Posted By:
David SmithI don't know how much of the following story is true or if I remember it correctly but this is something a veteran collector, who I will not name, once told me.
Back in the mid 1980's, this veteran collector, who is an Attorney and Broder decided that they were going to start a company and sellbaseball cards.
The collector/Attorney drew up the legal documents and he and the other guy went to Spring Training and started taking photos of players. After they took all of their photos and had them developed, they had them cropped and then had cards made up.
When all of that was finished and their first set was done they went out and tried to sell them. They ran into trouble when no major retailer would accept the cards because they were afraid MLB and the Players Association would not like it and keep them from selling authorized cards made by Topps, Fleer and Donruss.
Having money tied up in this venture, the two guys started going to card shows and selling the sets and star cards.
A little after this, MLB and the Players Association DID find out and went after these two.
At first they were going to fight it but later decided it wasn't worth it. The collector/Attorney stashed the remainihg cards in storage. That is where I first saw them in the mid 1990's and that was where they were in the Summer of 2007 when I helped him clean out that storage area.
At that time, he had thousands of these cards left. I know I picked up a stack of Barry Bonds cards, which would have been either his Rookie or second year card and counted them. In that one stack, which was falling out of it's original clear plastic wrapping, there were 500 cards.
He said he had more Bonds cards left because at the shows in the 1980's, if the sets weren't selling then people were buying the star cards individually and Bonds wasn't a big name yet.
David