There was a burglary at a northern Indiana hobby shop last week. Police in Elkhart, IN, near South Bend, say someone entered F&G Sports Cards in the wee hours of Christmas Eve and stole about $11,000 worth of merchandise.
The shop’s owner says two people pried open the back door and stole all of the hobby boxes that were inside along with a signed Michael Jordan baseball cap from Upper Deck Authenticated.
Police were called at 9 AM that morning and are looking at surveillance video in hopes of finding the suspects.
The store remains open.
It took only a few minutes for 424 investors to buy into a 1986-87 Fleer basketball wax box put up on the Collectable app Tuesday, fully funding the offering at $139,650. Shares were priced at $25 each.
The owner of the box is retaining $44,750 in equity, putting the full value of the box that likely contains at least three Michael Jordan rookie cards at $183,750.
Another week, another record price for a Jordan rookie. Bidding for a PSA 10 at Goldin Auctions is at $181,000. Factor in the buyer’s premium that will be added in at the end and it’s at over $220,000.
Bidding continues for five more days.
There are currently 317 MJ rookie cards rated Gem Mint 10.
The ESPN Daily podcast devoted most of Tuesday morning’s episode to the boom in sports cards. It’s targeted at a general audience so most collectors won’t learn a lot but you can listen here.
Veteran collectors know about those rough edges that are pretty much the norm on vintage O-Pee-Chee trading cards. Topps’ Canadian partner used a different type of cutting process, with the uncut sheets fed through machines that used cast iron blades.
They got a little less sharp as time went on, and according to Ken McAvoy, a shift supervisor at the plant during the 1980s and 90s, machine operators sometimes looked the other way.
He told SportsNet that the company “paid machine operators a bonus based on how many cards they produced per hour, which influenced how frequently the knives were changed.”
“They’re not gonna call the mechanic and say, ‘The knives need changing,’” McAvoy explained in the story, which focused on the recent sale of one of the two PSA 10 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky rookie cards. “They might just say, ‘I’m gonna keep the machine running and let the next shift worry about it.’”
The rough edges are evident on the Gretzky that sold for $1.29 million—the first hockey card to sell for a seven-figure price.
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