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bruce DorskindHistoric, offbeat pieces of sports history up for bid
EnlargeBy Anne Ryan, USA TODAY
Some of the items to be auctioned by Mastro Auctions include a Hank Aaron 1969 Atlanta Braves signed game worn home jersey, a Mickey Mantle 500th home run ball (darker), a Babe Ruth single signed ball, a Ty Cobb game used bat, and a set of T215 Pirate Cigarette baseball cards.
By Mike Dodd, USA TODAY
BURR RIDGE, Ill. — The heart of the warehouse for Mastro Auctions looks like it could be a storage room for any company — large metal shelves filled with white cardboard boxes and black plastic tubs.
The sports fan's heart, however, will beat a little faster upon closer inspection.
The 18,000-square-foot facility in suburban Chicago is the temporary home to some of the most sought-after and a few of the more offbeat pieces of sports memorabilia in the country. It is here items set for auction are authenticated, documented and photographed for the auction catalog, then shipped to their new owners.
This year, it has held memorabilia as valuable as a set of 1912 "Pirate" cigarette baseball cards that sold for $960,000, as noteworthy as Yankees manager Miller Huggins' 1927 world championship ring and as unconventional as a clump of Mickey Mantle's hair and Hank Aaron's 1968-73 Georgia driver's license.
Mastro, the largest sports auction house in the world, recently sold the baseballs from Mantle's 500th career home run ($144,000) and Barry Bonds' 70th homer of his record-breaking 2001 season ($14,400).
The ball from Bonds' 755th homer, tying Hank Aaron's career record, will go up for bid in an internet auction by Sotheby's and SCP Auctions the end of this month. Bonds' record-breaking homers — 756, 757 and 758, but not 759 — were caught by fans, along with Alex Rodriguez's 500th homer, and it's expected several of those balls will go to auction.
Sports auction houses are sophisticated operations, a byproduct of striking growth in the memorabilia industry. Longtime collector/dealer Bill Mastro's first auction in 1996 pulled in $767,000. Today, the firm generates about $10 million from each of its three premium auctions and totals more than $40 million in sales of sports memorabilia and Americana a year.
A staff of 40 employees prepares and runs the auctions from the office/warehouse, many mixing a passion for the subject with their acumen for the business.
"I still love this stuff," says Mastro president/chief operating officer Doug Allen, a former vice president for a technology company who used to set up a table at weekend collectors' shows to buy and sell tobacco cards and Chicago Cubs memorabilia.
At times, there's as much as $15 million worth of memorabilia stored in the secured warehouse, with some of the more valuable and portable items in the three large safes on the premises. Most items are kept in the boxes or tubs, each tagged with an inventory code.
The auction house, which collects a 15% consignment fee from the seller and a 20% premium from the buyer, receives items up until two months before the sale in order to produce the slick 500- to 600-page catalog.
Items are photographed in one of two in-house studios, one with a camera hanging from the ceiling by a cable to capture large objects, and trading cards are digitally scanned.
"Everything is done internally except the printing of the catalog," Allen says. "The goal of this facility is we don't want anything to have to leave here."
Nationally recognized experts in autographs and game-used materials come to the facility for two days at a time to authenticate the items before each of the three auctions.
Invariably, there are items that are not authentic, and they are placed in a separate bin to ship back to their owners.
"We call them, give them the bad news, then return them," Allen says, adding that many items are caught by Mastro's consignment specialists earlier in the process.
The auction house works with sellers to try to document the provenance of a high-end collectible, such as a game-used uniform or bat. A letter from the player, a teammate, team equipment manager or, with older items, the original owner, can enhance the value. "It places it in the hands of the player," Allen says.
Mastro employs eight full-time writers, each with an area of expertise, who research the items to identify them as specifically as possible, then write detailed descriptions for the catalog.
For example, researchers identified a baseball signed by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as one from a barnstorming tour in 1927, the year Ruth hit 60 homers. The distinctive balls used on the tour were made by Worth and featured red-and-blue stitching. This one sold for $72,000 at Mastro's live auction in Cleveland in conjunction with the national sports collectors convention this month. (Eighty-three high-end lots sold for $4.3 million at the auction).
The writers have several bookcases of reference material for the research, ranging from a book with patent-pending dates to three-ring binders with copies of every big-league box score from 1920 to 1999.
In addition to its three premium auctions conducted by internet and telephone, in which lots sell for an average of $5,000, Mastro also conducts three internet-only "classic" auctions each year, with lots averaging $1,200 to $1,500.
The current auction, which runs for about three weeks and closes in stages from Aug. 29-31, includes a 1939 Hall of Fame induction ball signed by six early inductees including Ruth, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner.
Allen says he has "put some feelers out" to the fans who caught the Bonds 756 and A-Rod 500 balls and is waiting to hear back. The Bonds ball could sell for about $500,000 and the Rodriguez artifact for $80,000 to $100,000, he estimates.
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