Sy Berger

[Peter_Spaeth]

But back to those 1952 high numbers. Faced with a bulging warehouse of cards now almost 10 years old, Berger, the preeminent card designer, licensing agent and contract hound, now switched hats and tried his hand at actually selling baseball cards. Wholesale. Really, really wholesale.

“Around 1959 or so, I went around to carnivals and offered them for a penny a piece, and it got so bad I offered them at 10 for a penny. They would say, ‘We don’t want them.’

“I couldn’t give them away. So we said let’s get rid of them. We decided to dump them in the ocean.” Topps had stored those 1952 Topps for eight or nine years. According to Berger, these were all cut cards.

“They were put in boxes. It took three garbage trucks. I would say 300-500 cases. All high series of 1952 Topps. “I found a friend of mine who had a garbage scow and we loaded the three trucks-worth on the barge.” It was tugged out by a tugboat, with Berger on board to supervise the undertaking, such as it was. “I was out there with it. Opposite Atlantic Highlands, a few miles out.”

The cases were stacked on the center of the barge, and a switch was thrown and those (now) precious cards were consigned to the deep. “And that was the end of it,” said Berger. “Whoever thought that they would have the kind of value that they would have?”

Attaching a dollar number is essentially impossible, or at least unwieldy, but one could make a good argument that our pile of cardboard on the ocean floor would now be worth tens of millions of dollars. The exercise runs afoul of hypothetical quicksand, because if the cards hadn’t been dumped, the high series wouldn’t be so valuable 50 years later. You get the idea.