Baseball cards are big business as a Shoeless Joe Jackson baseball card from a 1910 series, called T210 Old Mill, has sold at auction for $492,000.
The winning bidder’s identity was not revealed and the auction ended after bidding continued into late Thursday night.
Ben Foster urged his father, Hayes, to dig up an old baseball collection of 585 cards. When they looked, they found the minor league baseball card of Shoeless Joe Jackson.
“My dad had always assumed that he lost his baseball card collection somehow when he moved in with my mom and he thought it was just gone,” Foster said to ESPN. “That was back in 2009. At the time, I was in high school, so we took the box home and looked at it that day. I didn’t take a full inventory, I just flipped through them.”
“I went through the stack and found ‘Jackson, New Orleans,’ and showed it to my dad,” Foster said. “There must have been a miscommunication about the minor league thing because I asked him if this was Shoeless Joe Jackson and he said, ‘No, New Orleans wouldn’t have had a major league team and he wouldn’t have played for them that year.’ So I put it back in the stack and kept taking inventory.”
He then matched up a side-by-side picture of the card with one that sold in 2019 for $600,000. He put the card in a plastic holder once he realized its potential worth.
The cards had been passed on to Foster’s father from his great uncle in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
