If that Wagner card is real, I’ll donate my 1957 Topps set

Oh, puleez! That lame Honus Wagner card has reared its ugly head once again in the hobby, with a new set of gullible television executives falling for the desperate pitch. All of this would be funny, except that it just perpetuates the shady image of the hobby, which good people have been trying to shake off for the better part of 30 years.

For the uninitiated, I would state first and foremost that you’re not missing much. It’s a bogus card. The card has gotten tons of ink and video, and the guy who owns it and the auctioneer who has been charged with trying to peddle it, and maybe even the television executives duped into gulling their viewers all want it to be real. They should try closing their eyes and tapping the heels of their ruby slippers together three times. That might work.

HBO fell for it, ESPN has apparently also gulped down the Kool-Aid, and God knows who else is going to bite. But I’m pretty sure all the wishing, hoping and navel-gazing in the world isn’t going to change reality. That’s why we call it reality. If you could just wish stuff away or make stuff up, we’d call it cable TV or talk radio instead.

I could recount the details of this nonsense except that it’s just too silly even for me. The owner of the card is black, and so the silliest race card in the deck has been cautiously slid out onto the table. Sorry, too nutty and pathetic to warrant a response from me. Try calling me a racist and see where that gets you.

The only reason the infantile charade has been allowed to continue for so many years (25 and counting) is that the card owner won’t let PSA examine it without him being present. See any holes in that one?

I’ve seen the same scans of the card as everybody else, and just from that I can reliably state that it’s a clinker.

How sure am I? This sure. If the owner of the card can get PSA, SGC or Global to sign off on it as authentic and assign it a grade, I will immediately pack up one of my favorite card sets, 1957 Topps Baseball, which I have been working on and upgrading for 20 years, and ship it off to whichever major auction company can get it into an auction the quickest. And I’ll direct that the check for the proceeds – all of the proceeds that would have otherwise come my way – be made out to the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust.

I suspect any number of major dealers would make similar offers, except that the whole enterprise is just too silly to even warrant their time and attention.