My two-cents on "The Card"...boy did I enjoy it

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Posted By: Joe

Just finished reading “The Card.” Took me a few hours to read…couldn’t put it down. There have been some fine books written about the sports collectibles industry, namely Pete Williams’s “Card Sharks” and the incredibly under-appreciated “Operation Bullpen” by Kevin Nelson. But Michael O’Keeffe And Teri Thompson’s book has the potential to do to baseball cards what “Game of Shadows” has done to the steroids “hobby.” The reason for this is twofold, first: noted and respected authors as well as major league publisher, and secondly, like Barry Bonds in “Shadows,” we have a real-life villain in “The Card” in William Mastro.

I realize that some readers of this forum will take issue with some of the inaccuracies in this book—and there are a number of those--but you need to understand that this book is not written for you. Publishers would starve (and many are today) if they produced books for niche fields like us. Readers of this forum (which, by the way, makes a couple of appearances in the book) all know the story of the Gretzky T206 Wagner. Using this card as an example, this book is an attempt by two investigative journalists to expose fraud in a small but sexy industry. And they have kicked ass.

It’s basically a book about card doctoring, a practice—like steroids—everybody knew was going on but few did anything about—because everybody (including all the owners of “The Card”) was profiting from it. And while the authors essentially put the scalpel in Mastro’s hand, they could have been even harsher in their indictment of the industry titan. In fact, I thought they were more than fair in their accusations. For instance, they could have addressed the question of what has become of all the “restored” cards Mastro Vice President Ron Oser was selling 15 or so years ago. Nor did they speculate about Mastro’s reasons for changing his employment status at the auction house.


I loved this book. There’s a lot here, but I wanted more. We’ll all want more. Sadly, in the end, this really IS a book for us, because the problems of baseball card collectors amount to a hill of beans when it comes to fraud in American industry. But at least we can boo with a bit more confidence when Bill Mastro steps up to the plate.