Posted By:
Paul MuchinskyAaron,
You are right. There is no substitute for experience. Knowing you don't know something is one thing, but thinking you do when you don't is another. The latter is far more humbling. I'm still learning, and some of it doesn't make much sense, even after I have learned it. One case in point (I'll try to be brief).
About 10 years ago at The National some guy I never met before walks up to me at the show and asks me if I could help authenticate a pin for him being sold by a dealer. I didn't know how he knew I was into pins (this is before I wrote my book). I said sure, glad to help, and was envisioning some knockout piece of Wagner or Cobb. Not quite. The pin was a PM10, straight B/W, from the 1950s, of an obscure catcher (I believe) from the Red Sox, Sam White. The dealer wanted $10 for the pin. The pin was extracted from his case, and I gave it a careful inspection. I assured the guy the pin was vintage, he thanked me, I walked away, and I don't know if he bought the pin or not. As I was walking away, I sort of smirked to myself, imagining a crafty cheat who floods the market with repro Sam White pins. Yep, there sure would be a ton of money to be made in those. And for $10, how badly could this guy get hurt?
About five years later I'm in a sports memorabilia store. The owner had only a few pins, two of which were PM10s. I already had them, but asked to see them anyway. One was of Dom DiMaggio, the other of Bobby Thomson. Both were of the exact same era as the Sam White pin, and perhaps DiMaggio and White had overlapping careers with Boston. Both pins were high quality repros. I left the shop no longer thinking the Sam White pin story was quite so funny anymore. Who produces repro pins of Dom DiMaggio and Bobby Thomson? I don't know, but someone did. Why? Dom had a famous brother, and Bobby hit a famous home run. Does that qualify them as being of reproducable stature? Both pins were priced at $15, as I recall. The reproduction of these pins, of all the pins one could reproduce, just didn't make much sense. But that is what they were, repros. Maybe the guy who asked me about the White pin knew something I didn't.