "Wagner" and believe they were related to honus. Amazing they were just gonna throw out the shoebox but gave it to an employee.

The other aspect i think i've heard reported is that this wagner was part of a partial sheet that also had a plank on it, and they were both cut from that. This story doesn't quite mesh with that aspect. But perhaps that is what was in the shoebox.

I don't think it's a picture of the original owners holding the card I think it's a picture of Ray or Ray ond Sevchuk with the card.

The majority of the story is pretty fishy. The card supposedly is originally purchased at a Florida flea market in sheet form where it's brought to a New york dealers shop to make a back room deal for cash. Ray has the only original photo of the card with it's "bowed out side borders" (a few people supposedly had xerox coppies of the photo) but he says he doesn't want to share them because he plans on writing a book about the card.

There are many possibilities as to why we've been kept in the dark regarding the origins of this Wagner. Other cards from that uncut sheet might've gotten high grades from PSA as well and the owners of those cards don't want any drama.

According to Mastro he was told the cards were in strips before he saw them, the Wagner was cut well oversized but a Plank was cut terribly undersized. I don’t recall him mentioning any other cards specifically. I see no reason why he would be lying about that.

I could be wrong, but wasn't this Plank the supposed match to the Wagner??

I believe this is the one that purportedly came from the same (partial) sheet. Charley Conlon owned it before REA auctioned it.
https://collectrea.com/archives/2009...06-eddie-plank

Mastro talks about the too tightly cut Plank at 1:10:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omp0P5kJ9Cs

Not a chance in hell. It would absolutely plummet in value. Certainly not to the level of other authentic or low grade copies, but it would almost certainly fall to where high eye appeal altered cards typically land, which is usually about the price of a PSA 4.

+1

I think it depends on how strongly the connection is between this being THE WAGNER, and it being in a PSA 8 holder.

Certainly this card has some crazy notoriety that eclipses the flip.

But once you divorce the card from the flip, is it still the same card? While the cardboard purists and grading naysayers among us will definitely suggest that it’s the same card with or without the flip, I’m not convinced that there isn’t some diminution in value due to reduced cachet and recognizability if the flip is removed.

A there’s no question that for the set registry goons out there, the flip makes a difference, even for THE WAGNER.

I disagree. The value is all in the notoriety and historical significance at this point. it's the most famous card in the hobby. It had a book written about it. Everyone knows it's sheet cut and then cut again. Well, maybe not the sheet cut part, but the second cut for sure. Who cares that the flip says 8?

I'm very surprised that Ken's collection has almost no diversity. The only non-baseball cards I see are George Mikan, Michael Jordan and Bronko Nagurski. Where the heck is everyone else ?? :confused: What about the rookies of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving ?? What about Johnny Unitas, Jim Brown, Bart Starr, Paul Hornung and Joe Namath ? What about Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky ?? I could go on and on here ... I know baseball cards are king, but still, for him to just pass over all those guys I mentioned ... very surprising. I would take a MINT Wilt over most of those baseball players.

Many vintage collectors exclusively collect baseball and have zero interest in other sports. I am one of those people for example.

He mentioned a couple things that highlight his hyper selection focus: First is that he was collecting baseball cards since 1952. Second is that he turned down a private purchasing option of a higher graded version of the 55 Topps Clemente. Although his auction bidding proxy stopped bidding on at 3am once the max price Ken was willing to pay for the Clemente was exceeded by another bidder who ultimately won the card, that same buyer has tried to sell to Ken at a big multiple. He said in business he learned basically when to walk away. So his money seems very strategically spent to a limit. Thus a reason he may not want to spend one single dollar on something that doesn’t fit his collecting goals, since that would take that dollar away from something else he wanted to attain.

But Ken does like other sports and he was once the part-owner of the Phoenix Suns. He probably had dinner with many of those guys I mentioned above.

Bottom line is this: you can't have the best collection in the world if you focus just on one sport. It's not about who has all the highest-graded examples or how much money your collection is worth, it's about diversity. You could have a beautiful PSA 6 Mantle, but if you also have Chamberlain, Gretzky, Howe, Jack Nicklaus, Pele, etc., then that's what makes a great collection.

The best collection in the world is definitely not Kens. This one is about a zillion times better. Don't know if it's the best either but I'd think its up there.

https://youtu.be/QXavhN_jtCA

Hall saying it's "not trimmed" is about as trustworthy as Bill Clinton discussing the definition of "is" while under oath.

Hall may believe in his heart of hearts that the card was not trimmed per se, but he definitely knew it was not factory cut. I don't buy that he didn't; he was the world's foremost expert on the T206 set, and at one point in time had what I believe was the most complete master set with nearly all known back variations. This is one of the things that perpetually leaves me in SMH status about PSA. "We are the experts, send your valuable vintage cards to us." But yet what is that expertise when Hall is asked directly? Oh, it "doesn't look trimmed" to him. Huh? That's the "expert" opinion? Any pawn broker with a cigarette in his other hand can tell me that.

The whole genesis of PSA mixed with this story to me feels shady as hell...

Totally agreed. I've tried, but it's hard to not see Wilson as a bit of a slimeball. His previous "investments" that are all on the ocean floor right now with the Titanic somehow seem to get conveniently ignored. Maybe he does some good somewhere in other spheres, but from what I've seen when the videos get specific - he is painfully unfamiliar with most vintage cards, and on the other side from what I can tell his stuff seems to be mostly all about money.

This whole story is interesting if you compare the recent Kendrick video (Mastro BAD) with Bill's podcast interview that (if I recall) was only a few months ago.

Bill paints this innocent picture of wanting to keep the card for himself, and using a paper cutter (which he still owns, BTW) to change the shape from an oblong "football" of a card off some huge uncut sheet into the precise and razor sharp item that eventually became Gretzky's PSA 8. It was all very above board, innocent, and hey back then nobody knew much or cared about things like trimming or alteration anyway, right? Jim Copeland didn't care about trimming or apparently even ask any questions when Mastro sold him the pre-PSA card back in the late 1980's.

Since then of course, due to Mastro's other (real) serious problems with shill bidding and federal prison - it's been all too easy I think just to consider him the bad guy with the Wagner too. But was he really? I've seen others on this board who consider PSA crooks from the word go, saying David Hall himself was a known card doctor who wished to profit further from that with his grading company - and that the whole thing with the Wagner was a big conspiracy from the beginning.

Interesting in this, Ken's position is all "Poor PSA, they got duped, they didn't know..." :confused:

I find it very hard to believe that both David Hall and Bill Hughes believed that it was an unaltered, pack issued card.

PSA grades the Wagner an 8, and the Plank counterpart an Authentic grade.

Interesting

I remember Donald Spence at one point had all of the big cards that these big collectors today own.

Ohhhh ... my .... God .... :eek::eek::eek::eek: