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Baseball Cards: The New Lotto

By Michael J. Marando

Tom Marshall was a 6-year-old kid in Evanston, Ill., in 1952, when a boyhood chum cajoled him into trading away a prized Hank Sauer baseball card for a rookie no one heard of. Marshall’s lament lasted 30 years — until collecting baseball cards moved off Main Street and onto Wall Street.     
     In the early 1980s, card shops were all the rage, as baseball-star cards from the “vintage” era of the 1950s and 1960s began commanding big bucks, instead of winding up in the spokes of bicycle wheels or traded for boxes of Cracker Jack and a few collector-favorite puree marbles on school playgrounds.     
     Marshall, a former news reporter with Sacramento’s KXTV Channel 10 and now a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, vividly recalls one of the best financial deals of his life, although he didn’t know it at the time. Before Ernie Banks, Sauer was arguably the most popular Cub on Chicago’s National League team.  

‘A Guy Named Mantle’
“They called Sauer the unofficial Mayor of Chicago. At Wrigley Field, fans used to throw packets of Red Man chewing tobacco at him,” Marshall says. “And Joey Fullwrath talked me into trading him for a guy named Mickey Mantle. I hated the Yankees, so I put the Mantle card away in a filing drawer and didn’t look at it again for several years.”     
Continued...

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