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REA’s major event of the season, the Summer 2024 event, closes in mid August, offering a formidable assortment of vintage and modern grails spanning cards and memorabilia. In partnership with REA, we’ll be previewing the action over the next few weeks to shine a spotlight on some intriguing lots with insightful market context.
Today, we kick it off by exploring three pre-war baseball assets sure to resonate with vintage collectors across categories.
Ahead of REA’s Spring 2024 auction, we highlighted another Joe Jackson Type I photo, that one shot by the famed baseball photographer Charles Conlon. Despite the fact the photo had already sold four times in the last 12 years, increasing significantly each time, it reached a $166,000 result in the spring, improving by another 25% over a sale recorded just one year earlier.
That’s the power of one of the most coveted Type I photo subjects in sports; Jackson’s photo credentials are well documented. The all-time sports photograph record stands at $1,470,000 for a signed photo of Jackson. Thanks to the early-1900s era in which he played, supply is limited. More than 3,200 Type I photos have sold at four prominent auction houses over the last 18 months through the end of June. Just 13 of those lots featured Joe Jackson. 7 of them sold for five-figure sums, and a handful that missed that mark didn’t feature Jackson as the lone subject, instead depicting him in a team or with a teammate.
Overall, Type I photography continues to rise and gain an audience as a popular category at auction. Through June, REA, Goldin, Heritage, and Memory Lane are on pace to achieve Type I photo sales volume 54% higher in 2024 than in 2023. The lot count is on pace to grow a staggering 175%, which means greater supply available and therefore lower average prices. But that introduces a chasm between the prices realized for pedestrian photos and true rarities - five-figure sales are on pace to grow 20%. As evidenced above, Jackson typically falls in the true rarity category.
This particular photograph hails from 1919, the year of the scandalous World Series that saw Jackson eventually banned from the game. Another Type I photo, larger in size than the one offered here but depicting a comparable Jackson close-up and dating to 1919, sold for $26,960 in January of 2023. Can the photo offered at REA capture tailwinds similar to those enjoyed by the Conlon photo in April to deliver a strong result? It'll be another five-figure outcome for Jackson, as the $10,000 opening bid has been hit.
Game-worn material from the 1930s is scarce, scarcer still for one of its stars who managed just five full seasons. For Dizzy Dean, though, those five seasons were prolific, as the outspoken and charismatic hurler led the Cardinals’ “Gas House Gang” to a 1934 World Series title. That season, Dean took home the MVP award thanks to his thirty wins, a feat that hasn’t been equaled in the National League since. He finished as the MVP runner-up in 1935 and 1936 before an injury in the 1937 All Star Game ultimately changed the course of his career, curtailing the high-end speed of his renowned fastball. Following his career on the field, Dean further endeared himself to the public as a broadcaster, relying on his colorful, country patois to uniquely bring the game to life.
Rare appearances of Dean game-worn material at auction have achieved impressive results far before the more recent inflection in demand for high-end game-worn assets. Most notably, in 2010, REA sold a home jersey from the same period as the road jersey offered in August, achieving a sum of $103,500. That same year, Lelands sold a 1938 Cubs jersey, believed to be worn by Dean in the World Series, for $37,504.
Consider that in 2010, the most expensive price ever paid for a Babe Ruth jersey was $900,000, achieved back in 2005 for the same jersey that will cross the auction block later in August. That jersey, albeit with bolstered authentication pointing to the “Called Shot” game, has seen bidding reach $13 million already. Similarly, the most expensive Lou Gehrig jersey in 2010 was $717,000. Today, that record stands at $2,580,000.
Now, Dean isn’t Ruth or Gehrig…obviously…and their record-holding jerseys saw their prices bolstered by photomatch authentication in contrast to the MEARS A9 grade held by the jersey offered next month. Still, the evolution in prices is demonstrative of the rising demand for vintage baseball grails. Dean was a contemporary of those icons and a star that loomed among the game’s best at the peak of his powers. The question is to what degree that heightened demand will lift the appetite for a true rarity of the era.
In 2022, REA sold a PSA 9 graded 1910 E93 Standard Caramel Cy Young card for a record-breaking $522,000. To put that figure into perspective, even after more than two years since the sale, it remains the most expensive E93 Standard Caramel Cy Young card, surpassing the next highest sale by 52x. The cumulative sales of all PSA-graded E93 Standard Caramel Cy Young cards amount to approximately $611,000 across more than 40 total auction results. For those keeping score at home, the sale of that single PSA 9 card accounts for over 85% of this total value.
What made that REA sale so historic?
The E93 auctioned in that Spring 2022 event was not only a PSA 9, an almost unbelievable feat on its own, it was also the highest graded example with no like-graded copies in existence. In REA’s Summer 2024 Auction, there’s yet another T206 Cy Young that stands as the highest PSA graded example. The rarity of this particular Cy Young goes even further as it’s the only Broad Leaf example that shows Cy’s glove in the PSA census. Just as this PSA 5.5 graded example is unmatched, so was the career of vintage baseball’s premier pitcher.
Born Denton True Young, “Cy” earned his legendary nickname after causing so much damage to the grandstand behind home plate with his fastball that teammates quipped it looked like a cyclone had struck the stands. His storied career garnered multiple records, many of which will likely never be threatened in today’s game. Cy Young holds the record for most career wins (511), most innings pitched (7,356), and tossed 749 complete games which accounts for 91% of all games he started.
Heading into the sale of this PSA 5.5, the last public auction of a glove-showing Broad Leaf example came in 2021 after REA sold a SGC 1.5 for $28,800. The PSA slabbed Broad Leaf has already reached $67,500, making it the second most expensive Cy Young card ever sold by REA and setting an auction record for the variation.
Stay tuned for the next edition of our preview - next Friday, we'll share a primer on a major assortment of high-graded, vintage cards.
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