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Longtime collector, Cubs fan goes shopping for Banks, Ryno, current Chicago stars
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — I've been a Chicago Cubs fan for 55 years. My first experience at Wrigley Field was in 1969, a season that lives in infamy among baby-booming Cub faithful, when they blew an 8-game lead in August to the Amazin' Mets, who were on their way to winning the World Series.
As an 8-year-old, I don't remember much about that game, other than Hall of Fame third baseman Ron Santo committed an error against the Cincinnati Reds and came close to being charged with another one.
I wasn't aware of the massive meltdown of the Summer of ’69, and it's probably just as well. It wasn't until the dawn of the ’70s that I jumped on the Cubs bandwagon, which extended to riding my Schwinn 5-speed to buy Topps cards (along with Jolly Ranchers and Bub's Daddy bubble gum) at the local PDQ convenience store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I've still got many of those Cubs cards and have expanded my collection over the years to include some team-issued sets I kept over time that were gate giveaways at Wrigley.
Like many others during the pandemic, I reconnected with my love of baseball cards during the shutdown as a way to break through the boredom and have some fun at the same time. I began to follow Vintage Baseball Photos on Facebook, created by Kevin Baskin, a collector who owns an astounding 50,000-60,000 signed cards across all sports. Baskin holds auctions on a weekly basis, selling cards to the highest bidder within a two-hour time frame.
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I established a theme for participating in those Facebook auctions: “Mediocre Cubs of the 1970s,” of which there are loads to choose from, considering the team finished a combined 42 games under .500 for the decade. For three of those seasons, they finished at least 20 games behind the winner of the old National League East division. Ugh.
Forget those numbers. It didn't stop me from spending a few hundred dollars, winning auctions for coveted has-beens such as Carmen Fanzone, Larry Biittner, Pat Bourque, Mick Kelleher, Rob Sperring, and Dave Rosello, six guys that epitomized Cubs mediocrity a half century ago.
As we all know, the thrill is in the hunt.
Now, five years after the sports world shut down and nine years after the Cubs won the 2016 World Series, Cub fans yearn for a return to glory and do their best to pinpoint the next big star before their cards skyrocket in value.
CHASING PCA
For collectors and dealers such as Scott Beatty, owner of AU Sports in suburban Chicago, the current demand among his customers is for young center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, his best seller over the last few months. For a standard rookie card, PCA's value remains under $10, but it may go up over time depending on his career, Beatty said. Last season, PCA hit .237 with 10 home runs, 47 RBI and 27 stolen bases in 123 games.
“Let's be honest, there's no limited production of the Topps rookie cards,” Beatty said. “They put out Allen & Ginter, Topps Heritage and Topps Gallery. Each one of these [brands] is going to have a different Pete Crow-Armstrong rookie card, so they will vary in value.”
AU Sports has been in business for more than 40 years, spanning three locations. Beatty was the store's first employee under the Gold family, the original owner. Eddie Gold, the patriarch, was a sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times for many years and ran a sports trivia column in the newspaper. Beatty bought AU Sports 13 years ago. Business remains solid after taking a “great leap” in 2020 when “everyone got back into collecting because they had more down time,” he said.
In general, key free agent signings that bring new blood to the Cubs, such as Cody Bellinger (now with the New York Yankees), Dansby Swanson and Shota Imanaga stand out among the North Siders' card clutter, Beatty said.
The same is true for Justin Steele, among the homegrown Cubs that came up through the farm system, he said.
PCA is the guy “everyone wants to go after,” said Scott Becraft, a collector in Charlotte who was among the dozens of exhibitors at The Charlotte Card Show in early March at Park Expo Center. Last fall, Cubs left field prospect Alexander Canario was the hot seller, Becraft said, but in February, Canario was traded to the Mets for cash considerations. Becraft said he plans to hold on to his PCA cards until he sees what Crow-Armstrong does this year, his first full-time season in the big leagues.
“His value is not too crazy right now,” said Becraft, an IT director for an industrial wholesaler. “I believe in him as a player and where he's headed.”
Apart from PCA, some dealers point to Cubs rookie third baseman Matt Shaw as potentially the team's next star player. Shaw doesn't have an official rookie card yet, but there's plenty of his prospect cards on the market.
“There's always going to be the ‘fresh guys,’ because that's who the kids like,” Beatty said. “This year, we'll get a lot of action on Matt Shaw. He's gonna be the guy.”
Bobby Hall of Raleigh, N.C. had a half-dozen different Matt Shaw prospect cards for sale at his booth in Charlotte. Hall is known as “Hobby Bobby,” and wore a custom T-shirt printed with his nickname. He grew up in Falls Church, Va. as a huge Baltimore Orioles fan and idolized Cal Ripken. Hall's full-time job is selling data server centers for Lenovo, the world's biggest producer of laptop computers.
“I took some time off from [collecting], but like a lot of people during Covid, when there was nothing else to do, I started buying packs again,” Hall said. “I quickly got swept back into it and it's taken over my entire office, much to my wife's chagrin.”
For Hobby Bobby, Shaw cards such as the 2024 Bowman Chrome series have sold well until his actual rookie card comes out this year. His Shaw inventory ran from $40 to $500 for his Bowman Chrome unique #1/1 insert card.
“Shaw is one of the favorites for Rookie of the Year, so he'll pick up pretty quick,” Hall said. “Angel Cepeda [the Cubs minor league shortstop] is a surprise; [he’s] actually moving faster than Shaw, which is not what I expected. People waited too long for Shaw, so now they're trying to do the same thing with Cepeda ... that kind of prospecting, assuming that he's going to do well.”
VINTAGE CUBS
At the Charlotte card show, George Beam, an older collector, remains partial to the big leaguers he grew up idolizing in the 1960s, including “Mr. Cub” Ernie Banks, a Hall of Famer, as well as Ron Santo.
Beam, retired from State Farm Insurance, lives in Greenville, S.C. He stands out on his own as a former college baseball pitcher at the University of South Carolina from 1969-73. Beam still holds the school record for striking out 17 batters in a single game against North Carolina State.
At his booth, Beam displayed his “overflow” of cards that included multiple Banks and Santo's 1961 Topps rookie card.
A cursory check of Santo rookies shows the value tops off at slightly above $100, depending on the grade, which “just kills” Beam, considering Santo's credentials.
“It's crazy; I thought he was a great player,” he said. “I loved him. It may not be a valuable card, but he was one of my heroes growing up.”
The same is true for Banks. “I've got a ton of Ernie Banks cards at home,” Beam said. “He was a class guy, a great player. I loved the way he played the game. There was no controversy with him. I don't like that kind of player.”
Ryne Sandberg fits that category as well. There's still demand for the Cubs' Hall of Fame second baseman, but collectors and dealers said his rookie cards don't command the high value on a level of other Hall of Famers.
They point to the “junk wax” era of the 1980s as the reason why Ryno's rookie card can be bought for $15-$20, depending on the card's quality. At the Charlotte show, I paid $25 total for Sandberg's Topps and Fleer rookies, both from Becraft.
In 1983, Topps, Fleer and Donruss all produced Sandberg rookies, essentially flooding the market and decreasing their value compared with the scarcity of rookie cards mostly produced by Topps in the 1960s and ’70s.
Hobby Bobby sold all his Sandberg cards in Charlotte. Ironically, Hall said he doesn't see a lot of Sandberg cards floating around and he believes that's why collectors snap them up whenever he has some to sell.
“In my eyes, he was an underrated player,” he said. “Older collectors remember him and think highly of him, but newer collectors have never heard of him, honestly. I hate to say that. Whenever I see his cards around, I grab them.”
In Chicago, it's a different story, which makes sense considering it's a Cubs town. Beatty said a standard Sandberg rookie card sells for $25 at AU Sports, which still isn't much considering his outstanding career.
Chip Marshall falls in line with Beam as an older collector. Marshall, a former sportswriter living in Chicago, owns a few thousand Cubs cards, including a full set from the 2016 team. He sets up a table to sell cards at flea markets in the parking lot at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, a Chicago suburb next to O'Hare International Airport, and three miles northwest of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, site of the 45th National Sports Collectors Convention July 30-Aug. 3.
Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Marshall holds a special reverence for the ’69 Cubs, the most celebrated second-place team in baseball history. His focus is on buying cards from the ’50s and ’60s and he enjoys the quirkiness of the hobby and the errors made by card manufacturers over time.
One example is in 1966, Marshall pointed out. Topps produced a Dick Ellsworth card that year that mistakenly ran a photo of Ken Hubbs, the Cubs second baseman who won the 1962 Rookie of the Year award before his tragic death piloting a plane over Utah in early 1964. Ellsworth served among the pall bearers at Hubb's funeral, Feb. 20, 1964, along with Banks and Santo.
Marshall prefers the look and feel of vintage cards. In the 1980s and ’90s, there was a glut of cards and brands compared with the golden age of baseball in the ’60s and ’70s.
“In the old days, they didn't put every guy on the team on a card, but it's different now,” he said.
Paul Popovich, a member of the ’69 Cubs, was on multiple cards despite being a utility player for a big chunk of his 11-year career, eight of which were spent with Chicago. Marshall lives in Glenview, Ill. and has spotted Popovich, now 84, a few times going to the grocery store and gas station in Chicago's north suburbs.
The first time he saw Popovich was during Covid when the ex-Cub wore a mask, but Marshall saw that his license plate read “Popo,” his nickname with the Cubs, and made the connection during a brief exchange with Popovich.
“We get ingrained with the faces of players off baseball cards, and I thought, ‘that's gotta be him,’” Marshall said. “I should keep a couple of his cards in my glove box [to autograph], because I know I'll run into him again. I loved all the ’69 Cubs.”
Same here. Anyone got a ’69 Topps Ted Abernathy?
Don Muret
