https://twitter.com/JoeOrlandoPSA/status/705146774139195392/photo/1
If you thought you were doing pretty good when you found a $20 bill in an old coat the other day, meet the family that discovered $1 million worth of Ty Cobb baseball cards in the broken-down home of a dead great-grandfather.
Well, you can’t meet them, as they have chose to remain anonymous, but you get the point.
This family found seven cards that were printed between 1909 and 1911 in a paper bag. It sounds too good to be true, but the authenticity of the cards was verified by Professional Sports Authenticator in Newport Beach, Calif. Joe Orlando, which is also the name of a 1950s pool hustler, said the discovery was “spectacular” and “miraculous.”
“I am not sure if any other baseball card find is more remarkable than this new discovery,” Orlando said in a statement.
Orlando also said, “This is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of our hobby.”
He didn’t go on to say, “It’s right up there with the time we found a Willie Mays lunchbox from 1945 in an abandoned fallout shelter and a Joe DiMaggio jock strap from a spring training game in 1955 at a junkyard in Brooklyn,” but he should have said that.
The story also says on the scale of 1 to 10, 10 being mint and 1 being you kept them in your bike spokes for the entirety of third grade, the Cobb cards are between 3.5 and 4.5, which is supposedly very good for cards this old. It’s not unlike when you see your 100-year-old grandmother and tell her she looks like a million dollars, relatively speaking, although no one is giving you that much money for her.
What the family plans to do with the cards is unclear, but if it’s not “sell them to a nerd for $1 million,” then what’s the point of any of this?
