Sometimes A Big Fish Story Is True

A story confirmed and a lesson learned

A while ago while discussing picking I mentioned that I’d heard that someone had discovered a $50,000 Babe Ruth card at an antique show that I usually attend:

“I was at an antique show talking with a dealer and he mentioned a Babe Ruth card that Goldin sold for over $50,000. He said the consignor found the card raw at that show in May, bought it from the clueless seller for $25, had it graded, and consigned to Goldin. I don’t know if the origin story is true, but there was a Goldin sale of a matching card late last year.”

I was pissed that I hadn’t been there because I am such a sunny optimist of a guy when it comes to picking that I think I will be the one to find the needle in the haystack. Like Captain Kirk, I don’t believe in the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario; I always figure I will win. It’s what drags my ass out of the rack at 4:00 on a freezing Sunday morning to walk around a parking lot in the dark for three or four hours.

I reported that big fish story because it was interesting and accentuated my point at the time, but I had my doubts as to its veracity. If I had a dollar for every story like that I’ve been told, I wouldn’t be worrying about chasing cardboard treasures to make a buck (I probably would do it anyway because I like the hunt, but you know what I mean). These sorts of hearsay stories are rampant and usually turn out to be total bullshit, like my guy with the file cabinet of 1950s cards that turned out to be junk wax. Well, I recently met the guy who found the card and I can confirm that this particular big fish story is 100% true: he found a $50,000 card and got it for $25. The guy was a dealer at the show and found it during dealer set-up time. That makes me feel oddly better about it because I wasn’t a dealer at the show and I never would have found it anyway, so I didn’t miss out on the card because I missed the show.

Here’s an interesting twist on the story: after confirming that he was the lucky picker, the dealer asked me not to mention the specifics to any of the other dealers at the show because he is afraid that they will not deal with him again if they find out what happened. Since I heard the story from another dealer at the show, I think that ship may have sailed. Regardless, I don’t think he did anything wrong. The dealer who sold him the card has only his own ignorance to blame. I didn’t mention it to any other dealers partly as a courtesy to the lucky picker-dealer, but mostly because alerting them to the shortcomings that I hope to exploit in the future is not a good strategy. What I don’t want is to turn them into the idiots we all see at antique shoes, flea markets, etc., pricing junk wax baseball at 500x value because they saw a local TV news report that baseball cards are valuable.

It does bring up two issues about the show circuit that I wanted to discuss. The first is just how much of the business of a show actually takes place between dealers. There is quite a round-robin of cards making their way back and forth between dealers in swaps, which is a very efficient way of reallocating items and costs if you think about it in market terms. Everyone has a different audience and pipeline, so my trash is your gold. I recently traded an item I’d not been able to unload for years to another dealer for things that I could use. He got it sold inside of a week (at a lower price than I paid for it); his cost basis in what he traded to me must have been very low. I don’t resent that at all; we have different networks. The second is that it reinforces how important it is to get into any venue, whether it is a card show, flea, or antiquarian book fair, as early as possible, ideally during set-up. An efficient reallocation of inventories is NOT what I want to happen. I want to skim off that profit for myself. If I am not inside picking for cardboard gold, I am outside picking my butt.

The other lesson is an interesting sociological point about this thing of ours: age equates to inventory. Many live collectible events are mainly manned by older people because they have the stuff and the muscle memory of setting up at shows (as I cross over into my sixties, I know I do). While they generally are not good with tech, do not like to spend time researching things, and often have antiquated ideas about value, they are really good at something that is going extinct: in-person collegiality. That is why the lucky picker-dealer was terrified of being named. Most of the dealers at the show are very old and very chummy with one another. To many of them, the shows are both social and commercial and there are unwritten social rules, like watching each others’ backs, referring customers, not interfering with each others’ deals, and so on. If the lucky picker-dealer is outed as having made 2,000X on a deal with one of them, they could very well shun him for what they might characterize as exploitative, anti-social behavior. I see that, but I don’t adhere to it. I am a believer in evolution. As the market moves and information changes, adaptation is critical. I loathe the card bros but I understand the need to speak their language, use the resources they use, and adapt to their transactional norms. You roll with the changes, or you get rolled.

I actually think I know who had the card because I have had the same thing happen with my buys from him multiple times, albeit on a much smaller scale. At the same show where I confirmed the Ruth story, I found a small stack of obscure prewar baseball cards in one of that dealer’s picker bins (guess the other dealers hadn’t cleaned him out just yet). I recognized the issue and saw that he was pricing them way below market and that he priced the HOFers the same as the commons; gotta love that bit of ignorance. I grabbed all of them, even the commons because the commons were still way cheaper than market, negotiated a further 20% off for a bulk sale, and walked away with a smile on my face and a 4x-5x return locked in. Made my day. The craziest thing of all was what he said to me while we were discussing the discount and which is why I think he is he one who sold the Ruth card:

“I don’t know what these are, so I just priced them.”

Maybe I’m just no fun, but my philosophy is that if I don’t know what something is, I don’t sell it until I figure it out. It just might help me avoid a $50,000 blunder. But I also understand how that dealer could be happy just picking and flipping and not sweating that he’s maybe selling a $160 card for $16 because it cost him a dime at some estate sale. The cognitive effort to research and price material is a time tax on all of us; I bought a collection last week and I am many (happy) hours into breaking it down and listing it, and still nowhere near finished. I don’t think what the hapless baseball card seller does is the smartest way to run a business, but he seems happy enough living in his own world and I am pleased to nab crazy good buys at his table seemingly every show, so it is a symbiotic relationship. It’s like the old joke where the mother thinks she’s a chicken and the rest of the family doesn’t want to tell her that she isn’t because the eggs are really good.