Lou Gehrig DeLong Purchased for $620 At Card Show!

This is another entry in my Collector Stories Series. If you have a cool story you want to tell, email me the details and photos if you have them.

A subscriber named August wrote in to tell me a story I couldn’t resist sharing. The kind of story that would fit well on a Chris Sewall “Regular Rollers” video.

I’m going to let August tell the story (lightly edited for length):

I grew up collecting cards as a kid in the 90s and like many of us, phased out of collecting in the early 2000s. I got back into the hobby in 2019 and was faced with a dilemma common to many of us: what should I collect?

After a brief phase of opening packs and flipping ultra-modern cards during the COVID boom, I made a conscious effort to focus my collection and develop a discriminating eye for cards I feel are worth collecting. The process led me to really prioritize the design and aesthetics of a card and sort of turned me into a set collector, as it became clear that certain sets were just more thoughtfully designed than others. I came up with a loose list of a few dozen sets which really stood out to me and I further refined that list by prioritizing sets that had an element of scarcity and affordability. The result is an interesting mix of sets spanning the major sports, both vintage and modern, some being small insert sets and others being base sets or parallel sets.

While I do collect some cards that fall outside of my main focus, I typically try to stick to cards from the sets I’m working on, and that makes finding cards at shows a challenge at times.

I attended the TriStar show in Houston last week and while I enjoyed myself, I had a very tough time finding anything to purchase. For practicality's sake, most of my usual eBay buys tend to be from the modern sets that I collect. They are usually much cheaper and readily available than cards from the vintage sets I hope to build. But at card shows, you often see a lot vintage and so I usually end up gravitating more towards that whenever I attend.

There are multiple vintage sets on my list that I have yet to add an example of. These are typically sets that meet my aesthetic and rarity criteria but fall short in the affordability category. Sets like 1887 Allen & Ginter, 1914-15 Cracker Jack, 1933 DeLong, and 1934 Goudey. I am a particularly big fan of the sets from the 1930s and after spending a few hours at the show I was hopeful to add an example from one of these sets, likely a low- to mid-grade common or lesser-known Hall of Famer.

I flipped through various dollar boxes and scanned nearly every showcase and really only found one modern card that was priced reasonably and fit into my sets, but it was a card I already had duplicates of, so I passed on it.

Feeling slightly disappointed, I started to make my way towards the exit. I stopped and looked at some of the showcases right before the door and low and behold, something caught my eye. It was a 1933 DeLong. Not just any 1933 DeLong though, it was the key card. The Lou Gehrig.

I noticed the price tag which read $650. I thought that can’t be right. Surely it was a typo and should read $6,500. I wasn’t an expert on pricing for the card, but I did recall seeing sales of it in past and they were always $5,000+, if not more. Even the dealer I had spoken to earlier about his DeLong set had referred to his Gehrig copy as a “$10,000 card.”

My bewilderment regarding the price momentarily blinded me from noticing that the bottom edge of the card had been cut off.

After I realized this, I gave it some thought and even with the bottom edge missing, the price still seemed a bit too good to be true. I started wondering if there was something else I was missing, perhaps the seller was trying to sell the card as “questionable authenticity” or something and I was the sucker who was about to fall for it.

Still, I remained intrigued. I waited patiently for the dealer to finish up with another customer and proceeded to ask him if he could let me see the card up close. He was very friendly and upfront told me that the card was missing the bottom edge and wanted to make sure I understood that. I assured him I had noticed that and proceeded to examine the card as best I could to determine if it was indeed an authentic card.

I am by no means an expert but from my perspective everything seemed to be legit. I still wasn’t completely sure though, so I asked him if it would be okay for me to take the card out of the sleeve. He agreed and as I examined up close I took a whiff of the cardboard and it undoubtedly had the smell of old paper. The smell reminded me of my great grandmother’s collection of Pollyanna books from her childhood that were printed in 1914. She gave them to my sister when we were children in the 1990s and the smell always stood out to me. After that, I felt confident that if nothing else, the card was old.

I asked the dealer where he had acquired the card and he said that it come in from a collection he had recently purchased and that the previous owner had bought the card in the early 1980s. I didn’t look up any actual sales comps for the card, and considering the condition there might not be anything relevant, but I felt like if the card was genuine, the price was too good to pass up.

I offered the dealer $600, he countered at $620 and I agreed. I immediately dropped the card off with SGC right there at the show and a few days later I got confirmation that the card had been slabbed by SGC as authentic altered.

This was obviously expected given the missing bottom edge, but I am thrilled to own the card, even with the missing portion.

I like to think that a kid cut off the edge back in the 1930s, perhaps ceremoniously so when Gehrig retired and was no longer on the Yankees or maybe just to get the card to fit properly in a photo album. The cut is quite clean and I actually think the card design benefits slightly as a result. The dimensions are closer to that of modern cards and the ratio between the space for the name and the image works better in my opinion. Perhaps that’s just a result of my overly particular focus on design and aesthetics, but needless to say the card fits my collection well.

I’ve checked past sales of the card and although I couldn’t find any relevant recent comps, even the most heavily damaged PSA 1s sell for $3-4k. I have no plans to sell the card anytime soon however as the card and story are just too perfect for my collection.

Thanks to August for letting me share his story! Remember, email me if you have a story or a link to a story you’d like me to cover.