The wild hobby of collecting Negro League cards

A version of this story originally ran in Feb. 2022

There are a handful of extremely rare baseball cards, some that have gone down so far in pop-culture lore that even the most casual of baseball fans know about them.

The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle. The 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. Or baseball's Holy Grail: the 1909 Honus Wagner. Even a ripped version of that one sold for close to half a million dollars earlier this month.

But what if I told you there are collections of cards even more rare? Cards that were never created in the United States, cards of some of the greatest players to ever hold a bat or put on a glove.

"All of the cards, literally every single Hall of Fame card, with the exception of probably four or five, are much more rare than the Honus Wagner T206 card," Al Jurgela told me in a recent phone call.

Jurgela is talking about Negro League baseball cards.

Although cards were created post-Negro League play as reprints, while the Negro National League was actually happening, cards were never created for players. In America, that is.

"They just didn’t exist," Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, said years ago. "It’s kind of a shame that nobody really had the foresight to do it, but at that time, the folks who were making cards, they probably weren’t going to make Negro League cards."

But look abroad, and there's a goldmine.

"The cards that we would later find come out of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela," Jurgela said. "Where the Negro Leaguers typically played in the winter."

Jurgela, a giant baseball fan, first got interested in the idea of collecting Negro League cards after speaking with Negro National League All-Star Lou Dials at an autograph show in the 1980s. Dials told him the stories and stats of great Negro League players, and 10-year-old Al became hooked. He first started collecting those reprints, but then discovered that there were these original cards in Latin America that were created while these stars were playing during the winter. An entire world of relatively unexplored baseball history.

So, since the late 1990s, Jurgela has gone on a mission to find nearly every Negro League card in existence. He's communicated with Cuban baseball expert and card collector Ryan Christoff, Josh Leland of Leland's Auction House, famous American painter and Negro League card aficionado Richard Merkin and even Gilberto Dihigo, son of Black baseball legend Martín Dihigo. The younger Dihigo lives in Miami now, but he brought a bunch of baseball memorabilia -- including baseball cards -- with him to the States.

"I got most of the cards from other collectors and have traveled to meet them, but most are stateside," Jurgela said. "Of course, a bunch of them I did get at auction houses through the years like Heritage, REA and Christie's. I just acquired things as they became available."

And the cards Jurgela has today would blow your mind.

A 1910 Pop Lloyd. It's one of two copies. One sold 10 years ago for close to $100,000 and Jurgela has the other. Lloyd was a .349 lifetime hitter, a shortstop Babe Ruth called the greatest baseball player ever.

A 1910 José Méndez worth more than $100,000. Méndez is considered one of the greats to ever appear on the mound, compared many times to Walter Johnson.

A Josh Gibson Toleteros -- one which some collectors have dubbed baseball's real Holy Grail. There are only 12 in existence and no other card of the all-time great was ever printed.

Jurgela has the only known copy of Dead Ball legend Pete Hill's 1909 rookie card, the only known copy of Dihigo's rookie card and the only Willie Foster ever found.

"Yeah, over the last 20 years, I've seemed to have amassed the most comprehensive collection," Jurgela told me. "I think I have every card issued of any Negro League Hall of Famer, and of course, many, many non-Hall of Famers that may still be inducted into the Hall of Fame at some point."

The 50-year-old told me there may be more cards that pop up in the Caribbean at some point, but many people in places like Puerto Rico and Mexico have already realized the value of the Negro League cards they have and pushed them into the market.

Today, Jurgela puts the value of his collection at likely "more than $1 million," but that's not why he got into any of this. He hopes to donate them to the right home at some point. He's spent almost half his life doing this because he has that same wonder, mystery and intrigue he felt while talking to Lou Dials as a kid decades ago. Piecing together these cards and teams is a way for him, and hopefully others, to learn the tales of some of the greatest to ever put on a uniform. Although they were turned away from the big leagues, they continued to play and dominate wherever they could.

You can hear it in his voice when he perks up talking about Grant "Home Run" Johnson's pre-1900 contributions to the Page Fence Giants or a Monte Irvin card from when he played in Cuba before the Hall of Famer starred with the New York Giants.

"They're really cool and a lot of them are photographic even, and that's just super cool," Jurgela said. "It's just, I don't know, you need to kind of hold them or at least see them closely to see the art and the story behind them and just that they even exist -- that they survived."