Imagine cleaning out your great-grandfather's house and finding $1 million. Well, not actually $1 million, but a bunch of baseball cards worth that amount of money.
A family, who has asked to remain anonymous, discovered seven identical T206 Ty Cobb cards that were printed between 1909 and 1911 in the home of their recently-deceased great-grandfather. Before the discovery, only 15 such cards were believed to still be in existence.
"I am not sure if any other baseball card find is more remarkable than this new discovery," Joe Orlando, the president of Professional Sports Authenticator in Newport Beach, Calif., said in a statement. "This is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of our hobby."
The last such discovery, according to Orlando, came in Georgia back in 1997 when five copies of the same card were found resting in between the pages of a book. This time, the seven Cobb cards were found in a paper bag in the great-grandfather's dilapidated house.
The print on the back of the cards reads: "TY COBB - KING OF THE SMOKING TOBACCO WORLD."
The family brought the cards to Rick Snyder of MINT State Inc., who is a vintage football, basketball and baseball card dealer. At first, he doubted the authenticity of the cards because finding seven at once is "almost impossible."
According to experts, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being mint condition, the cards rank somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5, which apparently is still a good condition for being more than 100 years old.
Cobb, who is regarded as one of the best baseball players of all time, was enshrined into the Hall of Fame back in 1936 and missed a unanimous induction by only four votes. During his 24-year career, he spent 22 of those seasons with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics.
He still leads all of baseball with a career .366 batting average. He also maintained a .945 OPS and logged 4,189 hits, 2,244 runs scored, 117 home runs, 1,933 RBIs and 897 stolen bases in 3,034 career games. Cobb led the Tigers to three World Series appearances, but failed to capture a victory, which is the only notable aspect missing from his decorated résumé.
