Posted By:
Tom BoblittNot to defend Mr. Lemke, but I think that since this is the first 'pass' at the list, at least they got them in there. The prices are completely inaccurate for the most part though. Having a large amount of them, I can speak from experience on purchase price for them.
In the last Hunt's auction, the Mathewson and Young went for basically the same thing (in EXMT/NRMT) condition--about $4100/$4300 (before the 15% premium). Lajoie went for $2000+ and Wagner (uniform) went for $3600. All STRONG prices. The average commons in the lots of 5-6 went at about $600 each. The lot of 5 hofers brought about $1300 each (with the premium).
Terry Knouse at Tik and Tik without question has the largest amount of these FOR SALE, albeit at quite a lofty price. At last year's National he had about 60-70 of them. The average 'commons' were $700 and average hofers were $2K to $3K.
The next-to-last Lipset auction had quite a few from the Don McPherson collection that averaged around $400 or so but they were in VGEX to EX condition. In the last 3-4 years they have gone from $100-$200 each in decent condition to $600-$700.
Large lots of them in Mastronet have brought $12-$18K. I won a lot of 39 from a few auctions back that were all over the board in terms of condition. They are tough in ANY condition. As for individual cards, speaking of Cobb, Mastronet had a VG to VGEX Cobb about 3-4 auctions ago. It bid well over $4000 to $4500.
So.....the prices are definitely off--at least in REAL terms of what they've been selling for. Now.....of course, I'm biased because I have quite a few of them and would like to see them valued accurately for valuation purposes, but artificially low so I can buy them cheap (although that isn't possible anymore).
I don't think Mathewson is particularly tough. From watching pretty much all the auctions out there, I see many more Mathewson's than Cy Young. Wagner seems to be quite available as well. I've had 3 different Wagners. There are two versions of the uniformed Wagner. One reads John Wagner and the other John "Honus" Wagner. I've seen only two of the Wagners in suit pose versus probably a dozen or more of the uniformed Wagners.
Much like Old Judge cabinets, the consumer could order the cabinets they wanted from a list printed on a flyer put into the magazine. Since Sporting Life was in Philly (I believe), I believe that Philadelphia and Pittsburgh players seem to be heavily printed as do most of the Hall of Famers. I've not seen but a couple of Cobbs. The Mastronet recent one and the one pictured in the Copeland Collection catalog of 1991. That had a lot of approximatly 70 with 59 different Hall of famer poses with a presale estimate of $100K. Didn't sell.
Anyway, Jerry Spillman has done the most work on checklisting them and has a nice program he'll sell you for $5.00. He can be reached on ebay at userid W600.
ALWAYS BUYING AND TRADING FOR ONES I NEED TOO......
shameless plug #207.....have two up for auction on ebay under 'autograf'