A rare Ty Cobb and some other pre-War baseball treasures are about to enter the market for the first time after being tucked away in a family for decades.
Originating in the collection of a woman who passed away in the 1990s, the collection includes two postcards from the 1910 PC796 Sepia set: Ty Cobb, another featuring Johnny Evers and Germany Schaefer and a few others from the obscure set.
The PC796 cards are known for their photo quality and they’re not easy to find. SGC has graded 15 of the Cobb—PSA just five.
Scott Russell of The Collector Connection, who acquired the cards—along with a1907 HM Taylor Tigers team card that also features a young Cobb—has sent them to PSA for grading so the pop reports for each will soon grow by one.
It was the second find of rare pre-War postcards for Russell in the past few years. In 2021, he landed a small family collection of exceptionally rare 1908 Rose Company postcards including Cy Young and Christy Mathewson.
The most recent collection originated with the grandmother of the person who turned them over to Russell. A baseball fan and postcard/stamp collector, she and her husband operated a small antique store in upstate New York during the 1960s and later a “trash and treasure” barn in a rural area.
Most of her baseball items were from the junk wax era and had little value so the entire collection was set aside after she passed away in the 1990s and had been virtually forgotten.
“She was always proud of the Cobb card, but I just assumed it was more of ‘grandma’s junk’ and stashed it away,” Russell was told.
Still curious after selling some of his grandmother’s modern era sets, the seller brought the postcards to the Strongsville, OH vintage card show earlier this spring, and on the recommendation of a friend, showed them to Russell.
“He said he was hoping to maybe get $50 out of the Cobb,” Russell told SC Daily.
Instead, Russell expects it to bring somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 when he offers it at auction later this year.
The HM Taylor Tigers team postcard should bring a low four-figure price. The Evers-Schaefer and a small group of other PC796s that were part of the find aren’t worth quite as much but will also attract interest from collectors piecing together the little known, but attractive set created 114 years ago.
