Posted By:
Rob D.Reading David's post about buying and reselling the World Series phantom tickets reminds me of a similar experience with a group of 300-400 1950s, '60s and '70s baseball pocket schedules. For a short time Mastro operated a Web site on which it offered straight sales of items, many of which seemed to be "left-overs" of buys the company made throughout the years.
One such lot was these pocket schedules. I've never collected schedules but knew that quite a few collectors are passionate about that part of the hobby. Plus, I figured that flipping them individually on eBay would be easy (apart from the scanning process) because they were small, flat and easy/cheap to ship. The price per schedule worked out to less than $3 each, and there was a decent number (maybe 20) from the 1950s, and one third was from the 1960s. I didn't think it would be much of a gamble to break even.
What a blast it was. It turned out there were two different first-year Colt '45s schedules (which sold for more than $100 each) and a couple early Mets examples. Plus one of the 1950s was a Brooklyn Dodgers schedule. It was great fun listing them and then watching which ones brought prices that I totally didn't expect. It also was an education seeing ones that I thought would easily bring $20 or so sell for the minimum of 99 cents. Doing it on a part-time basis took about two months to move them all, but in the end the collection netted about three times what I paid.
I never have considered this a "score" because in the end I didn't add anything to my collection, but it really was a lot of fun.