Greatest Facebook Marketplace Find Ever? $75 buy yields Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson and others!
Robert, who prefers to keep his last name private, was sitting in his truck between appointments, and decided to check out Facebook Marketplace for deals. One of the first listings he saw was a trunk full of old baseball magazines. A big baseball fan who played in college, he reached out to the seller to offer $75, and went into his next appointment. By the time he finished, he seller had responded agreeing to his offer.
Robert drove right over and met the seller, who opened the trunk and started showing some of the vintage magazines. He saw covers featuring Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and other legends. He asked the seller where he got them, and was told that a friend had passed away 25 years before at the age of 95, and he had left them behind. The seller had hung onto them since.
Robert started packing up the magazines, and the seller told him to just take the entire trunk. His wife wanted him to get rid of the entire thing, he said.
When Robert got the trunk home, he started going through it and found some surprises. First, two uncut sheets of smaller cards that weren't familiar to him, but he knew they were special. He decided to take them to Fanatics Fest to ask dealers. He walked from table to table, but no one knew what they were.
Then he encountered Leighton Sheldon, owner of Just Collect, a vintage sports card dealer. Sheldon explained to Robert that the uncut sheets were from the 1935 Goudey 4-in-1 set, both featuring Babe Ruth. According to Sports Collectors Daily, there were previously none of these known to exist.
Sheldon worked quickly with Robert Edward Auctions President Brian Dwyer to broker a sale for one of the sheets for $35,000. Robert holds the second one and told me that since Sheldon posted a video about the find to his YouTube channel, he has received offers up to $50,000, but he believes he can get more.
The second surprise in the trunk was a stack of three 1947 Bond Bread Jackie Robinson cards.
Dave Berg, vintage baseball card expert, told me that while the cards are called 1947 Bond Bread, which would make them his earliest-known cards, some of them, including the "leaping and throwing" variation Robert found, were released in 1948 through 1950. Because it was a regional release and not national, though, Berg believes it shouldn't qualify as a rookie card. Berg's YouTube video on the subject explains the intricacies of the card set. The card Robert found was likely handed out with bread.
Robert, who believes that the black blots on the middle card in the photo are from the printing process, decided to get these graded and authenticated, and Sheldon is helping him do this. Most longtime vintage collectors are skeptical of finds like this, and when they see unauthenticated 1947 Bond Bread Jackie Robinsons like this they immediately assume they're fake.
"They definitely are real," Sheldon told me. He's likely submitting them to PSA, whose population report shows that this specific variation of the 1947 Bond Bread set has only been graded 31 times, with a high grade of Excellent-Mint 6.
The last public sale of a PSA-graded 1947 Bond Bread Jackie Robinson "throwing" variation, like Robert's, sold on eBay in 2024 for a little more than $5,000. It was graded a PSA Very Good+ 3.5.
Other things Robert found in the trunk included a 1964 World Series program filled out in pencil, and a Manilla folder that contained the deed, bylaws, and contracts for the first Babe Ruth league in Harlem. He believes this means the original owner of the trunk helped start the Babe Ruth league.
For $75, this was the kind of find most collectors dream of.
Mike runs the hobby YouTube channel Junk Wax Hero, where he talks about a lot of different aspects of the hobby from a collector’s perspective. His most popular series is Attic Find Friday. He also writes a free weekly hobby recap newsletter at junkwaxhero.com. It’s a cliche, but his favorite card is the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr.