Tank McNamara by Bill Hinds for December 15, 2024

In the (near) distance, a sad trombone was heard.

Sold 5 cards in July, made enough to buy my new car.

Been there, done that with baseball cards and comics which today would have fantastic value if I had protected them from the start. But didn’t like most kids.

missed that punch line, had thought Eddie Pruitt was the $35 mil seller

I used mine mine for the spokes in my bike to make it sound like a motorcycle

If our mom’s hadn’t thrown them away there would be so many none would be worth much. Thank your mom for making a stranger rich.

A city attorney in Colorado was cleaning out his grandmother’s attic, and came across a box of his old baseball cards. He sold them, quit law, and bought a B&B in Vermont.

I wonder how much my Pokémon cards are worth.

It bugs me that some things like Magic and Pokemon were started with the intent of making deliberate rarities to increase sales. It bugged me 40 years ago when I realized that USPS encouraged stamp collecting and came out with lots of issues every year because each time a stamp is bought and placed in an album, USPS gets the money without having to provide the service.

I have a signed Pat Borders card, any offers?

When I was in first grade (about ‘63) I was on a Little League team. At the end of the season, the coach’s son (he was 2-3 years older than us) gave each of us a shirt box (remember those?) full of baseball cards bundled by teams. Was too young to understand what they were, so ended up using them on my bicycle spokes. If I want to make myself sick, I can wonder if I ruined a Mickey Mantle rookie card, or any one of a hundred other potentially valuable cards. There might have been a Bob Euchre!

The problem with the lucrative sports card collectible market is that nefarious actors (aka card shops and their suppliers) scheme to hoard the valuable cards for themselves and sell them at a premium. The average person will 99.6% be guaranteed to NEVER get a rare and/or valuable card because they bought a box of “unopened” packs, their only hope is to shell out a lot of money now for such a card in the hopes it only gets more valuable over time.

I never collected baseball cards, other than having most of the series from Post breakfast cereals for the 1961 season (sold during the 1962 season). One I never found was number 101, Gil Hodges (number 101 through 110 were the LA Dodgers), but a friend had it and I was extremely envious. These were another of those things that just disappeared over the years and, along with so much else, no one ever seemed to remember throwing them out (I never figured out if that was deliberate or genuine forgetfulness). At least I had Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Orlando Cepeda!

I still have lots of room in my sock drawer, but nothing valuable to put in it.

Is my Hobie Landrith card worth anything?