It won’t come as a shock, but the next Long Beach Expo show has been canceled. It had been set to take place in February. Shows in June and September were also called off because of COVID-19.
The show is a mix of coins and other collectibles but several sports card dealers and PSA are normally set up.
They’re hoping to hold their next show June 17-19 at the Long Beach Convention Center.
Eight autographed items from the collection of Jack Zimmerman, who teamed with Tim Gallagher and some other childhood friends to chase autographs in person and by mail long before it was fashionable sold for more than $36,000 in SCP Auctions’ recent sale.
As Bob D’Angelo wrote earlier this month, the collection included signatures of Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays, Pete Maravich, Julius Erving, Bobby Orr and others. The Clemente autograph on a 1970 Topps card sold for over $21,000 alone.
After collecting as a kid, Zimmerman went on to become an outstanding basketball player at the University of Dayton and then played some pro ball. He’s now in business and lives overseas.
Tom Archdeacon of The Dayton Daily News wrote more about their autograph chasing days.
This past weekend’s auction action won’t likely hurt the hobby in the eyes of those who have zoomed in on the idea of trading cards as alternative assets. It’s certainly caught the attention of a lot of people who aren’t exactly your typical collectors–and the financial media.
CNBC producer Sam Rega put together a 19-minute mini documentary on the sports card market’s meteoric path, with input from Topps’ David Leiner, breaker Rich Layton, Alt Founder Leore Avidar, collector and entrepreneur Nat Turner and several auction company reps.
Remember the “Jefferson City” find of 1986-87 Fleer wax boxes? In the early spring of 2018, a group of seven boxes purchased at a TG&Y store at the time of issue was acquired by Baseball Card Exchange after a lapsed collector from that Missouri town reached out. The packs still had their original 40-cent price tags stuck to the front.
One of those boxes sold for $96,000 at auction in October and another just sold via Greg Morris cards on eBay over the weekend.
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