As the owner of an advertising agency and an avid collector, Al Crisafulli had some auction companies as clients as the 1990s became the 2000s. His passion for vintage cards and memorabilia made those pairings a natural fit but he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d rather be doing what those consignment shops were doing.
Ten years ago, he decided to join their ranks and Love of the Game Auctions was born. Last weekend, LOTG completed its 38th auction. Since 2002, Crisafulli has overseen the sale of about 35,000 items.
Starting anything from scratch is a challenge, but getting into a category that already had numerous established players meant he’d have to work hard to attract consignments and present auctions that attracted collector interest.
It’s safe to say now he’s made it. LOTG has established its own niche as a smaller, collector focused “boutique” company that’s landed its share of newly discovered historic items.
“One of the best things about running Love of the Game Auctions is that it has provided me with so many incredible experiences – inside and outside the hobby,” Crisafulli told SC Daily as he looked back on his first ten years in business. “I’ve met amazing people, and been to some pretty incredible places.”
While LOTG sells just about anything sports related, Crisafulli opted to focus on an area he knew well: pre-War era baseball cards and memorabilia.
In this Q&A, we chatted with him about that first auction back in 2012, some of the top items he’s beat the bushes to uncover, some surprises he’s encountered and some of the people he’s met along the way.
SC Daily: Let’s be honest, that first auction could have been timed a little better, right?
Al Crisafulli: Our Inaugural Auction closed on October 28, 2012 – the day before Superstorm Sandy plowed into New Jersey, where my little startup office was located, in the basement of our home. We lost power almost immediately, but had purchased a small backup generator so I could keep our computer and one desk lamp working (in addition to some household appliances).
Our electricity was out for more than a week, and a lot of the roads were impassable due to downed trees and such. Meanwhile, around the country, people had placed winning bids in the auction, and wanted to know when they would receive their winnings. Thankfully everyone was understanding that there would be delays, but I still wanted to get it done quickly.
I processed the invoices and packed people’s winnings in the dark – literally by the light of my cellphone – for a few days, and the pile of outgoing boxes got bigger and bigger until the first delivery truck made it to the house to pick up the first batch of boxes. I helped the driver load them onto his truck, and as he pulled out of the driveway, I stood there and watched him, took a deep breath, and said “Wow. We did it.” I realized it was the first time in almost a week that I wasn’t tense. It felt great.
SC Daily: In 2015, you came up with a pretty great consignment that helped generate some publicity with an item that was worth a small fortune but also had a pretty funny story behind it.
AC: In the Spring of 2015, we got the opportunity to propose on an excellent consignment: a Lou Gehrig game-used bat that had been with the same owner since the 1940s. After years of it being the defense weapon in the house (“if someone ever breaks in, hit them with this bat”), the owner was looking for someone to sell it.
I met the owner and her cousin at a diner in New Jersey one morning during breakfast, and after we talked a while, they handed me a bat tube. I took out the bat and held it in my hands for a second, and then I thought “I’m holding Lou Gehrig’s bat!” So of course, I did what every baseball fan would do: I stood up with the bat, got into my stance, and took a swing – right there in the diner, in the middle of the breakfast crowd. I’ll never forget that, it’s my favorite part of the story of that bat but there was more to it.
Once we got the consignment, I set about the business of trying to find a photo of Gehrig holding a Hanna Batrite bat (the brand of bat we were selling). It took more than a month – our auction catalog was almost complete and ready for printing when I found it. Once we bought the rights, I asked the rightsholder for a 2400 DPI scan, which I blew up on my 27” monitor so I could see how much detail I could see on the bat. I had the actual bat in my lap, and the photo on my screen, and that’s when I realized: it was the same bat as the bat in the photo.
My wife was two floors up from my office, and she heard me yelp for joy when I figured it out. It wound up selling for $436,970 – the only photo-matched Gehrig bat, and it became one of the most famous bats in the hobby. But that moment of realization – magic.
SC Daily: About eight years ago, you helped solve a hobby mystery about some 19th century baseball cards. Tell us about that.
AC: For decades, the hobby had referred to them as “Scrapps Tobacco” cards, due to a simple miscommunication when putting together a hobby encyclopedia in the early 1970s, but everyone knew that no such brand ever existed. In the summer of 2014, we received a consignment of two conjoined, uncut cards from the issue, and on a little tab of paper that connected the two was printed “HDS & Co.” That set me off on a wild goose chase that lasted a couple of weeks.
Eventually I discovered a special supplement to Leslie’s magazine that revealed the source of the cards – a Cincinnati company called H.D. Smith & Co, who announced their special St. Louis and Detroit Champion Baseball Gum – making “Scrapps Tobacco” cards gum cards – among the earliest baseball cards issued with gum. That discovery was a really gratifying one.
SC Daily: You have to hit the road sometimes to round up consignments. Beyond the memorabilia and cards you’re gathering up, is there anything special you remember about some of those long trips?
AC: A couple times a year I will go out and put a few thousand miles on the road, visiting customers and picking up consignments for future auctions. The first time I did this, I met up with my good friend Ryan Cristoff of Cuban Baseball Auctions at his home in Colorado, and he joined me on the trip over the Rocky Mountains to Arizona. One of my favorite moments was leaving Moab, Utah – a place I’d never seen before, and which has since become one of my favorites – and driving through the desert as the sun set, chatting with Ryan as the night fell and the stereo played. It was just a great vibe.
Somewhere in Indiana, on one of my earlier road trips, I was in an antique shop, just poking around, taking my time. I found a big box filled with old baseball gloves, and I was rooting through it, looking for buried treasure. When I came up for air, there was an old woman watching me, and she said “That reminds me of Grandpa Shoesie.” And then she told me the story of Grandpa Shoesie, a shoemaker in her town when she was a girl, who would fix everyone’s shoes for 35 cents. A local boy had a hand-me-down glove, and he played so much baseball that he wore a hole in the palm, and since he couldn’t afford a new one, he played with it anyway. Grandpa Shoesie fixed it for him. When she told me the story, she cried. It’s important not to be in a hurry all the time, you could miss moments like this.
SC Daily: What’s another highlight that’s maybe a little different as you look back?
AC: Over the years I’ve encountered some amazing collections. Not just sports memorabilia collections, either – amazing collections of all sorts of things. One of the world’s largest collections of Wheaties boxes (with cereal inside, as old as the 1930s). The world’s largest collection of Chinese restaurant menus. Unbelievable collections of toy trains, bottlecaps, defaced pennies, model airplanes, and more. People have amazing tastes.
Some of these encounters gave me the opportunity to appear in a documentary series with legendary filmmaker Errol Morris called “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports.” The segment I was in covered all the strange things people collect. It was a really interesting experience to watch a great American filmmaker at work.
SC Daily: You’ve brought some great cards to the market that hadn’t been seen by the public before. Do you have a favorite card consignment story?
AC: An elderly couple approached me quietly at a show in late 2013, with a notebook. Inside the notebook was a listing of baseball cards – T206 and Old Judge, mostly. They claimed to have this collection at home. In the words of the nice lady, “The cards were my father’s. He died in 1975 and I’ve saved his baseball cards ever since. Now, I need money, and I thought they might be worth something.”
So I made arrangements to visit their home, thinking I was going to help a family deal with the expense of an illness or something awful. There, I encountered an excellent collection of tobacco cards, including a lot of rare backs and N172 Hall of Famers. It turned out that they were only looking for $1,000 to help fix some water damage their house sustained during a tropical storm. When I explained they would be getting more than $1,000 for the cards, they were skeptical. At the end, the collection sold for nearly $50,000 – they took their entire family on vacation, after paying the bill that required the $1,000 in the first place. It was a privilege to send that consignment check.
SC Daily: Consignors look to sell for a lot of reasons, right?
AC: While the hobby, to me, is great because of the history, the stories, and the rarity of many collectibles, I recognize that there’s a financial component to it as well, and we work as hard as we can to achieve the highest possible prices for our consignors. Because of that, it’s always a treat to learn what consignors are treating themselves to with their consignment proceeds.
Several have invested in new sports cars. One named his new SUV “Joe Namath” because it was paid for with the proceeds from our sale of Namath’s rookie card. And a handful have used their proceeds to find kitchen remodeling projects – when several of them realized they’d used their proceeds for the same thing, they nicknamed me “The Kitchen.” I get a kick out of that.
SC Daily: Sometimes you never know what to expect when you meet with a consignor you’ve only spoken to on the phone or via email. I’m sure you have one of those stories.
AC: In 2016 we were fortunate enough to be awarded a consignment of a complete collection from a family in San Antonio. When I spoke to them, they described the collection as a “complete run of sets” from 1948-2007. Based on that description, I expected 60-70 binders. So I packed up my SUV and drove down to San Antonio to pick up the cards. When I arrived at the front door and introduced myself to the consignor, we made small talk for a few minutes, and then she looked at my car and asked “Where’s your truck?” I responded “Oh, there’s a lot of cargo space in this SUV.”
She then brought me into the house and showed me the “complete run” of sets – which included sets from every major card manufacturer, regionals, minor league sets, unlicensed sets, parallel sets – hundreds and hundreds of binders, filling an entire room, plus boxes and boxes in the garage! I had to go back three times with a 16 foot box truck to get them all!
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