Man finds more than 600 century-old baseball cards in deceased father’s closet

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It is a baseball card collector’s dream.

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A Northern California man cleaning out his late father’s closet nearly 30 years ago found an old tin cigarette box filled with trading cards more than a century old. These were not just trading cards -- the tin included some of baseball’s biggest stars of the early 1920s, including Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson.

Now they are being made available and will be included in an upcoming sale by Auction Monthly, the Granite Bay, California-based company said in a news release. The company works to evaluate and consign sports memorabilia for a variety of customers.

The more than 600 cards from the post-World War I era are not in mint condition by any means, but have held up well after being kept in the Pedro Cut Plug Tobacco tin.

Officials from Auction Monthly said they were surprised by the amount of cards and their condition.

“I couldn’t believe what was inside the old tobacco tin when I first opened the lid and noticed more than 600 pre-war baseball cards were all well preserved in the box,” the official said, according to the news release. “When I opened the old tin, I was surprised to see iconic names like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson. I began to imagine what it was like to be a kid in the 1920s chasing the game’s current greats.”

The current owner of the baseball cards, identified by Auction Monthly only as John, is from Sacramento, according to KTLA-TV. The cards and tin belonged to his father, Ed, who lived in the town of Tracy when he passed away, the television station reported.

According to Sports Collectors Daily, Ed was born in 1909 and grew up in nearby Oakland. The memorabilia collector never let go of his cards, and they were still in his possession at his San Joaquin Valley-area home when he died in 1994.

As a youth, Ed would receive baseball cards as gifts from his uncles, John told Auction Monthly.

“Like many of those who grew up in the Depression, my father and members of his family did not discard anything,” John told Auction Monthly. “When I was young, elementary school age, I remember my father showing me the cards and the tin they were in.”

John has held onto the cards for nearly three decades and finally decided to sell them. He called Auction Monthly in late September, according to Sports Collectors Daily.

The inventory included these cards from the early 1920s:

• 1919-1921 W514 “Shoeless” Joe Jackson;
• 1919-1921 W514 Babe Ruth;
• 1920 W519 Babe Ruth;
• 1920 W519 George Sisler;
• 1921 E220 National Caramel Babe Ruth;
• 1921 W516 Ty Cobb;
• 1922 American Caramel E121 Ty Cobb;
• 1922 American Caramel E121 Babe Ruth;
• Nearly every player from the infamous 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” team.

Other cards came from the Zeenuts sets from 1924 to 1926, which featured Pacific Coast League players.

The Ruth and Jackson cards from the W514 series are called strip cards. The Ruth card is one of the more valuable cards in the set, according to the “Standard Catalog of Vintage Baseball Cards.” Finding the card in a high grade is difficult, according to Professional Sports Authenticator, a grading service. There have been 69 cards submitted for grading, and the highest specimen was a PSA8.

The Jackson card is also rare, with only 70 of them submitted for grading to PSA. Only three of his cards have been graded at PSA8 or higher.

The American Caramel E121 set in 1922 consisted of 120 cards and had at least 25 Hall of Famers in the set. Predictably, the Ruth and Cobb cards are the most valuable. Because both cards have variations, it was unclear which versions John found at his father’s residence.

“As I was digging deeper into the tobacco tin, I noticed several cards from the 1919 ‘Black Sox’ team and then I pulled the ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson card -- a very rare find,” the Auction Monthly spokesperson said.

With more than 20 cards of Ruth among the 600 in the cigarette tin, the discovery was a monumental find.

It was unclear when Auction Monthly intends to put the cards up for sale, or whether they will be sold as a group or broken into individual lots.

The company bought the collection from John and immediately put aside the better-looking cards to be graded, Sports Collectors Daily reported.