Letting the Days Go By, Part 3

All righty then...

So, cards were 100% of the radar from the late 80s until 2007, when Henry was a few months old. He expressed ZERO interest in TV, except for sitting in my lap while I watched the Dodgers and giggling when I told him one man was going to throw the ball and the other man would catch the ball, etc.

Something about being with a 6 month old watching baseball sparked my memory and I checked out Ebay. In those long off salad days, I actually had 2 jobs and income, and for my birthday in November, I bought myself a small collection of 1957 Dodgers, including Drysdale (rookie), Koufax, and Reese. Didn't want the rest (who really needs Clem Labine?), so re-sold them, recouping most of the original investment, keeping the 3 I wanted for more or less free, and starting this entire mess!

Very quickly, I realized that Ebay was not the place to acquire cards. Too many people doing the same thing as I was, all bidding against each other. No real bargains to be had that way. The key was the Collectibles section on Craigslist. I started spending inordinate amounts of time searching "Cards," "Card," "baseball" on CLs across the country, and buying collections sight unseen from Georgia and Oklahoma. This proved to be a real crapshoot. I made out like a bandit a few times, but got stuck with TWO counterfeit Joe Dimaggio cards and completely ripped off (sent money order, got dookie) by a scumbag in Las Vegas who is now serving time for theft, armed robbery, etc., all un-related to me (maybe I'll devote some time to this clown in a later entry).

I'd cherry pick out a few, and sell the rest card by card on Ebay, making a few bucks here and there. All small potatoes stuff, as I was full time employed and really thinking about getting together a collection of Hall of Fame rookies that maybe Henry or Violet would appreciate some day. The real illness didn't start until I got laid off in September 2008, right in time for the Great Recession. In fact, come to think of it, I might have been a leading indicator. While sending resumes off to the void and getting the occasional fruitless interview, I started thinking more and more that maybe I should sit this one out and just sell cards until the economy rebounded. Depression was starting to rear its ugly (and familiar) head, and I thought maybe this was the key top kicking it in the sack and running away while I had a chance. Plus, I'd probably have more free time to try to write something again (I mistakenly reckoned).

While doing a couple of weeks' contract work for another company that folded a few weeks later, I happened upon an Ebay listing for an GIFUCKINGNORMOUS collection listed at $50K and not getting any bids. It turned out to be in Los Angeles, and I went to see the whole thing.

Nice young Armenian cat with the unlikely name Hampig (I shit thee not - Ham and Pig in the same name. Definitely not a Muslim) was selling out of his stake in a local card shop to focus full time on his other business. Pretty amazing stuff. All sorts of Hall of Famer autographs and vintage cards. Graded Mickey Mantles, etc etc. All in all, we agreed that if I could con a bank into loaning me 30K, I'd buy him out.

The biggest surprise in this whole escapade was (looking for votes here):
a. that Bank of America loaned me all the money with no verification of income in an era that banks were supposedly not loaning money to ANYONE;
or
b. that Jenn went along with this scheme.

Either way, by March 2009, the garage in my old house in the Valley was CRAMMED with boxes of cards. 2 car garage filled approximately to 30%. Couldn't park a car in there. And so it began. 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week, sorting, cataloging, listing, selling, shipping cards, arguing with shut in collector freaks in New Jersey about what constitutes an EXMT card vs. an EX+). To all of you haters who think I'm a lazy S.O.B. smoking pot all day in my underpants, this is not the case. I probably put in more hours than any of you. The difference, though, was that I really didn't make any money for my efforts. Oh, and also that my endeavor is completely embarrassingly lame.

At first, it looked like a grand slam. I cleared over 11K/month for the first month and visions of making 80K selling cardboard started to fill my pretty little head. But the second month it was 6K, and never over 3-4K after that. After I sold off the best stuff, there were diminishing returns. It became very clear that I might be working for scratch after loan interest, mailing costs, envelopes, etc. I had paid the ham pig too much. It was really impossible to know before putting theory into practice(at least to me), but in retrospect, I shouldn't have paid more than 20-25K. Kept me sane though. Better than not getting a job day after day, week after week.

So, eventually, I cleared it all out. This took about 9 months. I re-invested several times and bought smaller groups of cards. Nowadays, when I buy, I'm looking to make no less than 100% profit, or I walk away from the deal. I am finally net positive, but not by much, and certainly by a LOT less than I would have made pouring coffee somewhere. But, who would want to read that blog?

Starting next time, I'll start busting out the highlight stories, beginning with "The Great Ice Tea Caper."

Thanks for reading.

Letting the Days Go By, Part 2

(If you haven't read part 1, this will make less sense)

My cards lay in their plastic sleeves gathering dust in my parents' house for 5 or 6 years until I needed a better guitar than that crappy white Ibanez with the Heavy Metal whammy bar and remembered them. AHA! Cardboard for pickups seemed like a great trade. I borrowed my sister's car (this is a long story that I'm not going to go into, but, yes, I'm still bitter), got them out of my old room's closet, and headed down to the local card shop.

I figured, after a quick tally, that I had maybe $1000 in cards. Here is when I learned:

Life Lesson #1:

Everything is worth exactly and only what someone else will pay for it!

The shop owner quickly flipped through the book, his eyes lighting up once or twice and told me I'd give you $100.

Holy shit say what?

Really? For which ones?

For the lot. You have some decent stuff here, but I have doubles and triples on most of it.

But... but... the book says -

The book doesn't mean anything, kid. Hundred and a quarter is best I'll do for you.

So, I went staggering out with my cards under my arm. Was I going to have to get a job to buy a guitar? The horror. I tried another shop in a different neighborhood, and got more or less the same spiel. However, at this second shop, on the way out, a guy about my age stepped outside when I did and started a conversation.

Man, you don't want to sell your cards to a shop. That's the worst money you'll ever see.

Oh. Okay. So, where do you sell cards, then?
(note: this is in the ancient pre-Internet era. There was no Ebay, no Craigslist, no nuthin).

I know a lot of people. Let's go sit down and check it all out. I live around the corner.

So, idiotically, I followed. We sat in his apartment and he went through the book, more enthusiastically than the store owners, and told me that he knew some guys who would for sure buy them, so just leave them with him, and he'd sell them for me and take 10% commission. This leads me to:

Life Lesson #2:

Don't Be Such a Fucking Idiot, Golden!

Yes, it's true: I left my property with a random stranger. I guess I figured I know where the guy lived, and it really never occurred to me that someone could be a complete slimeball. I'm too honest myself to believe that other people can behave that way. Or something like that. In any case, yes, this does prove what many of you have said to me over the years about my relative intelligence, and yes, this motherfucker did in fact leave town with my stuff. I called him a million times, never got any response, and headed over there, probably on day 3. He was completely moved out and the manager of the complex had no forwarding info. Line disconnected the next day. Game over. That stung.

So, as for LL#2, I think I did learn to not be so trusting, and "I'm never letting someone steal my baseball cards again" has been one of my internal catch phrases. Whenever presented with an opportunity to further prove how completely detached from reality I am, I have pictured my card's stealer riding off into the sunset laughing maniacally (Moo-A-HA-HA-HA!), and have (on most occasions), not taken the absolute stupidest choice.

As for Life Lesson #1 - I applied this to selling my first house in Portland. The buying agent told my selling agent that his clients wouldn't pay our asking price, because the the comparable houses in the neighborhood hadn't sold at that price. Show me the comps, he evidently told my agent. I quickly reflected upon LL #1 and told my agent that he could suggest to his counterpart that he shove the comps up his ass. We got asking.

Come to think of it, I can't remember where I got the money for my better guitar...

Stealing from the Mentally Challenged

This was supposed to be How Did I Get Here, Part 2, but today's events take precendent...


This morning, I saw a post on craigslist (where I find everything I sell) for a pretty high graded Sandy Koufax rookie card (1955 Topps). Sells in the $800 range on Ebay, consistently. It was described as being in "a plastic case," which lead me to believe this was a person who didn't know what a graded card was (i.e., that it increases value, etc). I haven't had a chance to go into this yet, but basically, the only way to make any money at this is to COMPLETELY FUCK PEOPLE IN THE ARSE on their stuff. This makes me feel like a complete jerk... but also kinda good in a king of dipshits kind of way. I'll write at length on this subject soon.

So, I wrote and offered $300.

About an hour later, I got a call on my cell phone from an unknown area code. It was a very mentally impaired/retarded man named Edwin who, as soon as I had confirmed that I was the one who offered to buy his card, launched into a breathless rant about how his father had died and left him with a number of extremely valuable cards and his mom said he could do what he wanted with them and he really wanted enough money to buy an XBox and ran through all of his cards without pausing for a moment to let me react. At least, I'm pretty much sure this is what he was saying. He told me he'd take a picture of all the cards laid out on his bed (see photo with identifying numbers removed) and send it to me.

For the next hour or so, I figured I had me a great blog post brewing up about the greatest attempted scam I'd come across yet. Some guy with actor training putting on a voice of a retarded guy and offering to sell $200K dollars of vintage cards for less than pennies on the dollar (quick note: these are a greatest hits package of the most desired cards in unbelievable condition - auction house stuff). The mark gets greedy, sends a few hundred off and gets nothing, or a bag full of rocks in return. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And what if it were on the level? Was I really cold hearted enough to steal money from a retard? Really? As I swam laps, I started to negotiate with my soul - well, you could give him several thousand bucks and he could buy every XBox game ever made. What could be happier than a retarded guy with 500 video games? Etc. Bad, bad thoughts.

So, while I argued with my soul, I got a call from the same number an hour or so later from his older cousin. He explained that, yes, Ed had "some mental problems," and they were in fact cards inherited from his extremely rich father, but he wasn't going to let him give them away -

- No, I wouldn't take advantage of someone like that...

...Dammit.

So, still talking about doing a deal, bankrolled by Mr. Bigtime in NYC, but it would be very high cost, comparatively low return. Still, not bad if it comes together.

Letting the Days Go By

So, how did I get here?

In 1975, 2nd grade, the big thing at my school was baseball cards (then yo-yos, those little parachute army men, etc.). For the unfamiliar, it's a pretty amazing set, art-wise. All cards are divided in half with one color on each half, and a different scheme for each team. I remember seeing older kids with rainbow stacks of gum-scented cardboard and thinking I have to get in on this whole deal.

My neighborhood is in the hills in the SF Valley. My folks' house (where they still live, 39 years and counting) is on the corner of 2 impossibly-steep hills, Eddingham/Adamsville. The ice cream man, whose truck said "Uncle Ron" on the driver side (and who my mother was sure was a child molester, but that's a whole nuther can of woims), made the loop around the hood and then parked at the corner by my house with that horrible music blaring out of the 2 dollar speaker every day of the summer. Every kid in the neighborhood would congregate and buy his wares there. I don't know why he didn't catch on and stop doing the loop around the other streets, but Uncle Ron had his methods.

At first it was innocent. I'd take my allowance money and wait my turn to buy 25 cent packs, forgoing the tantalizing Bomb Pops and 50/50 bars. By the time, I had exhausted those funds, I turned to the plastic water bottle in my closet that my parents must have been filling with pennies for me since I was born (I had no idea where they came from). I'd organize front pockets with 25 pennies carefully counted out in each, and then invariably spill them on the sidewalk and down the gutters when trying to extract them when it was my turn. I can remember the look on Ron's face as I approached the truck, and now that I have children, recognize that it was that grimace born of wanting to tell a small child to fuck off, but knowing it's not really the best choice under the circumstances.

My other main source was the blood money my dad paid me at the liquor store when he bought the cigars that he smoked in the car away from my mother. Every visit was good for a pack or two with the implicit deal that I wouldn't rat him out. Then there were the jumbo cellophane packs that I could pester the babysitter into getting me once in a while at Thrifty's.

In those days, it was all about getting the Dodger cards, none of which, by the way, are worth anything to collectors nowadays. My cards were sorted and resorted into dogeared condition, like most kids'. I was so young that I learned that the Dodgers had been in the World Series and lost to the A's by reading about it on the cards.

And so it went for several years, culminating in the 1982 Topps set, which I shoplifted pack by pack down my pants at the Alpha Beta, before I lost interest in new cards and started trading up to the good stuff: Mantle, Clemente, Mays, Bench, Rose. The national fever for cards was in full swing, and I would spend hours on my bedroom floor calculating and re-calculating the supposed value of my collection (more on that in later installments). I did great work with a spoiled only child up the street named Brian, whose methods were erratic and quantity over quality-centric. I ended up with most of his best stuff for larger groups of my crap. At its peak, I had a pretty impressive collection of all the Hall of Famer types worth at least a few bucks.

This went on into my first years of high school, when I kept it my little dirty secret, as it had become obviously dorkish by then. Then water polo, girls, cheap beer, and minor acts of juvenile delinquency replaced baseball cards and they gathered dust in my closet for several years.

In the next installment: how I learned that I'm an idiot in earnest/lost all my cards.

I'll Start at the End

This might be the one that makes me finally put an end to this adventure, which seems like as good a place to start as any.

She claimed she had a large collection of cards left behind by the man who dumped her and left the country. Her finance, she said. She knew nothing about them, but her friend did. She put him on the phone and he described the massive number of cards they were sorting through.

Do you have vintage? That's really what I buy. Pre-70s.

Shitloads, dude. Seriously. There are so many fucking cards here that my head is spinning.

So, I arranged to drive an hour south on Saturday morning, when the traffic shouldn't be too bad. Costa Mesa, wherever the hell that is. What should have been the first sign, if I had paid attention, was that the Border's Books where we were supposed to meet was out of business. Who the hell has heard of a Border's Books shutting down? Maybe not many readers in Costa Mesa. Maybe more of a Jerry Springer kind of town.

The door was left open, and he was standing in the entryway with an eyes-bulging-out-of-the head intensity. My first thought was Meth, but I wasn't sure. Maybe just a thyroid gland problem. The house had no heat and reeked of cat piss. He had just moved in, she apologized to me. Bought it foreclosed. "Red Tag" he said, whatever that means. She asked me if I wanted something to drink and was all pleasantries.

Sitting in a chair, not saying anything, was a massive hulk of a guy looking half awake. Not nodding or anything like that, but just not there. He smiled with a mouthful of dirty FUCKED UP teeth. By then, I was starting to pay attention. A vague, un-named fear started to tickle the back of my neck. Still, a buck's a buck.

The cards were in boxes and piles on the table in the front room. I asked him if the older stuff was sorted out.

I had it pretty sorted on my bed, but then I had to move it out here.

So, we started to go through them. Tens of thousands of cards, more or less all from the 1990s.

Hey, so I'm not really seeing the older stuff we talked about...

It's there, man. I've seen a bunch. You just haven't liked any of it.

He's just saying that shit to try to get a lower price, chimed in the Large Dim One. If I had any sense at all, that should have been my cue to walk.

So, we plowed on. Hours passing as I flipped through card after card, maybe setting aside 30 that I would consider buying (2 of which where from the 60s or 70s). Meanwhile, She tried to be helpful, pulling out one value-less card of some long forgotten shortstop or catcher. How about Bump Wills? I tried to humor her the first 40 or 50 times, but ran out of steam and just gave her the sort of Uh huhs that a parent gives his 6 year old daughter to try to maintain sanity on long road trips.

At some point, I came across a pair of 1986 Topps Jerry Rice rookie cards. Both in pretty good shape, but one off center at least 70:30. I set those aside in my pile and He noticed. I sold one of those a few years ago for $1000. This is when things took a turn seriously for the worse. This card has a high book value of $80, which means, if you are a complete idiot hellbent on overpaying for things in life (you probably shop at Nieman Marcus, etc), this is the most you might ever pay for a Near Mint (NM) copy of the card. These were a condition step below that, and would probably bring $40-45/each on Ebay. So, feeling my usual need to express to a complete stranger when his ideas reek of crack cocaine abuse, I mentioned all this.

Dude, that card books for $1500!

Not so much. Eighty.

Man, I just saw it in the Beckett Guide (which he couldn't subsequently find). I'll bet you a thousand dollars.

This was too much for me. I just don't have that level of politeness in me. I'll tell you what, I'll bet you $1000 that the book value of that card is under $500, but it will be the worst bet you ever made.

I've made a hell of a lot worse bets than that! to which She and the Large Dim One chortled, and which I saw to be the gospel truth. He hemmed and hawed, but didn't pursue it any further (well, actually, he did ask me if I felt lucky enough to bet him if I could flip heads twice in a row, but that's inconsequential to the story arc here).

As you'll see in future posts, there is an inversely proportional relationship between market knowledge and belief in the value of ones cards. I'd explain further, but there's a lot of math involved. In any case, I now knew what I was in for - or at least what I would typically been in for had this complete lack of knowledge not been paired with brain damage, inbreeding, and/or drug abuse. I thought I'd bring a little reality into the conversation and convinced him to go look up completed auctions of his ostensible $1000 cards on Ebay. There were 15 or so completed auctions in the last few weeks of this card in similar condition, all of which sold between 30-50 bucks with one outlier at $60. See?

Nope, his brain was hellbent on making the data support his thesis, like my Republican acquaintances who still try to find ways to make Trickle-Down Economics seem like a great, efficient system. What about that one listed for $880?

That's an overpriced card graded PSA 10 and there were no takers at that price.

Yeah, but these cards are 10s!

No, these cards are ungraded cards in similar condition to the ones we just saw selling for the EXACT amount I told you they sold for.

Man, you think you know a lot more than you do. I'm a self-made millionaire! You should be listening to me. I have a photographic memory and I can tell you right now that I saw that card in the price guides for $1500.

You think I make this shit up? That was fucking verbatim. The man was becoming unhinged in front of my eyes. I, being an idiot, decided to see it out to the bloody end. By then, The Large Dim One and She had come back into the house from a lengthy smoke break. I was starting to have visions of being jumped, but squashed them down as paranoia.

How about we just look over my stack of cards, figure out a price, and I can get back on my way? I suggested as calmly as I could. He stood listening, clearly agitated.

I figured that I could realistically re-sell the lot for between $500-600, so I started at 50% - I'm thinking $300 for the group.

I saw him start to shake with rage, as if I had offered him to kick him in the sack and fuck his woman in exchange for his property (remember, by the way, these were NOT his cards - they were Hers). I tried to talk my way through it: I'm buying a group, so would expect a volume discount, etc, etc. I think that's a pretty fair offer.

I don't think it's a fair offer at all.

Okay. What do you think would be?

This is the point at which some back and forth typically goes on, at the end of which I walk with the cards, they walk with my cash, and we never see each other again. Not this time, though. His anger at me started to become more and more visible in his deranged eyes and he started barking at me again about him being a self-made millionaire (which, by his filthy hands and general odor, I'm thinking was as true as his earlier claim to have gone to USC "for a while").

I started to back away from the table. This is getting kind of silly, I said nervously.

She agreed and tried to calm him down some. If you're not comfortable with the offer, we can just call it off -

He interrupted her, having now boiled completely over. I WANT YOU TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE he yelled at me. I'M DOING THIS AS A FAVOR FOR HER AND I WANT YOU THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!

I looked at him and, stupidly, said Well, that was a waste of 3 hours. I walked toward the door with him in pursuit, ready for me to say the one more word that it would take to justify kicking the living shit out of me. The Big Dim One then arose from his stupor and also came at me shouting to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! That was all it took and I all but broad jumped out the front door.

I realized that this was the sort of situation in which you leave or they end up hiding the body under the back porch and retreated double time to my car, shaking with fear and adrenaline.

Took me two hours to calm down. That was the worst one yet. I might be done.