The Most Popular Baseball Card Ever Up For Auction – Forbes

Photo by Robert Edward Auction

Last year, this deluxe, oversized cabinet version of Whitney and Midget sold for $18,000 in an REA auction.

With our country beset by divisiveness, it’s heartening to find a wholesome topic everyone can agree on. A vintage baseball card has been dubbed the most well-liked in history, a copy of which is up for sale. Mile High Card Company is auctioning off an 1887 tobacco card of a small dog named Midget putting his precious paw on the knee of infielder Art Whitney.

So far, this “immensely popular pasteboard,” as Mile High describes it, has attracted only two bids, edging it to $220. But expect a flurry of last-minute activity on the auction’s closing night of September 14.

If you can’t afford the most famous and expensive baseball card, the $3.1 million 1910 Jumbo Honus Wagner, consider this less costly alternative. “Art Whitney w/ Dog,” as it’s formally known in price guides, has long been a collector’s best friend.

For some context, let’s start with Bob Lemke, the late pioneering historian and mastermind behind The Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards, the hobby’s bible. In a 2001 interview with cycleback.com, he called the card his “number one favorite” card of all time.

“Whitney is pictured looking like he is having a game of fetch with a curly coated little mutt,” Lemke, a dog lover, wrote eight years later in a blog post. “One winter I spent a lot of hours poring over microfilm of The Sporting News and The Sporting Life weekly newspapers trying to determine whether the Pittsburgh team of the late 1880s had a canine mascot, but could not find any mention of such.

This card is one of the most popular of the 3,500+ Old Judge baseball cards issued between 1887-1890. While Whitney’s other poses sell at ‘common’ card prices, the card with the dog brings prices that exceed all but the biggest stars among the Hall of Famers in the set.”

Photo by Mile High Card. Co.

Mile High Company has this card up for auction. SGC has graded it authentic.

Cards pop up periodically on eBay and in top auctions. “The card’s popularity has really taken off and despite not being a Hall of Fame player, this issue doesn’t come cheap,” writes Anson Whaley on Sports Collectors Daily in his article, “10 Great 19th Century Tobacco Cards. ”Expect to pay in the $500 – $1,000 range for a decent copy.”

That’s an astonishing amount for a ball player all but forgotten for the past 125 years.

Playing mostly for Pittsburgh and New York, during his 11-year career, Whitney batted .223 and had 820 hits. “[He] was as a small man (5’ 8”, 155 pounds) who played third base at a time when it was almost as important to have a strong chest as it was to have a strong arm,” write the authors of  the fabulous encyclopedia of Old Judge cards, The Photographic Baseball Cards of Goodwin & Co. “He fielded the position well (.888 fielding percentage) and that kept him in the major leagues.” (For stats buffs, his “Range Factor” ranks 23d in baseball history.) Whitney celebrated two championships with the New York Giants in 1888 and 1889.

In 2009, Keith Olbermann, the commentator and longtime collector, devoted a TV segment to what “may be the most popular card in the [Old Judge] set.” In a poll conducted on a top collecting forum Net54, ninety-one voters weighed in. The Whitney commanded more votes than any other single card in the set.

What does it all mean? The Photographic Baseball Cards of Goodwin & Co., highlights the “typically scruffy ball player and cute little dog” as an example of the company’s sense of humor. 

There may be more to it, though. “This photograph was apparently taken and included in the set as a joke,” Robert Edward Auctions notes. “ Whitney was notorious for switching teams. [He] is posed with a dog as a study of two extremes, with the dog representing the most loyal of all animals, and Whitney representing the opposite.”

Photo by Don Hontz

I added this card for sale on eBay (seller: donscards7) because it’s fun and Old Judges with two players are desirable. McCarthy, a Hall of Famer, is tagging out a base runner.

Indeed, Whitney bordered on a parody of a journeyman player, hopping between ten clubs in six cities from 1880 through 1891.  Either he had no choice because he was released or he was trying to improve his bargaining position.

During that time, the top tier of professional baseball talent was locked in by the notorious reserve clause, binding the players to their team in perpetuity as if they were chattel. The players formed their own union and founded their own Player’s League in 1890. Whitney joined numerous future Hall of Famers who jumped to the PL, which lasted just one season. Free-agency was nearly a century away.

Jay Miller, a co-author of the Old Judge book, points that most players bounced from to team, so the practice was not worth emphasizing in the photo. If anything, Whitney may have been the exception, playing four straight seasons for Pittsburgh when the photo was waken in 1887.

Whitney was likely making the best of a bad system. Far from showing disloyalty, he personified true American grit as a rugged individualist. At least Robert Edward and I can agree on one thing: “The Old Judge card features one of the most unusual and memorable images to ever appear on a baseball card.”