While many collectors likely associate the origins of autograph redemption cards to the modern era, in reality, they began more than a half-century earlier.
That’s because in 1935, California-based retailer Pebble Beach Clothiers beat all of them to the punch.
SCP Auctions sold is a set featuring this obscure piece of hobby history for $51,000 Saturday night.
In those days, prior to Major League Baseball's expansion to the West Coast, the Pacific Coast League was the only show in town.
Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio both started their careers playing in “the third major league,” as it was affectionately called. According to the Baseball Hall of Fame, around 60 Hall of Famers were connected to the PCL in some way during their career.
Despite the league’s popularity, there was little in the way of baseball cards. The biggest producer was likely Zee-Nut, a confectionary company which released cards from 1911-38. But a perfect storm arrived in 1935 to make the Pebble Beach Clothiers set one of the most fascinating and, in retrospect, groundbreaking, releases in history.
Pebble Beach Clothiers 1935 postcard set featured five players and two managers from the PCL, as well as three other popular regional athletes. Among the players featured in the set was the San Francisco Seals’ Joe DiMaggio, a year before he made his MLB debut for the Yankees, Lefty O'Doul, who played for the Seals after his MLB career, as well as Ernie Smith, the Seals broadcaster and sponsor of the promotion.
A 1935 letter from Smith offered “personally signed pictures” in exchange for a band from a Pebble Beach necktie, according to SCP Auctions, which is selling a group of eight freshly graded autographed postcards, including a DiMaggio card graded PSA 2/Auto 10.
According to a letter of provenance provided by SCP Auctions from the consigner, his father, a French immigrant to the U.S. in the early 1930s, was attending a San Francisco high school at the same time as the set’s release. He had redeemed the set and received the autographs, stashing them away in a bedroom dresser along with other family documents, where they remained for decades.
In 1980, the consignor’s father died, and the family moved to Virginia. In the process of cleaning out their belongings, the 1935 Pebble Beach Clothiers postcards were found. “We were fortunate to find them in their original state some 50 years later,” the consignor wrote.
PSA has graded a total of 20 cards from the set, only five of which feature DiMaggio.
The most expensive and most recent sale for a DiMaggio card from the set, graded PSA 3/Auto 10, was $84,000 in February 2023 at Heritage.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.