Shortly after I found my first signed T206 cards in April 2004…

…I learned that many of the autographed pre-war cards in the hobby can be attributed to legendary autograph collector Jeffrey W. Morey. Jeff has been collecting autographs in person and through the mail for the past 60 years. The profile of Jeff to the right is from the 1960 issue of Card Comments when, as the article states, he was 18-years old. Jeff started collecting baseball cards as a nine-year old boy in Syracuse, NY, and specifically recalls collecting the 1951 Bowman set. Soon after that he began pursuing T206 and other cigarette cards and sending them to players for their signature in the 1950s and 60s. He found the address lists in various hobby publications beginning in the 1950s. As Morey told me, “If there was a consistency throughout all my life, if there was a card it was better to have a signature on there.” I was able to interview Jeff in 2007, and he and I have been hobby friends ever since. You can listen to his interview at the bottom of this article.

As early as 1968, Jeff attempted to sell some of his collection. In the January 1968 issue of Sports Trader pictured below, you can see Jeff offering “1910 era cig cards – Carrigan – signed on back” and “Wahoo Sam Crawford – 2 diff, each $2.00 – signed on picture”:

I was very happy to find a summary of Jeff’s collection in the March 1968 Sports Collectors Journal, in which Jeff stated that among his “most valuable items” were “some 1910 old baseball cards autographed by such men as Sam Crawford, Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb, and Napoleon Lajoie.”

In the July 1969 Sports Trader, Jeff offered "1910 T205 (sic) White Border Cigarette Cards signed" of Cicotte, as well as Sam Crawford, Bill Carrigan, Lefty Leifield, and Fred Snodgrass:

Below is an excerpt from an autograph mailer that Jeff sent to a collector list in May 1972. You can see that his signed T206 collection was really starting to grow.

As you can see below, Jeff’s “1910 old baseball cards autographed by such men as Sam Crawford, Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie” became available to the hobby in the 2001 Mike Gutierrez/Mastro auction:

It was be wonderful to see all 32 of the signed early tobacco and candy cards listed here, but Mastro did not include images of all of them in the catalog. Fortunately, before Jeff sold them he made black and white photo copies of most of his cards. He recently sent me a picture of him with his collection circa 1973, and in the bottom right corner of the photo, you can see a photo album open to a page containing 15 autographed T206 cards. Jeff dated the photo based on the 1972 Hall of Famer photographs over his shoulder, and Richie Coggins pictured over his head, who last played for Rochester in 1972. Although Mastro didn’t take pictures of the entirety of Jeff’s collection, you can still line up the 1973 picture with the cards that he submitted to Mastro in 2001, based on the black and white photo copies he made in anticipation of that consignment.

And you also can see that Jeff sold the Cicotte pictured below in the March 25, 2002 Mastro Auctions screenshot below for just over $1,000. In short, we have photographic proof of the same signed T206 Cicotte over a 30-year span, dating back now 50 years!

Additional signed tobacco cards from Jeff’s collection, including HOFers Fred Clarke, Zack Wheat and Sam Crawford (the Cy Young was not from his collection) were also featured in Lot #1378 of MastroNet’s April 2002 auction:

As an aside, where did Jeff get all of these old baseball cards to get autographed? From fellow collectors, of course. In fact, in the April/May 1957 issue of Sport Hobbyist, a then 15-year-old Jeff placed a classified ad seeking T202 and T205s, among other cards, both kinds of which he was able to get signed.

I recently asked Jeff whether he recalled selling these signed tobacco cards back in the 1970s, and he said “No — think they stayed with me a bit – even back then many did not understand the fun of signed BB cards.” It looks like they may have remained unsold until Jeff sold his entire collection in 2001.

As hard as it is to imagine, while there has never been a significant supply of signed pre-war cards, interest did not really grow in them until about 2007. So many of the first group of signed T206 cards collectors picked up before then were available for about $100, some for under that. It was not until about 2007-2014 that prices started to pick up and more surfaced — which, unfortunately seemed to encourage expert forgers to begin using T206s as their medium in early 2015.

But, Jeff really never stopped collecting autographs, even some 70 years after he got started as a young boy back in the early 1950s. The photo to the right was taken in his home town of Syracuse in March 2019.

On December 27, 2007, Jeff sat down with me for a telephone interview to discuss his experiences getting deadball era baseball cards signed by players.  Among other things in this 30-minute interview, Jeff described his visit with old time New York Giant pitcher Hooks Wiltse in 1954 (yes, he had Wiltse sign a T206) and his encounter six years later with Ty Cobb (and had Cobb sign a T206 and an e90-1) in Cooperstown, New York.

You can hear my interview with Morey in its entirety below.

Jeff Morey’s Ty Cobb COllection

These are a few of the items Jeff had Ty Cobb sign in Cooperstown in 1959 and 1960.  As Morey explained in his interview, these were signed by Cobb using Morey's rapidograph pen, which contained black India ink.  Interestingly, that was the date of the Hall of Fame game between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians. 

Sadly, Mastro did not catalog Jeff’s entire collection with photographs, and so many of the card images are lost to time as most of these cards have been buried deep within collections for nearly 20 years since the Mastro auctions. Fortunately, Jeff made black and white photocopies of much of his pre-war collection, so we can get a pretty good look at what he managed to accrue during the 1950s and 60s.

Thanks to some saved auction images, we get a look at what that gorgeous signed T202 Baker looks like in full technicolor below. Morey recalls getting the Baker signed T202 by mail, but that he also got some signatures from Baker in person in the Hall of Fame plaque gallery at Cooperstown. In fact, as you can see in the clips above, Morey was able to take a photograph of Baker standing by his plaque, which he later sent to Baker to sign.

In 2007, Jeff sold me some of the last remaining signed pre-war cards in his collection. Here is what they looked like when I got them from Jeff in the mail.