Baseball’s Most Valuable Prints

They lag behind cards, memorabilia, and artifacts

The other day I received a printed catalog (Portfolio, Vol. LXXIX, №1) from The Old Print Shop, where I have been a customer now and then over the decades. The catalog was first offered in 1941; the shop has been a fixture at the corner of 30th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City since 1925; and it began in business under that name in 1898. These days most of the shop’s sales are online, so this venerable catalog will soon be discontinued. (“We are dedicated to our seventy-nine-year-old publication, Portfolio; however, we recognize that its days are numbered.”)

This latest number of Portfolio featured on its cover a print I knew well and had written about at Our Game, as part of a five-part series called Diamond Visions: Baseball’s Greatest Illustration Art: “New York Fashions for March 1870,” depicted above. [See: http://bit.ly/2M3QMl3.]

I knew that “New York Fashions for March 1870,” published by the Butterick sewing-pattern company, was beautiful and exceedingly scarce (fewer than ten copies extant, I had surmised). And yet I was a bit taken aback by its price: $16,500 for a small lithograph, just shy of 10” x 14”. For a full description, see: http://bit.ly/2EnPyNz.

Should I have been? On page 2 of the current Portfolio, Henry Sandham’s glorious gravure of a Temple Cup game of 1894, uncolored and complete with cameos, is offered at $35,000 (http://bit.ly/2Es8kDo). Might it be a bargain at that price, too?

I collect prints, and not only in baseball, so while I am more concerned with aesthetics than with values, I track the latter pretty closely, too. What, I thought, have been the highest prices paid for baseball lithos or engravings? As with baseball cards or memorabilia, the drivers of valuation are not quality or scarcity alone but also desirability, which is often enhanced by an item’s association with a star player.

According to Rich Mueller of Sports Collectors Daily May 2019: “The highest price ever paid for a Wagner [Honus, of course, and T206] was $3.12 million for the PSA 5 ‘Jumbo’ example, which sold through Goldin Auctions in 2016 and remains the most valuable baseball card ever sold, just ahead of the PSA 9-rated 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle which sold last year for $2.88 million.” Cards are produced as multiples, just like prints, and if scarcity alone were paramount, the famous Slow Joe Doyle card in the T206 series would be worth more than a Wagner or Mantle — the latter is not even his rookie card.

Just the other day, a Babe Ruth bat went for $1.08 million at SCP Auctions — which a few years ago sold “The Magna Carta of Baseball,” the handwritten Laws of Base Ball from 1857 for $3.26 million. And a 1928–1930 Ruth jersey fetched $5.6 million last June.

I offer these few indicia to support my growing suspicion that in the immature hobby of baseball collecting — still refining its criteria as, over the years, equivalents have taken shape among aficionados of stamps or coins — the iconography of the game may yet be undervalued. Some lithographs or aquatints are so scarce that no sports auction house nor print shop has ever handled one. I have in mind, particularly, the large folio version of the Currier & Ives “American National Game: Grand Match for the Championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, N.J.” which has never sold publicly for six figures, and the 1867 J.L. Magee litho “The second great match game for the championship, between the Athletic Base Ball Club of Philadelphia and the Atlantics of Brooklyn, on the grounds of the Athletics, Fifteenth & Columbia Avenue, Phila., Oct. 22nd, 1866.” To my knowledge, this has never come up for sale.

Of the the two images above I have written: “ This 1867 depiction of a baseball game played in the previous year is less well known than the Currier & Ives image above, but if one were to come to market today it would probably bring about the same figure, nearly $200,000. Both are exceedingly scarce, but the Magee has more brilliantly crisp detail. It gives us a real flavor of being right there, right then.” If I could choose one to own, it would be the Magee.

From my hasty and unscientific research, the ten most valuable baseball prints (including auction commission) are listed below, in declining order of price received. It is notable that items associated with actual players and the advertising of a product have yielded more than even the rarest examples of lithography. I will mention as the highest-priced baseball painting Norman Rockwell’s study for “Tough Call,” ultimately a cover for the Saturday Evening Post, which sold in 2017 for $1.68 million (http://bit.ly/2EpXDRA).

1. 1874 Red Stockings Cigar Advertising Display Poster Featuring George Wright; $189,600.
2. 1889 Cap Anson and Buck Ewing “Burke Ale” Beer Poster; $188,000.
3. 1915 Cracker Jack Advertising Poster; $152,750.
4. 1889 A35 Goodwin Round Album Advertising Poster; $105,750.
5. 1866 Currier & Ives, American National Game; $76,375.
6. 1864 Union Prisoners at Salisbury, N.C.; $46,400.
7. 1870 “New York Fashions” (see above); $22,325.
8. 1894 Pittsburgh BBC Schedule Poster; $17,400.
9. 1910 Home Run Cigarettes Advertising Poster; $11,162.
10. 1888 Hastings “Galaxy of the National League” Team Composite (mix of photographs with art); $8,888.

I will welcome additions, corrections, and updates.

Baseball’s Most Valuable Prints was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.