January 8, 2009
139-year-old baseball card
Bernice Gallego found a baseball card of the Red Stocking B.B. Club of Cincinnati, the first professional baseball team in America, and tried to sell it on ebay.
The starting bid was $10.
But after getting a flurry of inquiries about whether the card was authentic or not, Gallego started to suspect she was holding something a little more valuable and immediately ended the auction.
Turns out her hunch was correct. She did have something more valuable. The card she found was made in 1869 and featured the “Red Stocking B.B. Club of Cincinnati,” the sport’s first professional team. It’s considered one of the first baseball cards ever produced and its actual value could be worth more than $100,000 when she puts it back on eBay (with a higher starting price, of course).
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[...] Bernice Gallego found a baseball card of the Red Stocking B.B. Club of Cincinnati, the first professional baseball team in America, and tried to sell it on ebay. Once she realized what she had, she halted the auction and tried it again. The card just sold for $64,073. The sale ended a whirlwind month for Gallego, who attracted an avalanche of attention on the front page of Yahoo!, the New York Times and other outlets across the country. Her popularity soared even further in late January, when she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and revealed that this wasn’t her first instance of blind luck. She once won $250,000 from a slot machine in Nevada. [...]