Tough Zeenut Hofers

Happy Holidays to all! I was searching ebay completed items and saw a nice 1915 Zeenut Harry Heilmann - don't think I've seen that card for sale before. Seller wanted 10k!! I assume Heilmann is one of the tougher HOFers, ditto for Crawford. Anyone want to try a ranking of the toughest Zeenut HOFers?

Merry Christmas gentlemen.

I hope someone with more collecting experience comments, but I'll offer what little I do know through anecdotal evidence. I think it would be difficult to assemble a rank order list of difficulty, but I would place them in tiers. I think they are interchangeable within tiers.

Tier 1:
Heilmann, Covaleski, Southworth, Crawford

Tier 2:
Vance, Bancroft

Tier 3:
Chance, Lazzeri, Hooper, Cochrane

Tier 4:
P. Waner, L. Waner, Gomez, Averill, Lombardi

Tier 5:
DiMaggio

Obviously, the confounding variable is the extreme difficulty of some years over others which are more readily available.

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Some years back I owned a couple hundred Zeenuts from various years and tried to follow every auction/sale I could. I saw every one of the key Zeenuts from the different series including the 1916 Claxton, 1911 Bohne, 1919 Arbuckle, etc., but never the 1920 Sam Crawford. I think one came up for sale in the last couple of years, but I could be mistaken about that.

Met Patricia Maguinez yesterday (daughter-in-law of Jimmy Claxton). IT WAS MY FAVORITE GIFT THIS YEAR! We had spoken on the phone many times before but finally met for the first time. Her husband, catcher Bob Maguinez, was known as "Mr. Amateur Baseball" in Tacoma, and later was a scout for the Minnesota Twins.

As for the Zeenuts, I would really like to hear Macrae's theories on them.

Thanks for the responses so far guys.

Crawford is in the tough 1918 zeenut red border set right? I'd imagine that's one of the toughest zeenut hofers out there. Especially with the coupon intact - oh boy, what a monster that card would be!

Crawford is indeed in the 1918 set. Never seen one with the coupon attached.

The only one I've seen was an old photocopy and that was sans coupon.

There was a Crawford a few years back in a auction that featured a lot of rare Zeenuts like Thorpe, Bohn, Claxton, Arbuckle, etc

2011 REA auction:

Lot # 536 1920 Zeenuts Sam Crawford SGC 40 - Sold for $4,944

Lot # 530 1918 Zeenuts partial set (60/104) inlcuding poor condition Crawford - Sold for $12,925

They weren't kidding when they called that 1918 Crawford "poor"....

You can barely tell there is a red border