Bernice Gallego, 72, and her husband, Al Gallego, 80, have been in the business of selling collectibles since 1974. Their Fresno, CA antique store, Collectique, has been the staging area for their collectibles business for almost as long.
Bernice Gallego sat down one day this summer, as she does pretty much every day, and began listing items on eBay. She dug into a box and pulled out a baseball card. She stopped for a moment and admired the picture. "Red Stocking B.B. Club of Cincinnati," the card read, under which stood a photograph of 10 men with their socks pulled up to their knees. The card itself was dirty and wrinkled in a few places. This, she thought, has potential. As a collector and seller, it's her job to spot old items that might have value today, to find the gems among the junk. This card, she thought to herself, was worth selling on eBay.
She originally listed the card on ebay for $10, but due to a flurry of responces to her listing she quickly reevaluated the pricing of the item. Based on the large amount of interest in the baseball card, she felt that it could be worth $50, maybe even $100. Or, as Bernice Gallego came to find out in the following weeks, it could be worth a lot more.
The card is actually 139 years old. It, and a handful of others like it, are considered the first baseball cards. Experts say that Bernice's 1869 Cincinnati Red Stocking Card could fetch up to six figures at the right Sports Collectibles Auction.
Bernice told The Fresno Bee, "I didn't even know baseball existed that far back. I don't think that I've ever been to a baseball game."
And where, you ask, did the Gallegos make such a fantastic vintage baseball card find?
"We really don't know where we got it," Gallego says. "We don't even know how long we owned this thing."
The theory is that the card came out of a storage space they bought a few years back. It's not uncommon in their line of work to buy the entire contents of storage units, usually from a relative of a recently deceased person, for about $200.
Upon discovering the incredible history behind their find, the Gallegos headed south to Los Angeles, bound for the headquarters of PSA. They chose not to have the card graded, deciding that authentication would be enough given the card's extreme scarcity.
"It does have some pretty significant discoloration and creasing," says Joe Orlando, the president of PSA. "The good news is that the sepia tone photo that is mounted on the front is, relatively speaking, unscathed. The clarity of the photo is still there. If this were graded, it would be near the bottom. But even for a card that low on the grading scale, it does have some eye appeal to it. It still presents fairly well, and that's the more important thing."
Before the Cincinnati Red Stockings, there were no professional baseball teams. Formed in 1868, the team set the foundation for what we know today as Major League Baseball. They were the best of the best, winning games by as many as 30, 40 and 50 runs.
In 1869, the team's picture ended up on the front of a card advertising Peck & Snyder, a company that sold baseball equipment. Unlike modern baseball cards, the Peck & Snyder card was larger and focused on the whole team, not individual players.
"It really provides a time capsule for the game," says Orlando of PSA. "You look at the picture and the guys are wearing boots. They don't use gloves at that point. The classic uniforms. It was a completely different game at that time."
"Because I love history, the thing that really got to me was that it's a photo, a real photo of real people, basically taken right after the Civil War," Gallego says. "That's what got to me. I don't know much about them. Who are they? What are they thinking? Those kind of questions go through my mind."
Next is the big question: How much is this card worth? The Gallegos are content to put it on eBay and "let it fly."
Orlando offers: "The last one that I'm aware, it sold about a year to a year and a half ago, and it sold for well into five figures. You have to let the market decide what it's worth when you're dealing with something this scarce, because there's just not the market history to determine it."
Plans are to put the card back on eBay, though the auction is expected to draw a little more attention this time, thanks to the couple's longtime friend (and baseball card expert) Rick Mirigian, who is already plotting marketing and sales strategies for the rare item.
A few months ago when I heard that Donruss/Playoff was planning to produce more relic cards of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson I wasn't sure what would happen to the price of his first relic card from 2001 Upper Deck SP Legendary Cuts. Simple economics dictate that when quantity increases, cost diminishes. But in the case of Joe Jackson relic cards this doesn't seem to be occurring. When his new relic cards hit the market, the prices went through the roof. Now that the dust has settled and all the wrappers have been thrown away, the prices of the newer cards seem to be coming back down.
