When you’re in a Northern Virginia convention hall with fluorescent lights above you, dealers on all sides, and the low hum of collectors going through binders, all of a sudden you find yourself staring at a 1916 baseball card. It was kind of like that for Rob Chasser at the Chantilly card show at the Dulles Expo Center last year. In this hobby, it’s the kind of moment that people talk about for years.
59-year-old Chasser has played cards long enough to know when something is wrong. He often sets up at shows and has his own store called A Few of My Favorite Things where he sells collectibles. He has been collecting since he was a child on Long Island. He was ready to look when a man came up to his table and said he was selling some T206 and T207 cards. About the same old stuff. The man then reached into his pocket and took out some top-loading cards.
There was a black and white card on top. It’s not a T206. It’s not a T207. Chasser knew right away that there was something else in front of him. He turned it over. It was a 1916 Globe Clothing Shoeless Joe Jackson card. This set is so rare that only 145 cards from the whole run have ever been sent to PSA to be graded. “My jaw had already dropped,” Chasser said afterward. “And then I saw the Globe back.”
The 1916 Globe Clothing set, with the catalog number H801-9, is very similar to the more well-known M101-4 Sporting News series. Both sets have the same black-and-white player pictures, card sizes (1 5/8 inches by 3 inches), and layout. The back side is the only real difference. The back doesn’t have an ad for Sporting News; instead, it promotes The Globe, a clothing store that used to take up an entire city block at 322–324 Market Street in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Walter Strouse opened the store in 1894, and later his brother Benjamin joined him. The store became known for having low prices, and it eventually grew into a four-story complex. Back in 1916, using baseball cards to promote boys’ suits was a really smart way to market.
It’s not just the Jackson card that makes the find so interesting. What was different was that the man had twenty of them, and each one was numbered from 81 to 100. Getting that kind of complete sequential run from such an unknown set is almost unheard of. The cards that were in that group of twenty were Jackson at No. 87, Walter Johnson at No. 91, and Napoleon Lajoie at No. 97. It has never been proven that a PSA-graded copy of the Johnson card from this set is real. PSA’s database only has two Jackson cards from this set: a PSA 2 and a PSA 6. The Jackson card has not been sold to the public. There is no market gap there. That looks more like a ghost.
Felix Mendelssohn designed the set itself. He made the M101-4 series and then licensed the images and checklist to different companies so they could be sold. The Sporting News bought something. The Globe was one more. It’s not quite right to call it the “Sporting News set,” as people in the hobby often do. It was more of a shared platform that different companies used for their own purposes, with their own name and ads on the back. Many collectors think of the M101-4 series as the home of Babe Ruth’s first card, but this fact tends to overshadow the set’s quieter, rarer variants, like the Globe set.
It’s still not clear how the man got twenty consecutive Globe cards in a top-loader stack that he brought into a convention hall in Virginia. It was “such a random thing,” according to Chasser. Part of what makes it feel real is how random it is. In this hobby, the big discoveries don’t usually make themselves known. They arrive at the last minute, being carried by someone who might not fully understand what they’re carrying. They land on a dealer’s table while fluorescent lights buzz above and everyone else keeps flipping through binders, not realizing what just walked by.
This dog has seen many things in his time. His Roberto Clemente master set is one of the best in the business. He said this was the coolest thing he had ever seen. Someone who has been doing this since they were thirteen years old is saying a lot.
