PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Hidden treasures are not always buried in the ground.

A man in Defiance, Ohio, recently uncovered a fortune in baseball cards tucked away in his grandparents’ attic.

Karl Kissner was cleaning out the home of his late grandparents, and finding things one might expect, that is until he opened a dusty, old box filled with baseball cards.

“We started looking and we’re thinking, ‘well, they’ve got to be baseball cards because that’s Cy Young and there’s Honus Wagner and there’s Ty Cobb,’” said Kissner. “So we’re going – okay, they’re either worth nothing or they’re worth something.”

It turned out to be something, and something substantial – like $2 million, maybe more.

Dan Means owns Sports World Specialties on Smithfield Street in Downtown Pittsburgh, and Lou Ciocca is a regular customer. Both men know their baseball cards.

The shop is a go-to place for sports memorabilia. But the Ohio collection is 700 cards, sets of 30, some more than a century old.

An auction house estimates a total value of nearly $3 million.

“There can be a lot of money involved, you know, like the T-206 Wagner card. That Gretzky sold recently, $1.2 million for one card, it’s very believable,” said Means of the cards in his store.

Some sets there came with caramel candies.

Late owner, Carl Hench, owned a meat market and gave them away to customers, but not all of them. Even a hard core collector like Ciocca says he’d be tempted by the price.

“That would be the tough part, deciding which ones you want to part with,” says Ciocca.

We should all have such problems.

RELATED LINKS:
Sports World Specialties
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KDKA Radio’s Larry Richert & John Shumway interview Karl Kissner