[mighty bombjack]

A few thoughts:

I think most of you are looking at this from the point of view of net54, that is, vintage collectors, and not the point of view of the modern baseball card hobby. It has changed . A LOT. This is a bout gambling and flipping, not just to make money (because it is mostly losses), but rather as the hobby itself.

To the question about why they offer Mathewson to people who collect Trout: it's because the person who won that card in a case break did so for 179 bucks. There was never any doubt that it would be put up for sale immediately, because that is the modern hobby. They likely hope to sell it to someone here (looks like a long shot) and buy a bunch of trout, as all as copious spots in future case breaks of this ilk. The hobby, like everything else, continues to evolve.

As to cutting up a document and putting it on a baseball card, it should come to no one's surprise here that there are many people out there who like baseball cards and prefer them to anything else. It has been pointed out that, often times, a card with a piece of bat or jersey sells for near the price of an entire GU item, and this is very common with cut autos. I would much rather have the document and am sad that they cut that Matty up, but then the person who now owns it and is hoping to profit mightily (as a milestone part of their hobby) would never had had a shot at doing so.

Seeing all of the cries of "insanity" and "ridiculousness" here make me want to remind everyone that we are on a board that celebrates the spending of tens of thousands (hundreds, even) of dollars on tiny pieces of colored cardboard, something that 99.99 percent of the history of humanity would themselves judge to be "insane," and probably rightfully so. Or not. It's all relative, know what I mean?

Collect what you like is the mantra that cuts throughout the hobby ages.

For full disclosure here, I used to work at Topps.