1955 Mickey Mantle Baseball Card Pulled From Vintage Pack During Live Stream Event

cageymaru

cageymaru

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Vintage Breaks is an online baseball card company that allows collectors to buy "spots" in a pack of unopened vintage cards. The owner of the first spot gets the first card and so on until all the cards are distributed to the buyers. Magic happened during the opening of a 1955 Bowman cello pack, at the National Sports Collector's Convention, as the 19th spot revealed was a PSA 9 grade Mickey Mantle baseball card. A PSA grade 10 card would be deemed absolutely perfect. The new owner says that he has received offers of $50,000 already. The excitement shown makes me reminisce to when I was opening cards as a kid. The magic starts at the 26:29 mark, but warning it is loud.

Some 375 miles east of Cleveland, Chris Rothe was finishing up his job as a third-generation bookbinder in Maryland when he decided to check the archived videos of the pack openings from earlier in the day. Rothe, who randomly got the 19th card that was to be opened in the pack, discovered that he was the proud new owner of the Mantle card. "My friend told me my face went pale white when I saw it," Rothe said. "I was weak in the knees."
 
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MavericK said:
So, don't listen to that video with your speakers/headphones turned up. In fact, don't listen to it at all, as it's incomprehensible static for most of it.
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Added loud warning. ;) Forgot about that during the editing.
 
maclem8223 said:
My 12 y.o. self would kill for a card like that, wow.....
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I was the same way. Was a sad day when my card dealer died. His family sold all of his cards for a few hundred bucks and we were cutting grass and saving up to pay big money for one. He had a nice sized store full of cards.

I have no idea how many packs I opened with him in a futile attempt to get a Jordan or Allen Iverson rookie.
 
I know it's worth a lot, but those are so fugly designed baseball cards, the TV outline around the card... meh.
 
cageymaru said:
I was the same way. Was a sad day when my card dealer died. His family sold all of his cards for a few hundred bucks and we were cutting grass and saving up to pay big money for one. He had a nice sized store full of cards.

I have no idea how many packs I opened with him in a futile attempt to get a Jordan or Allen Iverson rookie.
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I hear ya, I spent many nights just categorizing my cards and looking up prices. Fun times :)
 
maclem8223 said:
I hear ya, I spent many nights just categorizing my cards and looking up prices. Fun times :)
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I still have my collection.. haven't touched it in over 10 years.

At one point I went to a yard sale and the person selling stuff had a binder full of cards. One was an Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. I bought the whole binder of cards for $90. Checked prices on the cards when I got back home and found I had $1200 worth of cards in that binder.
 
Damn that is lucky, I have seen people buy Magic The Gathering Alpha and Beta packs recently that pulled the Moxes and Black Lotus cards and immediately had PSA encase and grade them, not that they are on the level of some vintage baseball cards, but people immediately swarmed them throwing out obscene numbers out for them.
 
cyclone3d said:
I still have my collection.. haven't touched it in over 10 years.

At one point I went to a yard sale and the person selling stuff had a binder full of cards. One was an Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. I bought the whole binder of cards for $90. Checked prices on the cards when I got back home and found I had $1200 worth of cards in that binder.
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Seriously? I have a ton of Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards from Donruss, Topps, Upper Deck, and Bowman. I didn't think anything was really that rare anymore, since the 80s were about when collecting stuff seemed to become popular. I guess I know what I can sell to afford that 2990wx that's on preorder.
 
Nytegard said:
Seriously? I have a ton of Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards from Donruss, Topps, Upper Deck, and Bowman. I didn't think anything was really that rare anymore, since the 80s were about when collecting stuff seemed to become popular. I guess I know what I can sell to afford that 2990wx that's on preorder.
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At that point the Ken Griffey Jr. card was worth $90 by itself.

I haven't checked prices in years. eBay has sort of killed the prices on a lot of cards last time I looked.
 
The Mad Atheist said:
What about the gum!?
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In the mid 90's the local dollar store was selling tons of unopened baseball card packs from the 80's and the gum was harder than a fucking rock. Not only that it left a terrible stain on the card it was next to so if you did get "lucky" with a rare card but it was the last one in the pack it had already dropped at least one grade.
 
Wish I still had my Nolan Ryan foiled fireball set from the early 90's. :(
 
I just sold a sealed copy of Tools aenima on vinyl for 1300 on eBay. Paid $18 in 1996....

I'm a bit sad.
 
Nytegard said:
Seriously? I have a ton of Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards from Donruss, Topps, Upper Deck, and Bowman. I didn't think anything was really that rare anymore, since the 80s were about when collecting stuff seemed to become popular. I guess I know what I can sell to afford that 2990wx that's on preorder.
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I have the same cards... so does every other kid who got baseball cards in the 80s-90s. The industry took advantage of the kids of the 60s generation when baseball cards were put in bike tires to make motorcycle sounds. Those kids grew up and told their kids (80s and early 90s) to collect, preserve, and save their cards so they would be worth thousands. Then the market crashed.

There are a few gems (Jr rookie card from upperdeck '89 I believe) but most are not worth anything. I went through mine and every one that I held in high regard from my youth was worth nothing. Tons and tons of auctions on ebay for $1.
 
There's a market for everything, should you know where to look. I mean, even 30 years ago, who was really going to pay thousands for a Mickey Mantle card? It all comes down to collectors. For example, I collect video games. Very few people collect them. I have quite a few games so rare, you couldn't even pirate them. But when it comes to interest in selling, I probably couldn't sell it any of them for over $5. Yet, something like Final Fantasy VII black label or World of Warcraft Collector's Edition will go for a decent amount, even though there are tons. But when I was looking for a specific game, I ended up spending something like $800 for one of those rare games, because there was only 1 available copy worldwide at the time I was searching for it.
 
XvMMvX said:
I have the same cards... so does every other kid who got baseball cards in the 80s-90s. The industry took advantage of the kids of the 60s generation when baseball cards were put in bike tires to make motorcycle sounds. Those kids grew up and told their kids (80s and early 90s) to collect, preserve, and save their cards so they would be worth thousands. Then the market crashed.

There are a few gems (Jr rookie card from upperdeck '89 I believe) but most are not worth anything. I went through mine and every one that I held in high regard from my youth was worth nothing. Tons and tons of auctions on ebay for $1.
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I think that's part of the problem with collecting. Our parents didn't bother to save any of them because collecting them wasn't a thing. I remember growing up, my father going on about how his mom threw out all his baseball cards and comics when he grew older, because they were just kids stuff. And how he was so upset, because he did have a some of the original comics (such as Detective Comics #27 with the first appearance of Batman) as well as a ton of old baseball cards. Like you said, sometime later, when everyone saw how the surviving cards, comics, etc. became super expensive, that's when they told their children to save everything. But that's also what lead to companies creating "collectables", which became worthless, because there are far too many of them. Buy our collector's edition, only 27 million ever made.
 
I had a huge collection of comic books and cards at my mom's house til my nieces got into them and ruined everything....
 
Paul_Johnson said:
Think he got his 100th in the 1960's.
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Yeah, I got that wrong, I can't remember what the special occasion was for the set

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vegeta535 said:
I had a huge collection of comic books and cards at my mom's house til my nieces got into them and ruined everything....
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Same here except that mine remained untouched. Earlier this year, I went through my collection of Topps baseball cards from the mid 80 when I was a kid. Came across three 1985 Topps Mark Maguire rookie cards. Back then I spent every dollar on baseball cards.
 
My brother and I have a huge baseball card collection from the late 70s to about 1987. All of the opened cards are collated and indexed on paper and on floppy disk for the Atari 8 bit computers with software that I wrote in TurboBasicXL, lol. I check on them periodically, but haven't really dug into them since McGwire broke the season home run record 20 years ago. We still have several boxes of Donruss and Topps card from 85,86, and 87. Cool stuff.
 
Rahh said:
There's still a market for baseball cards?
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There is, but mostly it's the truly rare ones that have the really big numbers attached to them. The internet really popped the bubble that is the collectable market whether it was cards, comics, or whatever because those bubbles were for the most part local bubbles, so player X who's been lighting up the league for a grand total of 3 years no longer has his rookie card pushing over $100 or whatever, plus "grading" wasn't really a thing in the 80s except by the "expert eyes" of the comic book guy who was the one who was selling you.
 
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