I was watching Superstore and in one scene some characters are trying to raise some money by selling old junk. One of them has a Mickey Mantle baseball card, which they dismiss as useless because it’s from the first year he played, before he was even famous. Ha ha.
But why is it that there aren’t swarths of counterfeits for something like this? It’s very valuable and it was printed using what is now ancient technology. I would figure it wouldn’t be very hard to print an exact duplicate and give it a distress so it would be impossible to tell from a genuine one. Obviously that’s not the case but what makes it so hard to duplicate old technology?
There are swaths of counterfeits out there that can fool people like me but it’s harder (not impossible) to fool the experts. It isn’t really that easy in 2021 to duplicate the card stock, ink, and printing methods used back in 1951 let alone age the item properly to fool someone who know how to spot a counterfeit. Just a quick check, did you know that companies didn’t necessarily use the same card stock from year to year? Topps might have used a specific card stock in 1951 and then a different card stock the next year. Again, something I wouldn’t know but an expert would.
If you bring a valuable baseball card in to a collector, they’re not just going to look at the card. They’re going to want to know about the entire history of the card, and how you came to have it. Lies are likely to come to light in that.
And being in pristine condition brings top dollar. Hard to age something and still be pristine. Just off the press vs sealed and kept from sunlight for 60 years is noticibly different.
Another thing is that it’s a lot of work but you can’t make too many, as you’re going to drive down the market price of the card by increasing the supply. (Plus it’s going to be suspicious if all of a sudden, half a dozen new Mickey Mantle rookie cards hit the market right around the same time.)
Since a good Mickey Mantle card can sell for $5.2 million, and pristine ones are valued at $10 million, you really only have to sell one.
I’m sure collectors who are willing to pay that much are well aware of all the cards currently known and who holds them. If you came up with a previously unknown one you would have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.
Your best bet would be to pretend to be ignorant of its value and sell it to some Joe Schmoe for $10,000 because he thinks he’s ripping you off.
Sell it to Pawn Stars. They are always like " Hey man I got to frame it, advertise it, get it authenticated and then it may sit waiting for a buyer for years. Will you take $5000?".
Yes, this. My father was a card dealer for close to 40 years. If someone came to him with a highly sought after card, that person got the third degree. Dad could smell a fake card, and especially an autograph, from the other side of the dealer floor.
This is done often, at least with signed cards where a more recent card by itself is not that expensive, but a signed card is much more valuable. There are probably some ‘new’ Hank Aaron cards popping up recently. For something as rare and valuable as a Mickey Mantle rookie card it becomes more difficult over time to get any expert to risk their reputation by authenticating it.
And what if you just send it off to PSA to get graded? It comes back as a 7, and I then send it to StockX to sell, who’s going to start investigating the card’s provenance? Or is it more likely I collect an easy $125,000?
I doubt it’s that simple, and that the bottleneck here is that PSA is going to catch the counterfeit before they authenticate it. Either way - no one’s going to be personally questioning the card’s history. PSA will probably just destroy it.
I’ve often pondered this question myself. Not so much about counterfeit, but simply reproducing the card(s).
Maybe since I’ve been in the print industry for years I’m not appreciating some unforeseen value they apparently hold. It’s grease on paper! We used to flip them (it was a game, called flipsy’s). Another game was ledgey’s whereby we’d be throwing cards against a brick wall. And the gum was crap! But we chewed it anyway.
If I recall, I think it was 5 cents for a pack of 4 or 5 cards & a piece of bubble gum.
I had boxes of cards from the late 50’s early 60’s. Mantle, Roger Marris, all of them. I’d be a millionaire had my parents not thrown them out when I moved out. Same goes for comic books.
It’s a consumer driven, money driven, pile of crap as far as I’m concerned. And yes, of course I’d take the money for a piece of card if some fool wanted to give it to me. During my career as a printer I may have thrown billions of dollars worth into the garbage - people actually pay money for misprints…
Fact is, these cards could easily be reproduced today with far superior results.
An artist friend who was often commissioned to paint various subjects once told me; “If I don’t charge them a lot of money for it, they will think it’s no good.” That about sums it up.
Getting back to the original post. The paper today would be manufactured much differently, as would the inks used. Today they’d be far superior.
Superior for what? You seem to think that these cards have some practical purpose, and that the valuable ones are (or should be) better at that practical purpose, and that modern technology would enable them to be better yet. What purpose do you think that would have? So far as I can tell, the only practical purpose of a baseball card is to provide a reference for a player’s basic stats and appearance, and there are much better ways of providing that information than cards.
But that’s not what people are paying for.
As did millions of other parents. And that’s why they’re so valuable.
Superior print quality & paper quality, which is all they are. They are pieces of card.
No talent went into the manufacture of these cards. It’s not anything like a famous painting, sculpture etc that could only have been created by a particularly talented individual. It’s a bloody card that was manufactured by the thousands, not much different than a plumbing fixture. If people want to spend money on it, good for them. I’d give the money to charity if I had that much to throw around. Given a choice of investing, I’d invest in something a little more unique, like artwork. Something that someone has actually invested training & talent into. Something you could look at and admire in terms of quality & craftsmanship. A piece of paper doesn’t do it for me.
I once read an article by a guy who counterfeited Magic cards. He would print up duplicates of fairly rare cards and sell them for about half of the list price those cards would get. He said a lot of his customers were aware he was selling counterfeits but didn’t really care. They were getting cards they wanted, regardless of whether they were fake or real.
You don’t think it took some talent for a ballplayer to get his picture printed on a card at all? And a lot more talent for that card to end up being worth a fortune?
Really, do you have any point at all? Is a Rembrandt basically worthless because it’s made of old cloth and smeared with paint?