Notes: Rare 1952 Topps Signed Card Auction; $5 Million Mick Still in Storage; Collecting Ali Cards
Collector Tom Killeen is selling his partial set of autographed 1952 Topps cards at auction this week including one of the toughest signed cards from that iconic set.
No, not Mickey Mantle.
Killeen has one of the four signed copies of Howie Fox’s card on PSA’s Population Report.
Fox spent parts of nine seasons in the major leagues from 1944 to 1954. He was pitching for the Phillies in 1952 when Topps decided to put him in their first full scale baseball set. Finding his card is easy. Finding one he signed is virtually impossible.
In 1955, Fox was stabbed to death outside a San Antonio bar he’d recently purchased while playing in the minor leagues. With only a limited number of collectors chasing autographed baseball cards at the time, Fox is believed to have only signed a handful.
The card Killeen owns is the highest graded of the four.
In total, his set–one he’s been working on for the last 16 years– contains 341 of the 407 cards.
The auction runs through Sunday night.
Speaking of the 1952 set… collector Rob Gough, who made headlines with his $5.2 million purchase of the PSA 9 Mantle last week, says the card remains in storage inside the PWCC Vault until he can arrange for proper insurance to have it displayed.
He recently talked about the card with Stryker and Klein on KROQ in Los Angeles. “If you look at the data, other iconic cards in the hobby have just 10x’ed in the same period of time that this last sold for $2.8 million,” he said. “So, it’s not like I bought it on a whim here. I definitely did a lot of analysis and crunched the data, and for me this was highly undervalued.”
Sunday would have been Muhammad Ali’s 79th birthday. Former ESPN boxing reporter Dan Rafael is an avid collector and recently offered a tour of some memorable vintage Ali trading cards.
One of the 50 2009 Topps Chrome Gold parallel Steph Curry rookie cards was slated to close at auction Tuesday night for a big price.
