An early baseball card featuring the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings — America's first professional baseball team — went for $22,800 at auction yesterday in California, according to New Jersey-based Robert Edward Auctions.
The team, assembled and managed by British-born player/manager Harry Wright, won 52 games during a six-month coast-to-coast tour in 1869, two years before the sport's first professional league — later the National League — formed. The team was assembled of stand-out players from amateur teams. Only one — Charlie Gould — was a Cincinnati native. Players earned up to $1,000 for the season.
The 3.75-by-2-inch carte de visite-style card — a popular format in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which a photo was affixed to a small postcard — pictures the 1869 team and identifies the 10 players depicted on the back. The reverse side of the card also features an ad for the 1869 edition of the Chadwick's Base Ball Players' Book of Reference. That's an important detail, the auction house says.
"There are several different styles of 1869 Red Stockings team cards known, all featuring the same photograph but displaying slightly different mounts," the auction house said in a news release. "The smaller CDV style has been found with several different backs, but most are blank-backed. The examples with advertising for the 1869 Chadwick guide are not only the rarest, but also extremely desirable because their exact year of issue is known for certain (it is conceivable that other examples, with or without the Peck & Snyder advertising, might also date from 1870, when the club once again toured the country.)"
Bidding on the card, which a Cincinnati-area collector discovered recently, began at $10,000.
