The list of the hobby’s best post-World War II cards has to include the Sandy Koufax rookie card. Issued in 1955, it shows the teen pitcher who has just burst upon the scene. His Comet-like career would be over less than a dozen years after kids pulled this card from packs, but what a career he had. This week, we have a very nice, yet eminently affordable Koufax rookie card up for bid. Graded PSA 6, it is attracting attention from set collectors, those who collect rookie cards of Hall of Famers and those who simply collect Koufax cards. Three elements come together here: an iconic player’s rookie card, a popular set and a card graded highly enough to be attractive but not too high to price regular Joes out of the market.
The ’55 Koufax is notorious for being off center but this one is quite good. Its corners show just a hint of wear and it would be difficult to find a better PSA 6 example available on the market. Koufax hasn’t thrown a pitch in a big league game in more than 45 years but he’s still enormously popular. He is simply one of the best pitchers in the game’s history and it can be argued that no one was more dominant than #32 was in the early 1960s. He won three National League Cy Young Awards in a four-year stretch (all unanimously) and struck out 382 batters in 1965, while pitching in pain. Twice he was the MVP of the World Series after the club moved from Brooklyn to L.A. Three hundred wins is usually a requirement for modern day pitchers to reach Cooperstown, but Koufax was so good, there was no doubt he belonged and in 1972, he became the youngest player ever selected for enshrinement. It’s mind-boggling to know what his career numbers would have been had chronic arthritis not ended his career prematurely at age 30.
