Out of the Park

Courtesy SCP Auctions, Mission Viejo, California

Honus Wagner card that earned $2.8 million in 2007

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Not long after the late Mickey Mantle underwent a liver transplant, in 1995, he half-jokingly asked Barry Halper, a retired businessman, if he was interested in acquiring the organ the doctors had removed. Halper was not, but given his vast collection of baseball memorabilia—which included thousands of uniforms, trading cards and autographs belonging to the Hall of Famer and his peers alongside quirkier mementos, such as a pair of dentures worn by the outfielder Ty Cobb—it was a reasonable question. For more than 20 years, the basement of Halper’s Livingston, New Jersey, house doubled as a sports museum that regularly attracted celebrity visitors such as Mantle and fellow New York Yankees great Joe DiMaggio.

Halper sold the bulk of his 80,000-item trove for $21.8 million at Sotheby’s New York in 1999, not long after unloading a portion to the Baseball Hall of Fame for an undisclosed sum. Among the auction highlights were a game-used Mickey Mantle glove (est. $10–20,000), purchased by the actor-comedian Billy Crystal for $239,000; the Yankees hero Lou Gehrig’s glove from his final game, on April 30, 1939 (est. $35–50,000), which fetched $387,500; and an autographed Ty Cobb Philadelphia Athletics jersey from 1928 (est. $50–100,000), which earned an impressive $332,500.

Halper’s collection, although unusual in size and scope, exemplifies the intensity with which fans pursue memorabilia. “They want to be closer to the game,” says Phil Wood, a Washington, D.C., sportscaster and one of the foremost experts on game-used baseball jerseys. “What better way than by acquiring an artifact from an actual event?”

Sports collectibles fall into three main categories—trading cards, autographed merchandise and game-used equipment—plus a few smaller niches, such as figurines, advertising pieces, lithographs, press pins and publications. Although auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s (the latter recently discontinued its regular sales of collectibles and memorabilia) have conducted sportsthemed auctions, the most prominent sales are hosted by companies devoted to the trade: Hunt Auctions, of Exton, Pennsylvania; Lelands, of South Dennis, Massachusetts; Robert Edward Auctions, of Watchung, New Jersey; and scp Auctions, of Mission Viejo, California, among others. Baseball, with its long history as the national pastime, commands far more interest from collectors than other recreational sports and holds many of the auction records.

Those who have made a fortune from collecting—like Halper, who died in 2005—began in the early 1970s, a decade before the market exploded as baby boomers paid premiums to replace the baseball cards from the 1950s that their mothers tossed out while cleaning house. Today 1950s-era cards vary in price from a few dollars to many thousands, depending on their condition and the player pictured. Of course, earlier examples can fetch even greater sums. Last fall, an anonymous collector dropped $2.8 million —an auction record for a baseball card—at SCP Auctions for a pristine-condition card featuring Honus Wagner, the legendary Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop, that was once owned by the hockey star Wayne Gretzky. The 1909 card is considered the holy grail of sports-card collecting. Less than 100 are believed to exist, because Wagner—either from conviction or from a desire for further compensation—objected to having his image associated with tobacco, with which cards were packaged at the time, and his card was pulled after a small number were produced.

As the card market boomed from the 1980s on, collectors turned their attention to other athletic paraphernalia, especially game-used jerseys. In this year’s edition of its spring auction, held annually in May, Robert Edward Auctions sold a 1936 flannel jersey that had belonged to the Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, of the St. Louis Cardinals (est. $50–75,000), for $103,500 and a 1953 one worn by Stan Musial, another Cardinals Hall of Famer (est. $10–20,000), for $44,000. The firm’s president, Robert Lifson, attributes the high prices for such items to the interaction of material and history. “Flannel jerseys are very rare because they were not manufactured for retail sale,” he says. Until the early 1970s, when players switched to polyester knits, they were issued just two uniforms for road games and two for home contests. “If you find a jersey from a player from that era,” Lifson continues, “you can have a high degree of confidence that he wore it, because there was only a universe of four jerseys out there. Otherwise what did he do—go out in his underwear?”