This is a true story that happened to me recently.
I have many of the baseball cards between 1980 and today, but don’t have many cards prior to that time span. I have a dozen or so cards from the ’70s and a few from the ’60s, but not much else. So, I’ve been looking to acquire an older baseball card for some time. Something over 100 years old would be cool, but if I couldn’t plop down the dough for that, something close to it.
Also, I kind of wanted a Brooklyn Dodger. My father is a big Brooklyn Dodger guy, and followed them real closely as he was growing up in Long Island. So I did some searching on eBay one early Saturday morning for a Brooklyn Dodger card, about 100 years old, under $100, and in okay graded condition. I came across many cards that were over $100 and many that were ungraded. I wanted to stay away from the ungraded cards, because you just can’t tell from a scan, you know?
I finally found a few cards from the T207 set that were mid-range graded and in my price range. I also wanted though, a player who had a good career and was known by historians and collectors. Not necessarily a Hall of Fame guy, because that would most likely be well out of my price range. So, I’m checking out each player by finding their card, in my criteria, and then doing a Google search on their name. I have some knowledge of baseball history, being a one-time member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), but I don’t know all the old baseball player names.
So I come across this guy named Jake Daubert who played first base for the Brooklyn Superbas, Robins, Trolley Dodgers and Dodgers between 1910 and 1918. (All the team names mentioned here were previous iterations of the modern day Brooklyn Dodgers. For a full timeline on the team name progression, see this link. Daubert was a real good ballplayer. He led the NL in batting average in 1913 and 1914 with a .350 and .329 average respectively. He was also named the NL MVP in 1913. For his career, spent between Brooklyn and Cincinnatti, spanning 15 seasons, Daubert batted a career .303 average with 2,326 hits. To go with that, he had a stellar .991 career fielding percentage.
So anyway, I find a 1912, T207 card of his in PSA 5 condition. It’s an auction and it’s ending early on a weekend, so I figure I might be able to get in for under $100, possibly. I keep an eye on it and wind up winning it. For just under $50. A bargain if you ask me.
I get the card in the mail, check it out, it’s cool, and I put it away with the rest of my cards. Okay, I finally have my vintage baseball trading card. A T207 Jake Daubert. And I found out about a real good old-time baseball player in the process, who I didn’t know of before.
One day recently, my sister’s boyfriend was over our house. He and I were talking and the subject of baseball came up. I mentioned that I had a baseball signed by Babe Ruth which my father had handed down to me. So he says, you know, I have a great, great, great uncle who played professional baseball in Brooklyn. His name was Jake Daubert. I looked at him like, “Are you kidding me?”. I say hold on a second, I gotta show you something. I go get the card and show it to him, and say, “Is this him?” He says yep, that’s him, and a big smile comes across his face. I then tell him the story of how I wound up owning that particular card of Jake Daubert. My sister then comes into the room and we tell her the story and she says that her boyfriend has the same smile as Jake did.
I knew my sister’s boyfriend’s last name was Daubert, but didn’t put the two and two together, until it was right there in front of me.
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