If you liked the image in yesterday’s blog – and I know you did – today’s entry provides a really nice complement to it. This time it’s a college dorm instead of a military barracks, but the attendant homage to the world of baseball cards is right there, front and center.

   Our erstwhile college student appears to be wearing a Nehru jacket, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the 1970s, what with all the T206 White Borders and T205 Gold Borders showing on the wall behind him.
It’s probably not easy to see in the image, but it looks like there are about 75 White Borders pasted
up on the wall directly behind his head; there are about a dozen or so T205 Gold Borders in different groupings on the right side of the photo, including one that one appears to be stuck on the side of a jar above his desk.

   I didn’t do any better at collecting in college than I did in the service. I started college in 1972, and the baseball card boom of the mid-1970s was still a couple of years away. I don’t think I even bought any packs at all, but I did order the complete sets from 1973-78 from Larry Fritsch.

   For the life of me, I can’t remember why I skipped 1972, which, naturally, turned out to be my favorite set from that decade. I ended up putting the set together card by card maybe 10 years later.

   If you’ve gotten all the way to my blog, you have probably noticed the story about the bogus Brett Favre-endorsed jerseys that has been featured prominently on our website since Monday morning and is the cover feature in the Nov. 28 issue of Sports Collectors Digest that mailed out this week as well.

   This article, prepared by Chris Nerat over the better part of the last four months, is a remarkable investigative piece that looks at a controversial issue in the hobby. The questions about whether something is game-used or not has been a thorny one virtually since the beginning of the sports memorabilia craze, and it’s important enough that we directed the significant resources at it for this investigation.

   Just as it is in the broader arena of authentication itself, determining game use can have elements of inexact science, but trying to reduce and minimize such uncertainty has long been a major goal of the various authentication agencies. It is our hope that the publication of this article will enhance that ongoing effort.

   And to that end, we are asking readers for feedback about the question of game use for sports equipment in general and the Favre-endorsed jerseys in particular. We don’t claim to be the final arbiter on this topic, but at the very least we figured it was more than a little important that we pose the questions.

   Imagine you are systematically working your way through a brand-new box of 2010 Topps Heritage Baseball (I picked Heritage because that’s a product I can actually imagine myself opening), and just as you get to the bottom of the box, there’s a pack of a different color, so to speak.

   There, surrounded by the last two packs of 2010 Heritage, is a pack that looks nothing like the others, and has a vintage look and feel and bright red-and-yellow graphic design, but for some reason it’s somewhat smaller than the other packs. That’s because it is a pristine wax pack of 1975 Topps Baseball Minis!

   How cool would that be? I have been one of those hobbyists largely left behind in the craze that has defined contrived scarcity, but I would think that opening a box of cards with the potential – however remote – of finding a 35-year-old unopened pack inside would be a great sales gimmick.

   I’ve never been shy about offering suggestions to Topps over the years, and though they’ve ignored most of them, I don’t lose faith. So all Topps has to do is buy maybe two of the cases – which admittedly won’t be chump change – and according to my calculations that would give them nearly 1,200 packs to insert.

   Oh, I’ll be the first to concede there are probably lots of aspects to this that I don’t fully comprehend, but that kind of ignorance has never stopped me from spouting off before.

   Besides, I wanted to be known as the guy who invented the “insert pack.”

   As noted in yesterday’s blog, I was intrigued when I learned that Robert Edward Auctions would have to figure out a way to auction 26 unopened cases of 1975 Topps Minis next spring, this one of the highlighted segments of the Charlie Conlon Collection.

   Conlon died this past summer, and Rob Lifson of REA was contacted by the family to handle the liquidation of Conlon’s collection. Having such a startling amount of one item – even one as highly coveted as unopened cases of the second-best set of the decade of the 1970s (pure opinion, obviously; 1972 is just way too cool) – poses unique challenges for an auctioneer.

   “There’s no perfect way to do it,” Lifson said in a phone interview on Monday. “I think they will do well,” he added, though he conceded that conventional wisdom suggests the sheer volume could work to suppress prices, at least in theory.

   But the sale is hardly theoretical. “Uncertainty (about quantity) can be a drag on the marketplace,” he continued. “In the past, nobody knew how many cases he had. There were people who thought he had hundreds of cases, and now it’s a known, finite amount.”

   And Conlon probably did have hundreds of cases at one time, Lifson noted, adding that there are other elements at work that could push bidding upward. “We will likely never again see 26 cases of an important vintage issue available at one time like this again. People will look at it as a unique opportunity. This is the time to buy them.”

   The plan, tentative though it may be, is to sell the 12 sealed cases in three lots: six cases, five cases and one single case. The other 14 cases where the case seal has been broken, will be sold in seven lots of two cases each.

   Lifson said they didn't really think that breaking up a case to offer individual boxes was the thing to do. "We thought we should keep the cases intact, because that's the way he kept them; these are probably the only surviving cases out there, and there are individual boxes around already in collectors' hands (that all probably came from Charlie anyway). We think that dealers or collector/investors will probably break up some of the cases, and they will really be the buyers of these cases due to the quantity, so we also did not want to undermine their interest, which we think will be great."
 
   And while Lifson was talking to me, he was looking at a PSA 10 specimen of George Brett’s 1975 Topps Mini card. It’s hardly a surprise that Conlon would have been able to winnow through so many cases and come away with such a stunner.

   And just for good measure, Conlon also had 21/2 cases of Topps Minis Cellos, which will be sold as a single lot in the same auction.

   Now that we’ve discussed what will be offered .... and how it will likely be offered ... it’s only a short additional step to tell you who should be doing the bidding. That kind of all-encompassing hobby assistance can only be found at this location, meaning I’ll be offering those hints on the morrow.

   Remember, vote early and vote often!

   I don’t remember when I first realized there had been people clever enough to have saved unopened material, but I suspect it was around 1980 or so when I started attending regular card shows around Albany, N.Y.

   There were a lot of things that were genuine revelations at the time, perhaps the most compelling being the busting of the Topps monopoly and the emergence of two new card sets every year. But for me it was also startling to realize that there was still such a thing as unopened material from earlier decades.

   I remember doing the EPSCC show at the Music Pier on the Jersey Shore in the early 1980s when Alan “Mr. Mint” Rosen had unopened boxes of 1975 Topps Minis. With his adroit salesmanship, the excitement was palpable as throngs surrounded his table and packs were ripped open in search of Brett, Yount, Ryan, et. al.

   That part I can understand, but in the ensuing two decades the escalation of prices for unopened material has meant that now there’s that looming paradox: many purchases of unopened packs are so expensive that the option of actually opening them is almost taken off the table.

   Heck, a significant amount of unopened stuff now gets entombed even before it’s sold, adding to the expense and further complicating the idea of indulging in the wanton act of, gulp, opening it up.

   That seems to me to largely sterilize the whole undertaking: the very element that made it all so exciting – the prospect of figurative time travel in being able to open a pack of mint cards from an earlier time – is also what attaches the dramatic premiums that people are willing to pay.

   What got me to wondering about all of this was the news that Robert Edward Auctions will be auctioning the unopened 1975 Topps Minis from the Charlie Conlon Estate. That stash reportedly includes 26 unopened cases, so it will be fascinating to see how the veteran auctioneer decides to handle that for the sale.

   And that, dear friends, is a tease for tomorrow’s blog entry.