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Shelf Life

How much would you pay for a "defaced" baseball card?

Bridget Bodnar Mar 26, 2019
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Summer Dunsmore/Marketplace
Shelf Life

How much would you pay for a "defaced" baseball card?

Bridget Bodnar Mar 26, 2019
Summer Dunsmore/Marketplace
HTML EMBED:
COPY

When Beau and Bryan Abbott were kids, they spent all of their allowance on baseball cards. Today, those cards are mostly worth nothing. Or, they would be. 

The brothers, armed with Sharpies and what they describe as an “absurd” sense of humor, have turned doodling on their own worthless baseball cards into a very worthwhile side business, Baseball Card Vandals. It started as a website, where they’d post embellished cards daily. Then, they started selling the cards — the first one sold for $25. Now, some of them go for as much as $50. For the release of their book, “Baseball Card Vandals: Over 200 Decent Jokes on Worthwhile Cards,” the brothers talked about how, and why, they do what they do.

Here’s the custom Marketplace card the Baseball Card Vandals made for Kai Ryssdal.

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