Need Advice on where to sell a card: 1887 Old Judge Honest John Kelly

[pcgs69]

Hi All! New member here. I'm usually active at the Collectors Universe (CU) forums (usually PCGS), so I'm more of a coin guy. I've collected baseball cards in my childhood, of course it was during 1988 through 1992, which are apparently the most over-produced cards on the planet, haha. Anyhow, about 15 years ago I decided to purchase a couple of older cards to have in my collection. One was a seemingly common Bergen T206 (Brooklyn) card. The other was an 1887 Old Judge Baseball card for some Umpire named Kelly.

Looked like it might be a little bit rarer so after posting it on the Sports card section of CU, the guys pointed out a PSA 2 that sold for $440 recently. Link is here...

http://www.legendaryauctions.com/Lot...x?lotid=112000

Figure I'd send mine to SCG for grading. Came back 40/VG/3 (however SGC grades are written out). Pretty exciting!! So the question now is... what's the best way to sell this thing? And, if a 2 went for around $440, could anyone estimate what this one could fetch?

I saw a couple of Registry sets on SGC for the N172 Old Judge sets. Do you think it would be "bad form" to email some participants there seeing if they would be interested?

Thanks for your help!

[rhettyeakley]

Nice looking card, also a tough to difficult to find subject.

A few points about Old Judges...
1. Technical grade on the flip doesn't mean nearly as much as it does with almost every other set out there.

2. Since these are small photographs, the photo quality is VERY important and yours is far superior to the one recently sold in the Legendary Auction in that regard.

Regardless of how you go about selling it I would be shocked if you got less than $450-500 for that particular card with that photo quality, grade, etc. I don't know that you need to go the major auction route as I think if you started it even on ebay with a $399 starting bid it would garner quite a few bids and you'd be happy with the results. If you are fairly new to this area of collecting this is my suggestion on how to sell it (the $399 number is only to protect it from slipping through the cracks which I doubt it would have)

Also, you may have already gotten a private message or two from the members here--99.9% of the guys here are stand up guys and wouldn't be looking to take advantage of you.

Good luck with your card.
-Rhett

[oldjudge]

It's a nice card and a scarcer than average pose. Two things make the card even more interesting.

1. It is an umpire card and there are only a few in the Old Judge set
2. John Kelly was also, at one point, the manager of the Louisville AA team. His cards as a manager are virtually impossible to find so any Louisville collector who wants an image of him is forced to get the umpire card.

For this card the condition is about average, and I would think that if you listed it on Ebay you would do better than the auction realization on the SGC20, whether you used a reserve or not. Good luck with the card.

[benchod]

Agree with everything Rhett says
The image on yours is superior to the psa 2

[FrankWakefield]

To sell that you could put it on eBay, sell it here in the B/S/T, contact any of the banner advertisers...

If I was trying to sell it for the most money the quickest I'd call Bill Goodwin, and mail that card to him. 314 308-4649.

Wish you well with it.

[Joe_G.]

I won the PSA2 example in Legendary and would very much like to upgrade to an example with better photo quality. Let us know how you decide to part with it, congrats on a nice card.

[FrankWakefield]

An update to my post... You may well do better selling that card directly to Mr. Gonsowski. So I now think you contact Joe first, then go to Mr. Goodwin as a fallback position. I've sold several N172 HOFers through Mr. Goodwin, a smooth, confidence instilling, successful transaction every time.

[Rob D.]

If you decide to go the route of an auction house, before choosing one I would do a search using the Net54 archive (using the various auction houses' names -- Legendary, REA, Huggins & Scott, Mastro, SCP, Goodwin, etc. -- as keywords). You'll find a lot of interesting, eye-opening and useful info that should help you make a good decision.