Why Keith Olbermann Is Auctioning a “Holy Grail” Baseball Card That He Was Using as a Paperweight (Exclusive)

For years, Keith Olbermann, the former ESPN SportsCenter and MSNBC Countdown anchor, was using one of the holy grails of baseball cards … as a paperweight.

Now, the TV veteran tells The Hollywood Reporter that the card in question has been authenticated and slabbed by CGC, and will be going up for auction later this summer at Love of the Game Auctions, after making its public debut at Fanatics Fest in New York next week, alongside rare Wayne Gretzky and Mickey Mantle cards.

The card in question is a T206 Honus Wagner card. Specifically, it was a card known as the”die-cut Wagner,” which disappeared in the mid-1990s, only to find its way into Olbermann’s vast card collection in one of the more bizarre stories of rare collectors items.

“You’ve heard of the phrase an abundance of caution. This is what happens when you have too much of an abundance of caution,” Olbermann says. “I’m the guy who had a Mona Lisa sitting in the closet, or in this case in the office, literally was was in the lucite holder as a paperweight, sometimes holding down stacks of 1995 baseball spring training programs, and this, my stupidity, I think, adds to the story just a little bit.”

So, what happened? Back in the late 1990s Olbermann read an article about someone who restores baseball cards. He sent him a “small project,” and he did such a good job that the idea of a bigger job came up.

“He said, ‘I have an option to buy a really off-condition Wagner that’s just barely a card, but I think it’s a perfect candidate for the kind of restoration that I do,’ and so he quoted me a price, and it’s so long ago that I think we set up a two-year installation plan for me to pay him, and by the time I got it, it was early 1999 and he delivered it to me in person, and I met him, and that card is what you see now, it’s not perfect, but it’s the next best thing.”

It was after that when things went off the rails.

“I went on a trip for Fox to go anchor the Super Bowl for two weeks, and I came back and got the card out of my safe in Southern California, and I looked at it, and I said, ‘this is just unbelievable, literally, it’s almost unbelievable,'” Olbermann recalled. “I needed to know how he did this. I need to see his studio, which is something we had talked about during his restoration, and he had said, yeah, you can come and I’ll show you the tools and what I did to it, and what’s left of the donor card, and everything else.

“So I called him, and his phone was disconnected, and I emailed him, and the email bounced back, and then I wrote a letter, and it came back in the mail, ‘not at this address,’ and if you ever had any uncertainty about what you had in front of you, that would be amplified by that kind of response,” he added. “The guy, to my knowledge, had just vanished into the ether, so I didn’t know what I had. I wasn’t sure, and I did not want to go and find out.”

Olbermann ended up sticking the card into a lucite holder and keeping it on his desk, that is until this past spring, when “I bought a card from someone on eBay, who then messaged me and said, ‘by the way, I think you have my old Wagner, I was always told that my old Wagner was bought and restored, and you bought it,’ and I went, ‘hmm, that’s an interesting coincidence.'”

So Olbrmann brought it to CGC, for help authenticating that it was, in fact, the long-lost die-cut Wagner.

“We treated it like any other card, in this case, we did know there was restorations that we were looking for, so that in a way made it a little easier, but we’re trying to confirm that the core, or the part that’s the original Wagner, is in fact what it’s supposed to be, and so we reviewed it with the grading team,” says CGC’s Andy Broome. “We also used some of the technology that we have at our disposal, different things like a video spectral comparator, which is a fancy way of saying, you know, I’m using different wavelengths of infrared and UV and other types of lighting.

“As you can imagine, being die-cut, Honus’ portrait was cut around his head and shoulders, it’s in the name, die-cut, and we could see where that was put together, we could see some of the adhesives that were used, we could see where color was rematched in painting to essentially make it seamless, and we were able to detect that the parts were of the card were from a donor T206 card and matched up beautifully, and so we just confirmed what Keith figured out after many years, that this in fact was what’s known as the die-cut Wagner that has been restored.”

While restoration work is common in fine art, luxury watches and other parts of the larger collectible business, it is still somewhat scorned in the world of baseball cards, where trimmed and altered classics (including a T206 Wagner or two!) have left buyers burned. Olbermann and CGC are betting that by being completely up front about the restoration, those concerns can be eased.

“If you had a Mona Lisa, or you had a copy of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence, you would not throw it out or leave it in the back because it got coffee on it,” Olbermann quips. “I mean, you would, in fact, try to fix it, and it seemed to me that, as long as it was legit and acknowledged it was an art form by itself, and it allowed the possibility of getting people to enjoy the high-end cards without bankrupting themselves necessarily, and also, simply, you know, it’s a shame to see a great sports collectible or collectible of any kind that is damaged, and somehow it’s splendor, if that’s not too ridiculous a word, be clouded by all this.”

“You don’t stick arms back on the Venus de Milo, you don’t do it on every occasion, and you don’t have to do it with every card, but I think it would be better if the restoration work that has been done on cards in this hobby were up front,” he adds.

It begs the question, though … why sell one of the holy grails of baseball cards? A card that vanished 30 years ago only to return today?

“I’m at 67 years old, a little more grown up, not completely, but a little bit more grown up,” Olbermann says, noting that he already owns another T206 Wagner with its white border cut off, as well as a proof of the iconic card in question. “This card should have its own house. It should be on display somewhere, at least in someone’s house, rather than, as I said, my very slovenly stewardship of this card, because it is not just a Wagner, and it’s not just a Wagner that had its own past before anybody restored it, but the restoration is in and of itself unbelievable in some regards.

“The decision to auction it off is largely based on one thing, which is how many Wagners does one guy need?” he says. “I have three at the moment, it turns out. I thought I had two.”

Olbermann’s T206 Wagner will be on display at Fanatics Fest next week.