Move over, Honus!
The fabled T206 Honus Wagner baseball card has long been collecting’s ‘Holy Grail.’ Yet, while it remains as valuable as ever, it might be losing ground around here in popularity to another card with Pirates ties — the 1955 Topps Roberto Clemente.
Even the most apathetic sports fans know the significance of the T206 Honus Wagner baseball card.
But despite being one of the rarest and most valued pieces of baseball memorabilia ever created, a print of the former Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop from more than a century ago is perhaps not the most coveted card by Steel City residents. For card collectors like Luke Palmer, that would be Roberto Clemente’s Topps 1955 rookie card, which passionate fans like himself can more reasonably dream of owning one day.
“That Wagner card is kind of in its own world,” Palmer said. “The Clemente card is very limited in how many there are, but it’s not to that degree of scarcity. It’s still very valuable, but not to the degree of the Wagner card.”
Palmer, who grew up in Butler County and started collecting cards in elementary school, has never seen a Clemente rookie card in person. Though Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA), a division of
Collectors Universe, has evaluated at least 4,000 Clemente rookie cards, very few are in prime condition.
PSA grades cards on a scale from 1 to 10, with cards that receive a 10 rating being in mint condition. To date, just one PSA 10 Clemente rookie card exists, as well as 11 nine’s.
The last time a PSA nine was auctioned off, in March 2021, it commanded over $1.1 million, more than twice what it went for in 2016.
“That’s something you spend your whole life looking for,” Palmer said. “They’re very hard to come by. Even a PSA 1 is going for $300-400. That card, it’s just very expensive and very rare to come across one in any type of decent condition.”
More than baseball
Other players from Clemente’s generation have cards that yield absurdly high returns, including Mickey Mantle’s 1952 Topps rookie card that most recently sold for just below $3 million. However, what separates Clemente from stars of the mid20th century is that his legacy extends beyond the statistics page.
Despite accumulating a career .317 batting average, 12 Gold Gloves and an even 3,000 hits, Clemente is perhaps more revered for his charitable nature, which reached individuals like Duane Rieder, the executive director of the Clemente Museum in Lawrenceville. Rieder received an autograph from “The Great One” at a Pirates game in 1971, a year before Clemente’s tragic death in a plane crash while traveling to Nicaragua to provide earthquake aid.
Rieder, who grew up a diehard Pirates fan, was “mortified” upon learning of Clemente’s passing. Just as Clemente took the time to give Rieder an autograph, he was more than willing to put baseball in the rearview mirror for the benefit of others, even at the expense of his own life.
“He wanted to be a man of the people, and that’s just what he was,” Rieder said. “Some names may have been better at baseball, but there was no better humanitarian in baseball than Roberto Clemente. ... He died helping others, he gave up his life to help others. He’s the true definition of a hero.”
Rieder’s Clemente story is one of many told by fans at the museum that highlights the 15-time All Star’s kindness. Still, Clemente’s accolades alone would be sufficient reason for the museum, which has a few rookie cards on site, to exist.
But for Rieder, it’s who he was as a person that distinguishes arguably the greatest defensive right fielder of all time as a “hero.”
Even with his gaudy onfield accomplishments and dedication to humanitarian work that made him beloved by fans, Clemente’s rookie card is valuable for a plethora of additional reasons.
‘A gorgeous set’
In 1955, the baseball card world was highly competitive, with Topps and Bowman battling for players’ rights to produce their cards.
Though Topps would acquire Bowman just a year later, stars such as Willie Mays and Hank Aaron signed on to have their cards produced by the latter in 1955. In turn, the Topps set that year was one of the smallest ever created, and thus has become more coveted by collectors in recent years.
Not to mention, Clemente’s rookie card was not included in the opening set but was instead released as part of a “higher” series. A few months into the baseball season, Topps releases a second series of cards for players who weren’t included in the initial set.
A significantly smaller number of these sets are typically produced, since their release time coincides with the end of summer, meaning children are heading back to school and football season is around the corner.
Leighton Sheldon, owner of Just Collect, a vintage sports card and memorabilia store in New Jersey, believes these factors contribute to the allure of Clemente’s rookie card.
“What makes that card in particular special is it’s not only his first card, but it’s also from the high number series,” Sheldon said.
Topps’ 1955 set is also renowned for its aesthetic beauty, according to Sheldon. The 1955 set was the first time in the company’s history it used a horizontal format for player depictions instead of a vertical one.
Players like Clemente were illustrated twice per card, once with a head shot and again in an action shot. While Sheldon wouldn’t call it his favorite set of baseball cards, he recognizes other collectors do not share his opinion.
Among the famous players featured in that set are Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Harmon Killebrew, both of whom were rookies. But Rick Giddings, who is a lifelong Pirates fan and owns Gizmo’s Sportscards in Davis Junction, Ill., believes it is Clemente’s rookie card that truly completes the set.
“It’s a very good set,” Giddings said. “I just sold one of those sets the other day, which was a hard time because every time you do, you’ve got to put a good Clemente in there, which holds a stupid huge book value [on its own].”
Blast from the past
While Dan Gutman’s baseball card adventure book “Roberto and Me” is obviously fictitious, the ability of Clemente’s rookie card to act as a time traveler for older generations is undeniable.
Jeff Patton, who hails from New Castle and opened up Baseball Card Castle in Cranberry 31 years ago, believes the Pittsburgh area is still full of Pirates fans despite the franchise’s lackluster performances in recent years.
But instead of coming out in droves to support the squad, many PIrates fans reminisce of the team’s prior successes, such as their 1960, 1971 and 1979 World Series victories. That longing for Pittsburgh to return to its glory days is reflected by fans who choose to purchase team memorabilia from prior decades.
“Energy that can’t go into the current Pirates always goes back into Clemente, [Bill] Mazeroski, [Willie] Stargell,” Patton said.
The affection for yesteryear’s Pirates teams naturally includes Clemente, whom even young collectors like Palmer treasure. Despite being just 25 years old, Palmer has gotten his hands on an autographed Clemente card and is eyeing a bat as his next purchase.
For memorabilia shops like Patton’s, the desire for nostalgia, as well as other Steel City professional franchises’ accomplishments, has helped make Pittsburgh a leader for baseball card collecting in America.
The increasing desire to purchase sports artifacts is certainly present in the Pittsburgh area, but it is hardly restricted to it. For instance, a PSA 9 Clemente rookie card sold for $264,000 in 2018, but just three years later a card with the same rating sold for more than four times as much.
Sheldon believes that if the PSA 10 Clemente were to go up for auction again, which it hasn’t since 2012 when it sold for $432,690, it would demand at least $2 million.
A booming market
After a national baseball card explosion in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the industry slowed down for business owners like Patton. Until 2017. Between 2017 and 2019, sales at Baseball Card Castle went up at least 10% every year.
Today, Patton believes the baseball card industry is “hotter now than it was” during the ’80s and ’90s and that the market has corrected itself, returning card values to where “they should have been.”
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and many businesses went under or endured financial casualties such as layoffs and hiring freezes, baseball cards retained and even increased their value.
Card enthusiasts have several different theories for why.
One of the most frequently used explanations centers around the influx of disposable income in people’s pockets because of government-issued stimulus checks. Another is that former card collectors occupied their free time by digging around their basements to look for a diamond in the rough.
“The two best investments you can make in the world are land and old vintage baseball cards, because they’re not making any more of either one,” Giddings said.
In response, the prices for newer cards have ballooned. Mike Trout’s 2011 Bowman rookie card could be purchased for a few hundred dollars three years ago, but now they’re frequently valued in the low thousands.
There does not appear to be a consensus among baseball card collectors on whether the rookie cards of star players like Trout or Bryce Harper will retain their value. But several collectors and baseball card business owners agree the value for memorabilia from many decades ago will stay strong.
“Vintage will always have a special place in people’s hearts because there’s just something about the fact that a card was produced 70 years ago that you can’t overcome,” Patton said.
Though the future of baseball card collecting is unpredictable, history has shown there is no question that cards like Clemente’s 1955 edition are resistant to value reduction. Naturally, other cards have demonstrated the same capabilities, like Babe Ruth’s 1916 rookie card and the previously noted Wagner and Mantle cards
However, when it comes to Pittsburgh, there is but one card that has meant so much to generations of Steel City baseball fans.
“There’s a ton of people that have collected Clementes for 40 years who could never ever swing their dream card, [which] was to get that Clemente rookie card,” Patton said. “They thought about it their whole lives. I’ve had three or four times where a wife bought one for a husband for a retirement gift, you know, because he talked about it for 20 years. That’s very common.
“It’s the granddaddy of them all in Pittsburgh.”