OK. Fess up, who got the Jackson

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Posted By: petecld 

Who worked the side deal for the E90-1 Jackson on ebay?

C'mon, confession is good for the soul.

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Posted By: Andy Baran

Pete,

I know who got it, but he has asked me not to tell. He is not a contributor to the board, and I doubt that many of us know him.

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Posted By: leon

I totally missed it. Was it a BIN? ....any other specifics besides who won it?
regards alll

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Posted By: petecld

No, it wasn't a BIN. The seller ended the auction early. All of the sudden the card wasn't available for sale. We all know what that means. The seller answered my e-mail and told me what he got for the card - traded it, didn't sell it.

It WAS trimmed anyway. I will say no more.

I wouldn't have won the card so I'm just throwing this out for debate:

We know this happens and we know some auction houses will go behind a bidder's, and ebay's backs - any suggestions what to do about it?

Doesn't seem fair to those who place good faith bids. Or is it just the (human) nature of the auction beast?

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Posted By: Kevin Cummings

I'm not familiar enough with other auction houses to speak intelligently to their practices, but eBay, in my mind, is not strict enough with sellers to prevent this from happening.

If a trade was the reason for canceling this particular auction I can't say that I'd totally disagree with the seller's motive. Chances are he was selling the item to raise money to buy something else he wanted/needed. But having the cash to buy a rare sports collectible and actually being able to find what you want/need are two different things. If he was presented with the opportunity to fill a hole in his collection, it's hard not to say he made the right choice. If the only reason he canceled the auction was to scoot out from under the eBay final value fee, then it was just a cheesy way to save some money.

Good motive or not, however, anyone who was a bidder or might have eventually been a bidder (and perhaps the winner) got shut out. The only way to cut down on the frequency of canceled auctions is to penalize the seller monetarily for ending an auction early and then suspend him if he does it too often.

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Posted By: David

I don't know the specifics of the Joe Jackson auction, so my blabbering may not be applicable. My personal ebay rule is that if an item I have for auction has no bids, I will consider an 'off the board' buy/trade (except in unusual circimstances I pass on an offer, but I figure the person is trying to get it cheaper than normal). Once there is a bid on the item, they auction continues to its natural end. In one case, with an expensive item that already had bids, someone asked to buy it for a price I knew was higher than it would eventually go for. I passed on the offer and the same guy won the action at a lower price.

Other than my heavenly motives, I usually pass on deals like this because they're a hassle. If you want damn thing, win the auction.

Personally, this issue only comes up maybe once ever six months anyway.

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

....just won a beautiful Scrapps common (seller called it "ex", for 438....Julie

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Posted By: TBob

I was bidding on the Jackson when it disappeared ofr the board. I emailed the seller and told him I hoped he got a good price because I had intended to go all out even though I believe it was trimmed on the top border. He said he traded it. I have only ended an auction early once and that was this week when I offered a tough T205 to a guy and listed it on ebay when I didn't hear back. When he emailed me within an hour of its appearance, I cancelled the bid and auction and sold it to him with an email to the high bidder explaining the sitaution and apologizing. On the other hand I have been the "cancelee" on several cards, so I know the feeling. I guess all is fair in love and cards as I bought a really nice T207 Hooper during an auction by making an offer the seller couldn't refuse...

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

for a technicality. Hewasn't used to selling baseball cards, and he listed ALL his Kashin auctions in EACH auction. They didn't ask him to re=write; they suspended him for a month.

Yeah, well, I was bidding on a Moe Berg--the last one I needed. I e-mailed him. he e-mailed me. The upshot of all this e-mailing was (he said LOTS of people were e-mailing him about the card--mostly women), he wanted to know the absolute highest amount I would bid on the card. In other words, my snipe bid. I had to BID my snipe bid, and have it compared to all the others. I won the card...for $490. It lists for $160.
It was the very last Moe berg card I needed.

AUCTION INTERRUPTUS NO GOOD. Whoever does it.

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Posted By: Elliot

Am I missing something----why are so many women interested in Moe Berg?

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Posted By: Bill Cornell

I can't answer the question about female interest in Moe Berg, but thought it was worth reviewing a few details of perhaps the most interesting baseball player ever.

The popular theory that Berg was a spy is exaggerated: he took photos of Tokyo in '34 at the bequest of the US government during a baseball tour and later parachuted into Yugoslavia during WWII, but both acts were done as a willing civilian. He won the Order of Merit for his work in the war.

His baseball career is often dismissed as trivial, but I think it can't be underestimated that he was a Jew playing in an openly anti-Semitic era. The recent Hank Greenberg documentary has some staggering commentary on how difficult this was for the few Jews that played in the 30's.

An Internet search turns up lots of interesting Berg-related sites - these are 2:

brief Berg bio: http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/MBerg.html

George Clooney to play Berg in movie adaptation of "The Catcher Was A Spy" (?): http://www.georgeclooney.org/html/CatcherWasASpy.html

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Posted By: Julie Vognar

The Tokyo movies he took were of absiolutely no use to the U.S.

However, he deduced, from listening to a meeting in Switzerland in German, in which the greatest german scientist (working for germany) said nothing about a-bombs, of course, that the Germans (it was 1944) were making almost no progress on developing an a-bomb, and we would have them in ruins (which we did--I saw them) before any such thing began to happen.

Fortunately, he was right.

It isn't just women: it's the juxtoposition of major league baseball catcher and O.S.S. spy that turns people on. Although he couldn't hit for beans, he was a major league catcher for 17 years, and some pitchers liked to pitch to him. He was already "famous" before the war because he got a law degree from Columbia, and learned a bunch of languages. Sports reporters loved to say things like, he always had the New York Times waiting for him on the bench.

Read Davidof's "The Catcher was a Spy." It debunks a lot of the mystique, and describes Berg as a lonely man
who wasn't terribly interesting, but was surrounded by interesting people all his life.

And somehow managed to guess right about the germans and the a-bomb.

Julie