Thinking of Sports | Local Sports
Sports card collecting is not quite the same as it once was, judging from the recent story about the 11 year old from California who drew a famous Topps card.
If you have not heard the story yet, it goes something like this.
A youngster who collects sports cards, recently drew the first Paul Skenes Debut Patch card put out by Topps.
Patch cards have little pieces of a player’s uniform or some other piece of equipment attached to the card.
If you don’t recognize the name Paul Skenes, he is the 22 year old pitcher who suddenly arrived on the scene last year for the Pirates, and did so well that he started on the mound for the National League in the All-Star game.
For the 2024 season, Skenes posted a record of 11-3 and an ERA of 1.06, and finished third in the Cy Young voting.
The Pirates organization wanted to make a deal with the kid from California, to get the card for themselves.
They made him many offers, including 30 years of season tickets behind home plate at all Pirate games.
He would have a “meet and greet” with Skenes, and with Skenes’ girlfriend, Livvy Dunne, a famous gymnast and organizer from LSU, who is probably more famous than Skenes.
The boy would get two full Pirate uniforms with Skenes’ number, and autograph on them.
And there were many other offers also made.
But the kid said “no thanks!”
Obviously he was not a Pittsburgh fan, being from California. And at 11 years old, he was not likely to want to use those season tickets very often.
But the young fellow also got some good advice from somewhere. He could make a lot more profit by holding on to the card, and then having it sold at an auction.
Sometime in March, “Fanatics Collect,” a business that works these sort of deals, will have the Skenes 1/1 Debut Patch card auctioned off, and it should bring quite a tidy sum.
The young man will probably be able to pay for college with the profits from sale of the card, or maybe he will donate it to the California Wildfire Fund, to put out the fires that have burned up half of that state.
He seems to have made a wise decision by not giving in to the Pirate’s offer.
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When I was a kid, no one knew the value that baseball cards would bring. Most of us collected cards, used them for toys, bent them, and some folks even put them in the spokes of their bicycles.
I did have a few that I took good care of as I recall. Someone gave my Dad a 1954 Topps Ted Williams card #250, because Teddy Ballgame was my father’s favorite player.
Eventually Dad gave the card to me, and I put it in a shoebox that I kept in my closet, along with my other cards (which included a Willie Mays).
As I remember it, I came home after first year of college and went to clean out my closet.
My mother had already cleaned out much of it, including that dirty old shoebox with the cardboard pictures of ballplayers. Mom was an incredibly thorough housecleaner.
Yep, old Teddy Ballgame #250 was nowhere to be found. It really didn’t bother me too much at the time. At least she had kept my Rockem’ Sockem” robots.
But many years later I became interested in cards and their values. Even today, I still check occasionally on eBay to see what some of the old ones are selling for.
As of right now, the Ted Williams #250 is being sold for as much as $10,000, which might be enough to pay for a decent car for my wife, and some of my doctor and dentist bills.