A New Hampshire woman made a potentially life-changing discovery while scrounging around an old barn.
Turns out the walls of the barn were holding an extremely rare baseball collection — a collection that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
According to a story from local affiliate WMUR, while restoring the property, Toni Pappas of Manchester, New Hampshire reportedly found 52 baseball cards from the late 1930s and 1940s, one of which was a coveted Ted Williams rookie card.
“Right away, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, those were Billy’s cards,” Pappas told the outlet.
“All of a sudden, I look in there, about a foot down. There’s 51 more cards. I start pulling them out, pulling them out, pulling them out. We have 52 cards total, and we’re going through them, and we just recognize Ted Williams right off the bat,” contractor Ron Piecuch told to the outlet.
The workers restoring the property found the collection within the walls of the barn, WMUR reported. The owner had lived there with her now-deceased husband.
Pappas is considering keeping the cards for their sentimental value despite knowing they could be sold for tens of thousands of dollars.
“I can reminisce and imagine my husband at 10 or 12 years old. He was looking at all these cards, playing with them, trading them off with other kids, and probably dreaming that he’d be a great athlete someday,” she told the outlet.
The rare find may have been a blessing from above.
That’s because her husband was Billy Pappas, a baseball Hall of Famer at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and died in 2023, according to a UNH Athletics obituary.
“I think he’s smiling down at us. I really think he’s laughing and happy that we found them,” Toni told WMUR.
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