FanHouse BaseballCards

Like a lot of baseball fans, when I was a kid growing up I collected baseball cards. Every time I went to the store with my parents or ran to the local convenience store, I always made sure to get myself at least one pack of cards. By the time I had reached the end of my collecting days I had two giant bins full of cards in my basement, and countless books filled with the valuable cards.

Still, in my life there was one card I always wanted that I could never get my hands on. I remember the first time I saw it at my friend Billy's house when we got home from the local White Hen Pantry. Billy opened his pack of cards up and was flipping through them when he stopped on one and yelled "I got one!" I went over to see what he was talking about and sure enough, there it was. The 1989 Fleer card of Baltimore Orioles second baseman Bill Ripken, and there, written on the bottom of his bat were those two infamous words (Hint: They rhyme with Duck Race).

It's one of the most famous baseball cards to ever be printed, and for years there were a lot of different stories as to why Ripken had written those words on his bat. At the time Ripken came out and said that it must have been a prank pulled by one of his teammates, but as it turns out that's a lie. I know this because for the first time since that card came out twenty years ago, Ripken finally decided to tell CNBC's Darren Rovell the truth behind the obscenity.

Topps, the sports card manufacturer, wanted to try something a little different with their latest product, the 2007 Allen & Ginter Baseball set. Named after the former tobacco company that introduced the concept of baseball cards to the world in 1887, this year's Allen & Ginter set features unique artwork of today's baseball stars instead of the standard posed photographs.

In addition to featuring baseball players, the set also includes sporting legends from other sports, such as Mike Tyson, Carl Lewis, John Wooden -- even the famed hot dog eater Takeru Kobayashi. But what really sets this set apart is that it also includes some non-sports items, as this story from Beckett.com explains:

Chad Smith, of Wolverine Sportscards in Westchester, Ohio, bought a case of Allen & Ginter from Dave & Adam's Card World on the [National Sports Collectors Convention] show floor. Like many dealers, Smith lugged the case back to his hotel room to bust, with the intent of selling its key singles the next day.

Halfway through the case, she appeared. The 1/1 Mother Teresa cut autograph.

"We had been busting for a few hours, and about to quit at 3:00 a.m. (EST) when I saw it," Smith said. "I started shaking. I didn't say anything, but my buddy knew I hit something big.

How big? He's already turned down an offer of $20,000 in hopes of making more money on eBay -- the auction goes for another week and is already up to $6,000 after 20 bids. I'm sure somewhere up there Mother Teresa is smiling down at him: if there's one thing she stood for, it's unbridled capitalism.

(via Can't Stop the Bleeding, BBTF)

Think about that amount of money for a second. A small piece of cardboard from Mickey Mantle's 1951 rookie year with the New York Yankees just fetched that at a Chicago auction house. $160,000 is a record for a single Mantle card, and was a part of a huge sell-off by Evanston, Ill. collector Lionel Carter.

Carter, 89, sold about 50,000 cards yesterday, and ended up with $1.6 million in the sale. (!!!)

Carter has been collecting cards since 1935, and has painstakingly replaced cards when he found others in better shape. Now his investment is paying off, but not without a small amount of postpartum sadness:

"It was sad. I put my life into them," said Carter, once a boy who bought his baseball cards with packs of gum. The Evanston man has groomed the collection since 1935, adding cards that dated from the late 1880s to the 1980s and replacing them whenever he found one in better condition.

When they became too valuable for an elderly couple to keep around the house, he decided to sell them.

"I've seen them for the last time," he said Friday.

Fortunately, Carter can wipe his tears away with $500 bills, and then cackle as he buys himself a platinum- and diamond-plated walker. Ballin!

I collected baseball cards for a few years as a kid, and for me and my friends the card we were always looking for was the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey, Jr. rookie card. Upper Deck had just entered the market and was more or less revolutionizing the industry -- the high-quality paper practically felt like plastic, and, holy crap, there's a freaking hologram on it! When you opened a pack of Upper Deck cards you felt like you were peeking into the future.

I never did get my hands on one, and though I have a bit more disposable income now, I'm still a little daunted by the $40 price tag ... which I guess means I'll never get my hands on the 1909 Honus Wagner tobacco card:

The "Holy Grail of baseball cards," the famous 1909 Honus Wagner tobacco card once owned by hockey great Wayne Gretzky, has sold for a record-setting $2.35 million, the seller of the card said Monday.

The buyer has only been identified as a Southern California collector. SCP Auctions Inc., a company that holds sports memorabilia auctions, said it bought a small share of the card. It is scheduled to be shown at a news conference at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday.

The seller, Brian Seigel, in 2000 paid a then-record $1,265,000 for the prize card, which is in much better shape than the others.

You know the card is big-time when companies are buying "shares" of it. The press conference will be at Dodger Stadium, and just to put all of this into perspective, the card is apparently worth more than what about half of the team made last year. Given the quantity of cards produced these days, it's hard to imagine another card ever being worth as much, even if it randomly features George W. Bush and Mickey Mantle cheering in the background.