Posted By:
Mike SchmidtKevin --
I certainly see your point, and I do think it can be good for new collectors to get interested in vintage cards, as you have said.
However, I truly have an issue with the game-used bat card thing. How many existing game-used bats of Joe Jackson and Honus Wagner are there? Less than six for Joe Jackson, correct? Is that little slice of wood so important that it is worthwhile to destroy it into hundreds of little pieces for everyone else to have a "slab"? When you are dealing with such rare items like that, I feel that a museum is appropriate, not a baseball card.
If there is a sufficient supply of game-used bats (read: dozens) of a Hall of Famer, I can understand some of the lesser bats being cut up. But there, frankly, is not enough Joe Jackson bats in my mind to ever make it a reasonable thing to do.