Just saw in the paper that an LA couple bought Wayne Gretzky’s mint condition 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card on e-bay for about $1.25 million. Wow.
How would old Honus have felt about that? For starters, $1.25M is probably more than he and everyone else playing at the time made in their whole lives all put together. Also, one of the reasons this card is so rare is that so few were made. This was due to Wagner himself. He was vehemently opposed to having his picture on a cigarette card (the precursor to bubble gum cards- baseball cards weren’t always for kids)and forced production to stop after only a few cards were produced (less than 50?).
Even if The Great One gives the money to charity, is this out of control? Just because of the huge sums involved, or also because it might go against the presumed wishes of the deceased?
Side note- the couple’s daughter was quoted in the LA Times wanting to know why, if Daddy could spend a million bucks on a baseball card, why couldn’t she have a horse? Good question.
Since Wagner was opposed to his name and face being associated with cigarettes, I don’t see how he could mind the sale of the card NOW, long after the cigarette association. Presumably he did authoritize the card at one one (or if he didn’t he at least knew of the existence of a few, before having his withdrawn). I’m not seeing a director correlation between opposition to cigarettes and opposition to having your valuable card sold much much later at open auction.
Part of my thought was the money issue- how obscene would it be for someone of that time to know that less than 100 years later, something with their face on it might be “worth” more than they could imagine? Weird.
Tie-in is that the reason the price was so high was the rarity of the card, and it is rare bacuse Wagner never wanted the damn thing made in the first place!
PS- the card was probably made by order of the ball club, or the tobacco company just did it.
Who would have thought that, years after that Giaconda guy commissioned a portrait of his wife, it would be the most famous and valuable painting in the world?
Reminds me of that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Beloq shows Indy his watch and says, “Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But bury it in the sand for ten thousand years and it becomes priceless.”
We place value on all sorts of things that would make contemporaries of those things scratch their heads and wonder.
Leonardo, Giaconda, Wagner and Beloq have no say in the matter. Nor should they.