Every once in awhile, something cool just happens to someone. This time, a guy named Dave in Silver Spring was the lucky man. According to the Silver Spring Patch, Dave, 61, is a dedicated baseball card collector who ended up at a local memorabilia shop called the House of Cards. Dave started collecting cards with his kids, but then kept going long after they'd lost interest.
"Dave (who requested that his last name be withheld) had read about a new product in the sports card hobby world called In Memory of... from the Historic Autograph Company which features only signatures of deceased baseball players, and went to the store to purchase one of the $169.95 boxes," writes Patch.
Dave secreted his purchase home, fearing, understandably, that he'd be viewed as a sucker for throwing that amount of cash at a dinky box of cards.
"I went into the room where I keep my collection and opened the box to first find an Eddie Brinkman, and thought ‘This is pathetic!” he tells Patch. “Next was Dick Weik, another Washington Senator, and that really put me down in the dumps!”
But his haul got better. “I slowly pulled out the last card, and saw the letter ‘B’ then ‘a’ and thought that I may have something exciting,” Dave says. The letters kept coming, and Dave ended up with a Babe Ruth signature card in hand.
"The Babe Ruth signature card Dave uncovered is one of only five that were available in the entire run of 9,000 cards," Patch reported. The card could be worth $3,000 to $4,000.
Though a $170 box of cards is normally unlikely to be a sound investment, it's nice to see that passion pays off sometimes.
Photo by IAN RANSLEY DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0 Generic
Man Finds Babe was originally published by Washington City Paper on Feb 23, 2011.
