gotchanewsdaily.com 
In a former antique shop off a four-lane highway in rural Virginia, Tim Banazek knelt before a white banker’s box labeled “Autographed Baseballs” that was stashed at the bottom of a steel bookcase. He pulled the first ball out and examined the signature in the fluorescent light. It was Willie Mays’s.
“Look at this!” Mr. Banazek shouted. “Look at this!”
He pulled out another ball. “Stan Musial!”
Another. “Bob Feller!”
Every day, it seems, Mr. Banazek unearths new historic treasures from a collection of sports cards and memorabilia that he purchased in 2021 from a quiet hobbyist who lived in a neighboring town.
But this is not just any assemblage. It is quite possibly the largest private collection of sports cards in the world — and probably by a wide margin. Mr. Banazek estimates that it includes 20 million cards, although other visitors have pegged the number even higher. For comparison, Paul Jones, a man in Idaho who claimed to have the largest private baseball card collection, told a local newspaper in 2020 that his holdings amounted to 2.8 million cards. The largest collection of nonsports trading cards consists of 32,809 items, according to Guinness World Records.
What makes the collection even more notable is its lack of public profile. For years, it sat in a concrete outbuilding behind a low-slung ranch house on a wooded country road.
Two members of the reclusive seller’s family said that the collection had been painstakingly accumulated over more than 50 years and that the seller had “purchased whole collections from other buyers at times.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to protect the seller’s identity, they declined to answer questions provided by email, other than to say, “We are happy that the collection went to someone who appreciates and enjoys the collection.” Mr. Banazek declined to disclose how much he had paid for the collection and said he did not even know everything it contained, making estimating a total value for it very difficult.
