Field of Dreams Find: Mile High Lands Century-Old Card Sets in Iowa

For those who make their living selling baseball cards, anywhere you find a great collection is a Field of Dreams.  But when the caller on the other end of the line is from Iowa and beautiful, old black and white cardboard images almost come walking out of a cornfield, the story is the stuff of legend.  A huge find of nearly 400 cards from the 1916 M101-4 Sporting News and 1917 Collins-McCarthy baseball card sets is on its way to auction after being discovered in the Hawkeye state and consigned recently to Mile High Auctions.

The cards were graded Wednesday at the PSA booth inside the National Sports Collectors Convention.  Included is a complete set of 200 Sporting News cards including the Babe Ruth rookie card and Joe Jackson and 196 of the 200 cards in the Collins-McCarthy set.  Many cards in the collection are now the finest known examples in PSA’s Population Report.

The cards were collected by a young man nearly 100 years ago and his son, now in his 60’s, is the consignor of a collection that Mile High President Brian Drent could bring more than $500,000 in the company’s fall auction.

The collection is of such importance that each card carries an ‘E.C. McCoid Collection’ pedigree on the label.

The cards from both the Collins-McCarthy issue and the M101-4 Sporting News set all have blank backs, which makes them even more rare.

Drent showed Sports Collectors Daily the collection, now temporarily on display in its entirety before it will be broken up and sold when the company’s fall auction opens in September.

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About Rich Mueller

Rich is the editor and founder of Sports Collectors Daily. A broadcaster and writer for over 35 years and a collector for even longer than that, he's usually typing something somewhere. Type him back at [email protected]