Ty Cobb

What does a Ty Cobb autograph cost?

Most of the results recorded here fall between about four and a half thousand dollars and twenty-two thousand, across cards, baseballs, photographs and paper. He lived until 1961 and signed extensively in retirement, so the supply is deeper than for most of his contemporaries. One result stands far outside that range and is explained below.

Why did one card sell for a hundred and ninety-two thousand?

Because of what it is. The card is a 1909-11 T206 Sweet Caporal, one of his own tobacco cards from his playing years, and he signed it. That is an object which barely ought to exist: the card was issued while he was playing, and a signed example means somebody put a sixty-year-old tobacco card in front of him decades later, or he signed it at the time. It made 8.9 times the next highest result recorded here. Nothing else in his market is in that category.

Two identical baseballs sold minutes apart for very different prices. Why?

This is the most instructive pair on this index and we cannot fully explain it, which is the point. Lots 80550 and 80551 in the same Heritage auction were both 1960 single-signed baseballs gifted to a Coca-Cola executive, both graded PSA/DNA NM-MT 8, described in identical words and sold consecutively on the same day. One made $21,600 and the next made $13,200. Same room, same bidders, same night, one lot apart, and a difference of nearly two thirds. Whatever separated them - how the signature sits on the ball, which photograph the catalogue used, who had already bought one - is not on the holder and not in the description. A grade is a summary. It is not a price.