Cards
Exhibit Supply Company launched its first baseball set in the 1920s, collectors have been chasing the classic cards ever since
Benito Mussolini was taking over dictatorial powers of Italy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” was published, and the Jazz Age was in full swing.
It was the Roaring Twenties—1925 to be exact. And baseball cards were just starting to come into their own.
The Exhibit Supply Company became the first company to produce trading cards that weren’t used for advertisement purposes or as an add-on to a product such as tobacco, candy, caramel or gum. The Chicago-based company’s first release was in 1921, but it’s the 1925 product that is perhaps the most coveted by collectors.
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That year featured future Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Rogers Hornsby and Eddie Collins. But it’s a card of legend Lou Gehrig that is the most valuable Exhibits card in the company’s vast history.
The 1925 Exhibits set—which hit the century mark last year—was its biggest ever to date, containing 128 cards. In previous years, the sets were only 60-70 cards. The 1925 cards were oversized, much like postcards at 3 3/8-by-5 3/8 inches.
That year’s cards have proven to be tough for collectors to find in good condition. PSA has graded just over 1,300 cards, while SGC has graded just under 800. PSA’s highest graded single card is a 7, followed by one 6.5 and 13 in grade 6. SGC has slabbed eight 6.5s and eight 6s.
“I think because of the size of the card, I don’t think people kept them,” renowned vintage baseball card collector Marshall Fogel said. “They weren’t something you could keep in a box or in a sleeve. They were like postcards.”
When Fogel was a kid in the 1950s, he recalls going to an arcade where Exhibit cards, which included sports and non-sports, were available in vending machines. He would put a coin in, pull a lever and out came cards. It was like rolling the dice for Fogel since he didn’t know what cards he was going to receive.
According to Exhibits collector Jim Chanin, the cards could be obtained in two ways: via vending machines at arcades; and over the counter.
“I don’t know if they were wrapped in plastic and sold in multiple copies like I know the 1947-66s were sold, because I have those packages,” Chanin said.
Said fellow collector Bob Warren: “What they did is Exhibit packed 250 cards and they’d put brown paper around it and then they loaded the Exhibit machine. They called those 250 cards in brown paper, before they put it into the machine, bricks. So, they were shipping bricks to all these places that had the Exhibit machines.”
Warren, who only collects Exhibit cards and started in the early 2000s, also remembers heading to the arcade for cards in the 1950s.
“I picked up some myself at the Seaside Heights down there in the Jersey Shore, and that’s where I got my first ones back in the ’50s. I got a bunch of them, but I never really got the early ones,” Warren said. “The problem with the early ones, how do you protect them? You go to an arcade, you pick them up, you get on a few rides, you go home and they’ve got creases in them. There were no plastic sheets and stuff like that to protect them.”
A CENTURY OF COLLECTING
The population reports from PSA and SGC certainly reflect a lack of interest in young kids holding onto the cards back in the 1920s. That has made it difficult for current-day collectors to go after sets of 1925 Exhibits.
But that hasn’t stopped Chanin and Warren, who are the only two collectors in the PSA Set Registry to have completed and kept in tack current sets of that product. Chanin has the No. 1-rated 1925 Exhibits set, while Warren is a close second.
Chanin started collecting the Exhibits cards 25 to 30 years ago. He has completed every Exhibits set. Warren first picked up the 1947-66 Exhibits sets, and then thought he might as well collect the earlier releases, too.
“I fell in love with them, because they actually started in 1921,” said Warren, who owns either the No. 1 or 2 ranking in the PSA Registry for all the Exhibits sets. “Basically, they put out a set every year until 1966 when they went belly-up.”
Chanin and Warren consider themselves friendly rivals when it comes to the PSA Set Registry. What made it difficult for them at the beginning of collecting Exhibits was the fact the company didn’t have a checklist of which players were included in sets and the cards were not numbered.
“It’s hard to collect a set when you don’t know how many are in the set and who the players are,” Warren said.
Between Chanin and Warren, they have amassed the majority of the top PSA-graded cards in the 1925 Exhibits set. The only PSA 7 that exists, Hall of Famer Max Carey, is owned by Warren. He also has six of the 13 PSA 6 graded cards without qualifiers. Chanin has one 6.5, Cobb, and three 6s, including Johnson. Chanin’s GPA Weighted score is higher than Warren because Chanin’s bigger cards are in higher grades.
GEHRIG ROOKIE
Gehrig’s 1925 Exhibits card shows the young Iron Man taking a warm-up swing. When Exhibits released its set the next year, the image used for Gehrig’s card was the same as the previous year. The cards were nearly identical on the front and back. And since the cards didn’t contain numbers, it was tough to tell the difference between the two years.
That caused problems for collectors, grading companies and auction houses for years. Gehrig cards from the 1926 set were being identified and labeled as a ’25, and vice versa. The only way to sort out the difference in the years is to check the colors on the front of the card.
“If it’s the blue tint, a very slight blue tint, it’s a ’26,” Fogel said. “If it’s a light gray tint, it’s ’25. So, some of those cards have been mislabeled.”
Warren and Chanin made it their mission to make sure third-party grading giant PSA was labeling the Gehrig cards correctly and by the appropriate years.
“[We] had to tell PSA they were screwing up royally by not differentiating,” Warren said. “I said it didn’t really matter except for the Lou Gehrig rookie card in 1925.
“I bought, theoretically, a Lou Gehrig rookie card, but it turned out to be a 1926 card because of the tint.”
After a long, drawn-out process, PSA finally decided to recognize the distinction between the 1925 and ’26 Gehrig cards. Chanin said the hobby then caught on quickly to the fact that the ’25 is Gehrig’s rookie.
“The card that was practically worth a few thousand dollars went up,” Chanin said. “At its peak it sold for a million or something, but now it’s more like a couple hundred thousand for a 5 or a 6.”
Chanin owns one of the four PSA 5 Gehrig rookie cards, while Warren has a PSA 2 in his collection. PSA has graded just 49 Gehrig cards from the 1925 release.
Fogel has a rookie card of Gehrig in an SGC 6, which is the highest graded example from the grading company. SGC has slabbed 32 Gehrig rookies.
“When I bought that card, it was in a Mastro Auction out in California and I had no idea what I was doing,” Fogel said. “[Bill] Mastro said, ‘You’ve got to buy this card.’ And I paid $20,000 for it, and I regretted it. For years, I lamented over the fact that I paid all this money. And I was dead wrong, that’s for sure.
“I know that people have offered up to a half a million dollars and more for a 6.”
Since Chanin and Warren both completed their 1925 Exhibits sets years ago, they have just been upgrading cards when there is an opportunity. When Exhibits collector Don Spence broke up his ’25 Exhibits set to sell the cards individually around a year ago, Chanin and Warren were able to pick up some higher graded cards to add to their collections.
But with Chanin soon retiring from his day job, it has become tougher for him to acquire 1925 Exhibits because they have become quite expensive; he’s found an alternate way to upgrade his collection.
“I trade with Bob every now and then,” Chanin said. “It’s mainly trading with Bob so I can get stuff. Between him and me, we have pretty much every number one card. He’s not going to sell his and I’m not going to sell mine, so that leaves very little.”
