1971 O-Pee-Chee Ken Holtzman #410 High Number Chicago Cubs

Description

1971 O-Pee-Chee Ken Holtzman #410 High Number Chicago Cubs Three straight World Series championships, two no-hitters, a pennant clinching Game 7 win, and one of the toughest high numbers in the Canadian set. This second copy of the 1971 O-Pee-Chee Ken Holtzman #410 High Number Chicago Cubs card, offered by Alex Collect, delivers every bit of that story at an even friendlier price point, ideal for the collector building a Cubs team set or an O-Pee-Chee high number run. The 1971 O-Pee-Chee release mirrors the 752 card Topps checklist but was printed in Canada in meaningfully smaller numbers, and this is a Canadian O-Pee-Chee bilingual back example, with Holtzman's career highlights recounted in English and French and the pitching record headed Fiche Comme Lanceur Dans Les Majeures, exactly the way Canadian kids pulled it from wax packs in the summer of 1971. The card sits in the scarce high number series, which always sold through later and survives in noticeably lower quantities than the early series, a quiet driver of long term value for any player of Holtzman's stature. What a career that stature underwrites. Signed out of the University of Illinois, Holtzman needed just 12 minor league games before joining Chicago, led the Cubs with 11 wins as a 1966 rookie, and produced the impossible 9 and 0 mark in 1967 while squeezing starts around military commitments. His August 1969 no-hitter against Atlanta remains famous for recording no strikeouts at all, and his June 1971 no-hitter in Cincinnati was a 1 to 0 virtuoso turn against the Big Red Machine. Sent to Oakland for Rick Monday, he became the rotation anchor of the Swingin' A's, winning 19, 21 and 19 games across the 1972 to 1974 championship seasons and taking Game 7 of the 1973 World Series from the Mets. When he retired he owned 174 victories and a place among the era's finest big game left handers. This copy shows a touch more honest handling than its sheet mate, per the photographs, with visible rounding and whitening at the lower left corner, moderate wear at the other tips, a couple of small chips on the left black border exposing white card stock beneath, centering shifted noticeably right at roughly 60 to 40, and clean surfaces throughout with no creases, wrinkles, stains or writing, while the bilingual back remains bright and clearly readable in both languages. That corner and the left edge chips dictate restraint, so we estimate VG-EX 4, a fair, buyer friendly grade. For budget minded set builders, a genuinely scarce Canadian high number of a three-time champion at this price is precisely the kind of opportunity that disappears quickly. Grade Estimate: VG-EX 4