Baseball cards are works of art — no different than "Whistler's Mother," "American Gothic" and "Washington Crossing the Delaware." Except for one sweet fact that can make a dentist smile. They once came with a slab of chalky gum that smelled a lot better than it tasted.
Yet who would have thunk that some of these cardboard masterpieces would be priced like actual masterpieces decades later? If you put a Pete Rose rookie card in your bike spokes way back when, we'll give you time to skip the next sentence. ... It’s worth roughly five grand in graded Near Mint/Mint condition today.
Here are the all-time best baseball designs of the post-war era. OK, kids, let’s flip 'em.
Note: Because of the glut of products in recent decades, we’ll keep it simple. Only the regular sets of major brands (pre-merger Bowman, Donruss, Fleer, Topps and Upper Deck) are eligible.