1951 Topps Baseball Card Packs

Appraised on: August 4, 2012

Appraised in: Corpus Christi, Texas

Appraised by: Mike Gutierrez

Category: Sports Memorabilia

Episode Info: Corpus Christi (#1703)

Originally Aired: January 21, 2013

IMAGE: 1 of 5  

Appraisal Video: (2:34)

APPRAISER: How did you get these baseball cards?

GUEST: My grandpa passed them down to my dad, and since my dad doesn't have any sons and I'm his oldest, he passed them down to me.

APPRAISER: And do you recognize any of the players that we have up here?

GUEST: This first one, Dominic DiMaggio, I looked him up and he's Joe DiMaggio's brother. And as far as the other ones, I wasn't too familiar.

APPRAISER: Well, these are Topps baseball cards from 1951. This was Topps' entree into the baseball card business until they became... you know, the following year in 1952 they became a real entity. This was a 1951 card set. As you notice up here, we've got the player's names, and then we've got an action here. So on both of these cards, it notes a ball. Some of them note a strike, some of them note a hit, and various other actions. The best cards in the set are players like Yogi Berra.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: Bob Feller, and there are a few others. There's two colors: the red backs, the blue backs, which were manufactured in the same quantity, but for some reason the blue backs are a lot scarcer now. Recently, there was a find of the red back cards. Quite a quantity. So they're worth less than the blue back cards. The red back cards that you have here of Ralph Kiner and Dom DiMaggio, in this condition they're going to have about a $40 retail and auction value.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: The blue back card's worth about double in that same condition.

GUEST: Oh, wow.

APPRAISER: Unopened, this is where it gets interesting here.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: There's a little bit more mystery behind this because we don't know who's in there.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: Now, apparently what you can do with these cards is you can see through the white. And what you can do is probably see what color the back is. If they're red backs, due to this recent find, these cards could have a value, I'd say an auction estimate of about $4,000 to $5,000.

GUEST: Oh, wow.

APPRAISER: If they're blue backs, it'd be about double.

GUEST: Wow, that's awesome. That's a lot more than what I expected.