Antiques Roadshow

GUEST: So this is our Louisville Slugger Ty Cobb bat.

Um, we think, from 1920s, 1930s era.

My dad is an avid baseball, uh, collector, and so a gentleman, I believe he was in his 80s at the time, um, brought this bat to my dad and said, "I would like you to have this bat.

I see you have a true passion for it."

APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.

GUEST: And so my dad took it, um, and he put it in the corner, uh, forgot about it for 20 years... APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.

GUEST: Uh, until he sold his shop about five years ago.

And then we actually saw you appraise a Ty Cobb bat on ANTIQUES ROADSHOW a couple years ago... APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.

GUEST: ...and that's what got our, uh, interest piqued in the bat.

And so here we are today.

APPRAISER: Yeah, well, it's not very often that we find these in the wild.

I believe that appraisal was probably a decade ago, actually.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: It's been a long time since I've seen one like this.

And we'll get to the bat in a second, but we had a big change in baseball history last week.

Ty Cobb, for years and years and years, has had the highest batting average in the history of baseball.

Until last week, when Major League Baseball integrated the Negro League statistics.

And now Ty Cobb is number two in all-time career batting average at .366, to Hall of Famer Josh Gibson, a Negro Leaguer who had a career average of .372.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: So that's a little bit of Ty Cobb history that just came down, I believe, in the last week or two.

With that being said, let's talk about your bat.

First of all, there's two types of bats.

There's the bats that were manufactured by Louisville Slugger to specific weights, measurements, so forth, manufactured for the players.

And then there was the store model bats.

The store model bats were manufactured in all different sizes and shipped to sporting goods stores, to schools, to hardware stores, those types of things.

Value is a huge difference.

So first of all, the bat measures 36 inches.

The bat weighs 38 ounces.

So right there, that tells us that, wait a second, this is not your store model bat.

This would have been a bat that would have been made specifically for Ty Cobb.

That fits right into his range of the bats that he would have ordered.

The label dates it at 1916 to 1933.

However, Cobb retired in 1928.

So for us, that places this bat to have been manufactured between 1916 and 1928.

And also, Ty Cobb was known to tape his bats with about 11 inches of tape in a spiral fashion.

GUEST: (chuckling): No way.

APPRAISER: If you measure all the way to the tape residue, we have about 11 inches of tape.

We have some spike marks, and then we have the stains, which are widely considered to be tobacco stains.

So we have everything we want to see today in a bat that's a professional model bat, that has a really high likelihood it could have been used by Ty Cobb in a game.

So, all that being said, any idea what, what, you know, the bat's worth?

GUEST: I don't, I mean, you, you see online what, what some have sold for, of course, you, you don't, you don't think it's worth anywhere near that.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but I-I have no, no clue.

I-I wouldn't expect much coming into today.

APPRAISER: Yeah.

At auction, you're looking at $75,000 to $100,000.

GUEST: That's unbelievable, unbelievable.

I'd have never guessed.

APPRAISER: You're going to want to insure this bat for $125,000.

GUEST: Unbelievable, thank you.