Collectors Are Divided + Can You Rebuild a T206 Wagner? + Restoration or Recreation?

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Not intended for medical purposes Requirements works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy. Hello there. I'm Damon Hiskey and on my podcast the Brain Food show, our team, including the great Simon Whistler, our own devices, Gilles Messier and fact fiend's Carl Smallwood, serve up fascinating facts and stories that'll blow your mind. From ancient mysteries to scientific curiosities to deep dive history, we deliver knowledge that will help you become the star of Water Cooler Talk the world over. Listen to the Brain Food show wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Jordan Sports cards is a lifestyle Sports cards and we live now Jeremy Lee in the building and every guest that you ever needed Sports cards after hours keep the hobby heated Updates homie Talk like you never seen it Sports cards live and who could ever beat it? Sports cards is a lifestyle Sports cards and we live now. Welcome to another episode of Sports Cards Live with your host, Jeremy Lee. All right, Darren, before I let you go, I do want to change the topic and get your thoughts on one other item which you've been talking about lately and I'm excited to talk about too, and that is this. This T206 Honus Wagner. This is the original form of it. Darren, I know you've been talking. This is what they called the die cut. This piece here now is. Is now this. It's been transformed. It's been re. Reformed, refabricated. You've been talking a bit about this on Twitter. Give us your thoughts before we let you go. Just keep it as the die cut. I mean keep. Make it the die cut. Wagner, why do we have to take another card? I believe the other card was Another Pittsburgh Pirate. Why do we have to take another card? We know that yellow is not the background. Keith Olbermann. And, and we're creating this Franken Wagner. Like, is it, is that what someone wants? Because, hey, someone bought a half a Wagner and that was okay. And no, no one put that one back together. This, what, what is, what is the story of the person who cut it out? Like, but, but, but to, to say that that's the Wagner that should have never been is. Is just so weird. Is so weird. Restored, you know, in the art world, restored in the art world and the comic world are like, you can do that. You can't do that in cards. You can't restore a card that this is. PSA would give this like an N9. Not an authentic. Yeah, I do think it looks nicer in this form than this form. It c, it's, it certainly does look nicer. But I, I, I, I don't, I don't know. I, I would be interested to see among the only people that count are, I put, so someone said $3 million. I put 2.25 million. And a bunch of people called me and said, no way it's going to be 1 4, 1 5. But what would it have been just as the cutout? I don't know. I'm in the 15 range. That's been my, my estimate as well. And then one thing that you were. Why would Keith say that he owned it, though? That, that's such a negative. I mean, people don't like you. Keith. Go, go, everyone go to Twitter and read the, you can read the exchange between Darren and Keith Olberman on there. But one of the things that, that, that, you know, the color of the background is not the, it's not the color. It is not. And you mentioned that. And then Keith Olberman responded with, with this, this. Okay, okay. You can't find it on there. You can't. There's, there is not one that looks the same color. Moreover, even the lighter ones, like this one up over here, or this one over here, or this one that looks a little more yellowy than orange over here. These are all solid colors throughout. Look back. I know that, I know, Yeah, I know the card that they did it with, if you want to. Oh, no, it's not that one. It's. I'll, I'll, I'll find it. Because I, at some point, I, I, I, I had the card that they did it with. It was pretty clear. The actual copy or just another copy of it? No. What the car like who it, who it was. It reminds me of the Walter Johnson yellow portrait. Not the Walter Johnson. It was another. I was told the value of that card was. Now, okay, hold on. Before you say 1 3, 1 4. Who cares it. Remember it's the value of that card too. Is it really though? Is it? Yeah, because you cut up that card, but nobody cares. Nobody even knows. It doesn't say anything. $300,000. But it doesn't say on the, it doesn't say on the CGC label. That's part of the, in cost of this. Yeah. It's not just 1.4 net. Right. They had to buy that that card was worth $300,000. Whatever, whatever it was. I got, I got, I gotta go look at the pirates in the T206 set because I, I, I thought I, I had the name and now I can't, I can't find it. And there's a good, there's a good side by side of the kind of recognizable color of the Wagner versus this one here. All right, Darren, I, we got you for 30 minutes. I got it, I got it. You want to pull them up, you want to pull up the one that they took it from? Where am I going to get it from? Where am I going to go find this? You can just, just, I guess you'll put it in Google or whatever. It's Tommy Leach. It's the T206. Tommy Leach is the exact card that they, that they took this from. If you see it, you'll see the exact color yellow that, that is. How do you spell leech? L, E, A, C, H. Tommy. T, O, M, Y. I'm not, I'm. Oh, oh, there it is. Oh yeah. That's a nice looking card. I will, I will bring that onto the screen. Yep, that's, that is the card that they, they had to have used, I was told because it does look like the Walter Johnson. But remember, you have to get Honus's head in there in the perfect, in the perfect way. And, and Tommy Leach was also a pirate, so he was wearing the same thing. Right. So here it is, guys. I just found it on Google Images. So there's the card right there. And that does appear to be the same background that is on the, the newly formed Wagner, the Franken Wagner. So listen, I think I'm in the minority, Darren, where I would rather own it as it is now versus the, the Die cut. I don't think the die cut's a pretty card. This is prettier to me, but I'M not buying it in either form anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Before I let you go, Darren, I want to bring Leighton on, let you say hi, because he's joining us next. I want to let you say hi to Leighton before. Before you go. Leighton, you ready to join us on the screen? All right. Welcome. Say hello, fellas. Hey, what's up, Darren? How are you, bud? Leighton, how are you? Good. I see you at the National. I remember a couple Nationals ago, Cleveland. Darren, you had. You were set up a little bit with Leighton with a lot of your UN Items, all sorts of things. Very few cards, tickets, driver's licenses. You had a Nintendo system there, I believe. Are you still setting up at the National? I, I, I am not setting up, you know, to be honest, I set up just to be a troubadour and tell stories, as Leighton knows. Like, you know, that's all I did was tell stories nonstop and be a. A conduit for the industry to, to tell the young bucks that it's not all about modern cards. And I guess it was appropriate that I was next to Leighton doing that, but I think I'm done for the storytelling. The fact that you have to. They have to put some stuff in Layton's truck and have a vault and, you know, I think I'm just gonna walk around with a. With a case of, of memorabilia, porn, and, you know, it's gonna be. It's gonna be great. So you'll be there at the National? I will. I will be there. I will be the whole time, seeing if there's anything. Are you there the whole week? Good. Are you there all week? I'll be there Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Okay. It would have to be great just, you know, to make it Saturday. But I'm basically running around. I'm like, just cards, just cards. Just cards. And then I stop it. Like, not. I don't stop at the beginning. Five guys who are selling the gloves and the. Let me just make that clear. The guys who are on the right at, you know, the first five. Five rows don't stop there. But, But I do, you know, programs and type ones and obviously tickets. And if there's a. Oh, I, I do know at Fanatics Fest, there's gonna. The guys that gotta have it are gonna. They're supposedly going to have an ID sale. So that's very interesting to me. Int. Very nice. Well, good. It'd be good to see all. If I see you there, I'll say hello. If we run into each other, maybe I'll see You at Leighton's booth. Darren, before you go, David Snider sent a couple super chats and wants to know what is your favorite city in Texas? And he also wants to know, do you ever. You ever go to the Dallas card show? I have never gone to the Dallas card show. I. I do know that at least the. You know, the people at Texas A and M do not like me from my Johnny Manzel controversy years. So, you know, around where A and M is, that's my. That's the least favorite city. My favorite city in Texas is probably Dallas. Not for a positive reason. I'm a JFK guy, but I love being around where it went down. So, yeah, Dallas is probably my favorite city. There you go. David Snyder. All right, well, Darren, if you need to run, go ahead. If you want to stick around, we are going to talk about a couple of interesting cards, but I'll leave it up to you. Yeah, I got. I gotta run, but we'll be in touch on the list that. That we collect regarding what actually gets sold here. Yeah, maybe you come back on the show in August at some point and we revisit and recap and see how things. How things fell down. Thanks for the forum, Jeremy. All right. Thank you, Darren. Take care. All right, Leighton, how are you, buddy? Good. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. There's a couple. Okay. There. First of all, before we. We get on, I do have some things I want to talk about with you, but I want to start by talking about that T206 Wagner that we just heard from Darren about. And were you aware that. That this was the. That it was the Tommy Leach backing or. Or, you know, the. The. The background that became the background of this. Of this Wagner card? Did you know that? Yes. You knew it was Tommy Leach? How did you know that? Did you hear from a source, or did you guess yourself? So to be clear, I just recorded Trading Card Therapy the other day, and it was the first episode I did in a while by myself because I've been having guests, which is really fun. But one of the things I covered was the tit 206. Call it the Franken Wagner. I like that term. And I did a lot of research on it, so I had heard about it a little bit before that. But through all that research, was able to kind of verify what you had just talked about with Tommy Leach, as far as it being, you know, the card that was the background for this new or newly restored Wagner, I should say. And just in case people are coming and going, you know, I'm going to share the images again. This here is the, is the original Wagner known as the Die Cut Wagner. Someone just cut him out from the card. Huge mistake, but someone did it. The card has now been converted into this item here. And if you go to the Love of the Game website now, Love of the Game, I've been talking to Alex from Love of the Game just on DMS about this card. And, you know, they, they fully recognize that this card is controversial. You know, I, I've seen some controversy now surrounding CGC and them labeling it as authentic restored versus authentic altered, which is interesting. And I think there's probably some. Actually, it was, it was either Tiffany cards or Auburn35 on, on Twitter today who posted the CGC requirements for these designations. And there seems to be an inconsistency there. So, but who knows? Maybe it's just a special case that they made. Maybe they made an exception for this, for this card. But I've also, my understanding, also, Leighton, is that the Wagner cutout silhouette is actually like raised off the backing. So it's not like they cut out the original Tommy Leach silhouette and inserted the Wagner silhouette. It's almost as if they put, and I don't know, but I'm, but it's almost as if they put Wagner on top because I've heard that he's raised off of the background. Were you aware of that minor detail? I've heard that as well, but I've not seen it in person, so I couldn't tell you. And then, Leighton, there's the color. To me, it doesn't look right. And I like that it doesn't look right. I like that it doesn't look right because now you can't mistake it for being a real Wagner to me. That's why I don't consider it to be a counterfeit. They're. Because they're not trying to fool anybody. The color is wrong. And if you look at it apparently at the right angle, you can tell that this is a Franken card. This is a constructed card, post 1909 or whatever. I think it looks nice with the background. And, you know, it looks as nice as an original to me. I like, I like the gradient in the background, but I do not agree with Keith Olbermann who posted this image on, on Twitter and said the color is consistent. Just look at these. I just don't see that. Where do you fall on the color? I mean, you were shaking your head, so why don't you. What were you thinking? There well, let's just leave it all out there, Jeremy. First, I would prefer the card as a die cut. So you'll see where I'm now going with this. To me, when you perform or you hire a company to perform restoration. This is not. I'm just talking about cards. Like, my parents used to collect antique furniture. So if you bought a couch and you restored a couch. My mother loves the Color Purple. I mean, she's insane, but she loves the Color Purple. The movies or, I'm sorry, the movie with Whoopi Goldberg or the. I kid. I kid. I kid. That was good, though. Jeremy. It's late. As Leighton would say, thanks for laughing. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the reality of it is when you try to get a restored piece of furniture, you would try to get it to look as close as you could to that original piece of furniture. So unless my eyes have not been working that well of late, and it's possible. Right. I'm getting older. That yellow to me. Although I could see the positive that you're pointing out as to, hey, it can't be construed as a Wagner. Right. An original one with the oranges type background. To me, I. I don't like it. In fact, I actually hate it. And the reason. The reason why I hate it personally is because that card doesn't exist. Meaning, if you restored a card, I wanted to look as close to the original card as possible. And so I don't think that they accomplished that. But that's just one man's take. And to be clear, as you were commenting earlier, I wouldn't be buying if there was a die cut, and I'm not be buying it. Restored. Yeah. So that's my take there. And I would say that. And I've not done business with cgc, but I do think that they could have been or they could have done a little bit of a better job at the label. I don't think it's as straightforward and transparent as it. As it should be. What would it say? I have no idea. I'm not in that business. Right. Because it does say restored on the label. If it was restored, I would expect there to be, like, 95 of the original paper there, and they restored the edges or the corners or filled in a hole. I don't consider this card to be restored. I consider it to be refabricated, like, to the point of almost. To the point of almost being a counterfeit. Yeah. I mean, counterfeits a different word, so I wouldn't use that. But I agree with you, for example, like, I don't know cgc, but I know psa. And PSA generally doesn't have reports that come with their card. But I do know now that they have notes. So I'm curious because I thought about this. I was watching a few minutes of your and dad's conversation. I'm curious. Even though there may not be a written report, I'm hoping CGC has some. I know it sounds kind of trivial or funny. They have some graders notes on this card so that someone who's either bidding in this auction or post auction in years to come, they want to write an article about it. Who knows what the reason would be that there is a clear and concise description as to what this is. And I don't think that that came from sgc. Excuse me, cgc. It very clearly came from Al. And kudos to him and the team at Love of the Game. But when Al in Love of the Game finishes the sale of this card, that card will be traveling in the holder, not with the description attached to it from Love of the Game. Right. Well, what, what, what CGC should have done, because Alex Hidell here says massively altered should be on the label. I love that. I love that. And then BW says CGC should have chosen to add Tommy Leach's name to the card is I think as well it should say Honus Wagner, Silhouette, Tommy Leach, rest of card, something like that. But the other thing I could have done is put the link to this episode of Sports Card live on that holder so that people can come back and learn about it here. But the timing just didn't work out. The order of events did not allow for that. But yeah, I think, listen, I think I like, I like the new card, like, despite the fact that, that it's got all this sort of controversy, if you want to call it that. Because at the end of the day, you know, the, the, the bigger controversy isn't just this card. I think whoever owns this card, if you do any research on it, you're gonna be able to find some commentary about it and learn from what it is. Maybe not, but, but I think, but the bigger conversation, I think, I think Leighton comes down to what is restoration. There's, we've been talking about card cleaning, card maintenance, alteration, all these different approaches to changing a card, these different definitions, semantics. This is a, this is like the granddaddy of all cards has now, has now undergone the most egregious sort of treatment. Where does that leave the hobby? What does this mean for the Future of restoration, alteration, maintenance, refabrication. All these combination. And. And I don't know if you saw. So think about that for a second, Leighton. Now, I don't know if you saw this next image that I'm going to share. Not this one here. I'm going to share this. And now this next image. I found it on Twitter, I think, if I remember. And it was. I think this was from Tiffany cards. I just want to give proper, you know, credit to where I. Because this is not my image. This next one. This one, I believe came from Keith Olverman that we're looking right at right now. But this next one here came from, I believe, Tiffany cards or Auburn. They both kind of pop up in my. In my feed all the time. I think this is Tiffany. Where does it end? Basically saying. Well, what they're basically saying here is that, well, what if you have an original Wagner and you rip it up into, you know, 15 or 20 different pieces? You take each of those 15 or 20 pieces and you create a whole new roster of cards. Like this middle column. This piece here becomes this card, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that's only the first layer, guy. That's the first generation. Like, this is the first generation of the card, the original card. And now you, You. You. You rip it into 15 pieces. You got 15 second generations. What if you take the. Let's go to the next level. You take all 15 of those cards, you rip them up into small little pieces. Now you got a whole third gen. It's like cousins and second cousins and third cousins. Where does it end? Oh, I says it right across the top. I literally thought, where does it end? That, to me, this. This image here, I think from Tiffany, if this is. It wasn't from Tiffany cards. I apologize to the original creator of this graphic. But where does it end? I think this is the bigger question, and this is. This is like a systemic sort of issue. It could become systemic in our hobby. So what do you think of this image, Leighton? And do you think that we could be moving towards something like. Like, it reminds me of, you know, you take a $20 bill and you clip off a little bit of. You take a hole punch and you clip out a hole punch out of, know, 200, $100 bills, tape them together. You just. You just manufactured $100. People could do that with a Wagner card here. What are your thoughts on this image and that. That thought of these generations of. Of recreations. I mean, I feel like Pokemon has now had an impact on us. Man, we're talking about generations and different, more, you know, mutations. I'm with my son down the shore visiting some of my friends and their kids who are younger, and they're talking about mutations earlier in Pokemons. And I feel like that's what we're doing here with this Wagner. But the, the joking aside, Jeremy, I, you know, I don't know this. I'm not in that business. But there are other cards in the T206 set that have an orange type background. So I just don't really quite understand why the yellow was used. That really, you know, that's my question. Because I actually like the card. So I don't know, like, was it done? I guess that's what I'd like to find out is, was it done? Thinking that this will now clearly stand out and this is cool and it will maybe realize some extra money. I don't really know. But to me, when I see that card, I literally. This is what I talked about in my episode, which will drop Monday. I have an E95 Wagner in my. In the office that is closer to the yellow of an E95 Wagner than it is of any T206 Wagner I've ever seen and I've probably seen in my lifetime, you know, meaning in person, at shows, etc, easily 15 or 20 of them. And I've never seen a yellow Wagner like that. I'm with you. I haven't either, Leighton. But I have to say, like, this becomes the rarest of the Wagners. It's the only one with a yellow background. With a yellow gradient background. I'm not. Listen, I. Hey, I have. Hey, Jeremy. I have ice I can sell you in the winter. Also, Buddha, wouldn't you know, I'm in the market. I. I need. I need some. And I'm in Canada. I need. I need new igloo. Yeah, I figured. But I mean, listen, it is. It's got two. It's made up of two authentic T206 cards. The most important part of the card is authentic. They just dressed it up in a yellow gradient background. So we don't know why it was. Why. And I don't even. Did Keith Olberman have it restored or did he buy it restored? I couldn't really follow the, the sequencing there. Do you know the. The true history of the. Of the die cut? So I read it several times. It's hard to understand. Didn't you? It's hard to understand. And I read Keith's supposed, you know, summary of it. I don't know And I don't want to comment because I'm not really sure. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, I. I don't know either if if he was the one that had it restored or not. He talks about having it in a paperweight for decades, something like that. I. It wasn't very clear. The story was not easy to follow. Maybe that's just me, but regardless, listen again, just one person's opinion. I think it's cool like this with the yellow background. It looks so much. It looks so different and awkward. But I don't know. I think they did a. Whoever restored it did a great job. I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm just saying it's out there and I think it looks cool. So that's it. But yeah, it's. It's interesting. Okay, well a couple comments here. Really quick. Junk wax John, he said but it's not how it was created. This is not the card rep. Sorry, I'm not. I think this is my mid conversation there. So I'm not going to jump into the comments mid conversation right now, guys. I can't follow because I haven't been able to. To monitor them but. So you're not a fan of the card, Layton? I am a fan of the card. I wonder what. You know, oftentimes a card's value, part of a card's value can be attributed to the story of the card and often times that story is not. Is not specific to a. Is not specific to a certain copy. It's specific to the. The card. Like the 52 tops mantle high numbers dumped in the Hudson. All part of the lore of the card. This particular copy has a story all. It's like a provenance type of story. Right? It's the. It's what it went through. Talk about going through something. This card, first of all, this card lost all of its limbs and then it grew. It grew them back. Like talk about. Talk about surviving a crazy, you know, situation. It's. It's just kind of funny. I don't know. I think it's cool. I'm curious what it's going to sell for. Do you haven't. Do you have a guess on the sale price? You know, I haven't thought about it. If I'm going to put a number on it, I still think it's gonna be north. A million bucks. I think it's you. So. So I was talking to probably David Chase the other night or Joe Perot, one of them and we were talking about how, you know, a restored copy recently sold for like 1-718 somewhere in there. This is a nice copy. Despite it being Y below. Maybe if this copy was a restore, if this was a restored copy, but. But was like an actual. The actual card, it might be 2 million bucks. Let's say, like there was never the die cut. I'm saying. But it looked this good. I. Sorry, I'll put it back on the screen. It looked this good. I would think that this card if it was authentic, because I don't think it's really that authentic. But if it was, I think it's 2 million bucks. So then because it isn't, you cut that, maybe you cut that in half and it's a million dollars because half of it's authentic. Right. The. The inner part of Honus is actually authentic. The outer part is. And I think 50% of the card is authentic. Approximately. I can't, I'm not a. I can't do the, the math to, to calculate it, but I'm going to say for ease of discussion, 50% authentic. 50% of it is not to the name on, on the, on the bottom of the card and the label. So 50 of 2 million is a million bucks. But I want to give a premium to the. Because the best part of the card is authentic. So I give it a significant premium. I put it at 1. I think it's going to sell for north of 1 5. I'll take the under. I'll take the under. You're taking me. Okay. Okay. I love it. So do you think 15 is a good over under? I would have put the over under about 1 2, 4, 1.35, something like that. 1.24 to 1.35. I feel like that's the. But that's why I quickly moved to the under on the 1 5. So you're like 1 3. Yeah, yeah. I feel like there's a little bit more challenging, but I feel like at 15 I'll definitely take the under. Okay, so Layton is at 1.3 million. We're just guessing now. We'll follow up on this. I have no idea. Yeah, I'm saying I'm gonna say 1.55 because I'm gonna go north of 15 and. And then we'll. We'll bring on. Okay, so in the chat here, stukes is guessing 1.2. Junk Wax Johnny 750. Orlando is. Thinks 1.5. Yankees fan is saying $875,000. So we've got a few guesses all over the place. Mike Petty took the over. Mike Petty's taking The over of 15 Interesting Bystanders is over a million, for sure. Interesting stuff. Yeah. Fun discussion. Fun discussion. Absolutely. There were two other. Actually, I. I'm sorry, Leighton, for not doing you the. The courtesy of asking if you have any topics to bring because I have two other cards I want to talk about with you. No, I didn't bring any topics tonight because I knew you're gonna be chock full. All right, all right, all right. There's two other cars. Hold on one second. Yeah, go for it. Let's let him put the air on. And. And Charles said 1.5 million himself as well. Stuke says would. Would the buyer restore it back to a die cut? I've heard people talk about that Stukes and say they would do that, but I don't think. I don't think that'll happen. But it would be really interesting to see if it. If it did. Thanks for tuning in and being a part of the sports cards live community. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and most of all, keep collecting more great content to come. Sports cards is a lifestyle.