Johnny Bench and the $2,500 Sideburns

In case you wondered if I were a complete knucklehead at the age of 10

I’m glad to say I have the sort of mom who did not throw out my baseball card collection. I know some people weren’t so lucky.

Of course, that means I’ve been lugging a few thousand baseball cards around with me for the last 40-some years. I moved five times between 1999 and 2007, and the baseball cards came with me each time.

Someday, I kept telling myself, I’m going to see if these cards are worth anything.

I had them all neatly sorted by years and by teams. Unique cards went into a plastic nine-card sleeve and then into a binder with the National League East teams first, followed by the NL West, the American League East and West, and the special cards: checklists, league leaders, rookie cards, etc. Duplicates were sorted by years and teams and placed into a dozen or so boxes of corrugated board.

Every once in a while I’d go through the binders and relive some childhood memories and tell myself once again that someday I’m going to see if these cards are worth anything.

Someday finally came a few weeks ago, when I realized that wherever my next stop might be—whether the old folks home or Valhalla or the eternal void—I didn’t need to be dragging my baseball cards along with me. I considered selling the entire collection—thousands of unique cards from 1969-1985 plus an even higher number of duplicates—for a single price. I was going to call it the Nostalgia Collection and let potential buyers know that there might be some valuable cards in the mix and there might not.

The last I heard, the bottom had fallen out of the baseball card market—but then it picked up again during Covid. I stopped in at a local sports card store and asked the 20-something gentlemen there if they thought my idea had any merit. They said possibly. They said collectors are particularly interested in cards from 1975 and earlier, even if they’re not in mint condition.

I said hmmm. I didn’t know what condition my cards were in, except that they’d been in plastic sleeves for umpteen years so I knew they weren’t any worse than when I put them in. The problem was that when I was collecting baseball cards as a pre-teen and adolescent, nobody told me they’d make a good investment a few decades down the road. So I had a lot of cards with, uh, writing on them. Like if a player got traded, I crossed out the name of his old team and wrote the new one in.

There was really no reason to do that.

Neither was there a reason for me to make occasional alterations to the pictures on the cards. I have a 1971 card of Braves manager Lum Harris. Pristine condition, except for the little gap I drew between his front teeth.

My collection of cards didn’t just sit, either. They got played with, a lot. One game I made up involved picking 20 players, writing their names down, then shuffling the cards three or four times and noting which one came up on top. That player got a point. First player to ten won.

Repeated shuffling of baseball cards tends to drop them out of the mint-condition category.

Nevertheless. Before I pulled the trigger on selling the whole collection, I decided to see if I had any cards that might be worth something, just as I’d been promising to do for 30 years or so. I found a website called oldsportscards.com (which is a darn good name for a website devoted to old sports cards) and started looking up the most valuable and sought-after cards from 1969-1975.

And as it turns out, I had a few cards that might be worth a few bucks. Near the top the list of most valuable cards from the 1970 set was the Johnny Bench All-Star card, which looks like this:

According to the website, that card in mint condition was worth $2,500.  

I was pretty sure I’d seen it before, so I grabbed the 1970 binder, flipped to the back where the special cards were, and saw that yes indeed, I had the Johnny Bench All-Star card.

And then I got a closer look. Check it out:

I had drawn a longer sideburn on Johnny Bench.

Why? He already had a sideburn that went halfway down his ear. What was wrong with that? Why did I feel the need to extend it further and give him a mutton chop?

In my collection of 1970 Cincinnati Reds I have a Woody Woodward, a Ted Savage, a Bobby Tolan, a Pat Corrales, a Ray Washburn, and an Angel Bravo. None of these cards are worth more than a couple cents each, but oh, they’re all unscathed, all unvandalized, all with the same facial hair each player wore to the photo shoot. Not Johnny Bench, though. Johnny gets a $2,500 sideburn.

After burning about this for a few minutes, I had a thought: Maybe there’s another Johnny Bench All-Star card in the box of 1970 duplicates. Ha! Yes! I found the box and shuffled through to the All-Star duplicates. Would there be another Johnny Bench?

There was. And it looked like this:

I had drawn a freakin sideburn on that one too. The way I figure it, 0.001 milliliters of ink cost me about $5,000.