One of the strangest and rarest baseball cards ever produced, featuring President George H.W. Bush in his Yale baseball uniform, sold Friday night for a record $51,240.
The card is one of just three autographed examples graded by PSA.
The story goes that Bush’s grandson asked why his grandfather didn’t have his own baseball card: “Rather than allow the president to wallow in embarrassment, Topps came up with a plan to put Bush on cardboard,” Newsday reported in March 1990.
Topps originally claimed it produced 100 copies of the card and presented them to the President, however, a lawsuit later that year revealed Topps had actually made more — two types, one issued to Bush and one “that merely escaped the manufacturer.”
The previous record for the card belonged to a BGS 9, which sold for nearly $25,700 in 2019.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture.