Keith Olbermann Brings Uncommon Die-Reduce Honus Wagner Card to Public sale

For years, Keith Olbermann, the previous ESPN SportsCenter and MSNBC Countdown anchor, was utilizing one of many holy grails of baseball playing cards … as a paperweight.

Now, the TV veteran tells The Hollywood Reporter that the cardboard in query has been authenticated and slabbed by CGC, and will likely be going up for public sale later this summer season at Love of the Game Auctions, after making its public debut at Fanatics Fest in New York subsequent week, alongside uncommon Wayne Gretzky and Mickey Mantle playing cards.

The card in query is a T206 Honus Wagner card. Specifically, it was a card referred to as the”die-cut Wagner,” which disappeared within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, solely to seek out its manner into Olbermann’s huge card assortment in one of many more unusual tales of uncommon collectors gadgets.

“You’ve heard of the phrase an abundance of caution. This is what happens when you have too much of an abundance of caution,” Olbermann says. “I’m the guy who had a Mona Lisa sitting in the closet, or in this case in the office, literally was was in the lucite holder as a paperweight, sometimes holding down stacks of 1995 baseball spring training programs, and this, my stupidity, I think, adds to the story just a little bit.”

So, what occurred? Back within the late Nineteen Nineties Olbermann learn an article about somebody who restores baseball playing cards. He despatched him a “small project,” and he did such a very good job that the thought of an even bigger job got here up.

“He said, ‘I have an option to buy a really off-condition Wagner that’s just barely a card, but I think it’s a perfect candidate for the kind of restoration that I do,’ and so he quoted me a price, and it’s so long ago that I think we set up a two-year installation plan for me to pay him, and by the time I got it, it was early 1999 and he delivered it to me in person, and I met him, and that card is what you see now, it’s not perfect, but it’s the next best thing.”

It was after that when issues went off the rails.

“I went on a trip for Fox to go anchor the Super Bowl for two weeks, and I came back and got the card out of my safe in Southern California, and I looked at it, and I said, ‘this is just unbelievable, literally, it’s almost unbelievable,’” Olbermann recalled. “I wanted to understand how he did this. I must see his studio, which is one thing we had talked about throughout his restoration, and he had mentioned, yeah, you possibly can come and I’ll present you the instruments and what I did to it, and what’s left of the donor card, and all the things else.

“So I called him, and his phone was disconnected, and I emailed him, and the email bounced back, and then I wrote a letter, and it came back in the mail, ‘not at this address,’ and if you ever had any uncertainty about what you had in front of you, that would be amplified by that kind of response,” he added. “The guy, to my knowledge, had just vanished into the ether, so I didn’t know what I had. I wasn’t sure, and I did not want to go and find out.”

Olbermann ended up sticking the cardboard right into a lucite holder and holding it on his desk, that’s till this previous spring, when “I bought a card from someone on eBay, who then messaged me and said, ‘by the way, I think you have my old Wagner, I was always told that my old Wagner was bought and restored, and you bought it,’ and I went, ‘hmm, that’s an interesting coincidence.’”

So Olbrmann introduced it to CGC, for assist authenticating that it was, the truth is, the long-lost die-cut Wagner.

“We treated it like any other card, in this case, we did know there was restorations that we were looking for, so that in a way made it a little easier, but we’re trying to confirm that the core, or the part that’s the original Wagner, is in fact what it’s supposed to be, and so we reviewed it with the grading team,” says CGC’s Andy Broome. “We additionally used among the expertise that we now have at our disposal, various things like a video spectral comparator, which is a flowery manner of claiming, , I’m utilizing totally different wavelengths of infrared and UV and different varieties of lighting.

“As you can imagine, being die-cut, Honus’ portrait was cut around his head and shoulders, it’s in the name, die-cut, and we could see where that was put together, we could see some of the adhesives that were used, we could see where color was rematched in painting to essentially make it seamless, and we were able to detect that the parts were of the card were from a donor T206 card and matched up beautifully, and so we just confirmed what Keith figured out after many years, that this in fact was what’s known as the die-cut Wagner that has been restored.”

While restoration work is frequent in wonderful artwork, luxurious watches and different elements of the bigger collectible enterprise, it’s nonetheless considerably scorned on the planet of baseball playing cards, the place trimmed and altered classics (together with a T206 Wagner or two!) have left consumers burned. Olbermann and CGC are betting that by being fully up entrance in regards to the restoration, these issues might be eased.

“If you had a Mona Lisa, or you had a copy of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence, you would not throw it out or leave it in the back because it got coffee on it,” Olbermann quips. “I mean, you would, in fact, try to fix it, and it seemed to me that, as long as it was legit and acknowledged it was an art form by itself, and it allowed the possibility of getting people to enjoy the high-end cards without bankrupting themselves necessarily, and also, simply, you know, it’s a shame to see a great sports collectible or collectible of any kind that is damaged, and somehow it’s splendor, if that’s not too ridiculous a word, be clouded by all this.”

“You don’t stick arms back on the Venus de Milo, you don’t do it on every occasion, and you don’t have to do it with every card, but I think it would be better if the restoration work that has been done on cards in this hobby were up front,” he provides.

It begs the query, although … why promote one of many holy grails of baseball playing cards? A card that vanished 30 years in the past solely to return immediately?

“I’m at 67 years old, a little more grown up, not completely, but a little bit more grown up,” Olbermann says, noting that he already owns one other T206 Wagner with its white border reduce off, in addition to a proof of the enduring card in query. “This card ought to have its personal home. It ought to be on show someplace, a minimum of in somebody’s home, moderately than, as I mentioned, my very slovenly stewardship of this card, as a result of it isn’t only a Wagner, and it’s not only a Wagner that had its personal previous earlier than anyone restored it, however the restoration is in and of itself unbelievable in some regards.

“The decision to auction it off is largely based on one thing, which is how many Wagners does one guy need?” he says. “I have three at the moment, it turns out. I thought I had two.”

Olbermann’s T206 Wagner will likely be on show at Fanatics Fest subsequent week.