THIS IS ANOTHER STUPIDLY LONG (AND BASICALLY JUST STUPID) AND VERY BORING READ!! Many apologies!!
It is meant for entertainment purposes only and no actual conclusions should be drawn from the verbiage. Be sure to eat a hearty meal before attempting to slog through it.
There was another show out here this past weekend, and I sped into town to grab some cardboard and some laughs (not necessarily in that order), and here is what I walked away with...
1. Showsupials
The first thing I noticed, or more accurately,
DIDN’T notice, were the backpacks. Whereas the last show I attended looked like it was held inside of a
Dick’s Sporting Goods in
Nepal, because of the overabundance of backpacks, this time there wasn’t a rucksack to be seen. It was sort of jarring, the sudden sea change in carrying equipment. Maybe it was due to the heat? Who knows. It seemed like the only thing people had to store their purchases in this time was their pockets.
2. Neighbor Blindness or
Failure to Case the Joint
There were a few times where different dealers at adjoining tables had the exact same number-graded cards for sale, separated by merely a few feet, but at wildly different prices. They didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on right next to them. One guy had two separate
PSA 6 1966 Topps Pete Rose #30 cards for sale at
$150 each. About seven feet away at someone else’s table, the same card had a
$318 (talk about a weird number) price tag on it. All three looked very similar, so they were basically the ‘same’ card. Think about it -
Dealer #1 had two of the cards at less than half the price of
Dealer #2’s, and neither of them had sold. That means his ‘low’
$150 price was too high,
so what in high heck was going on in Mr. $318’s head??
Which somewhat leads into...
3. Taking a Satchel Paige from the Oldest Trick in the Book
At some point, the
1953 Topps Satchell (sic)
Paige started becoming a card that was on everyone’s radar, and you always make a mental note when you see one. I saw two different sellers who each had a
PSA 3 prominently displayed for sale. Since I visited every vintage table a hundred times, I can say without hesitation that those were the only graded threes in the room. One seller had his listed for
$1,600, and the other for
$900. I was at the
$900 table when a guy went up to him and said
(lied),
“The guy over there is selling the same card for $800. If you want me to buy it from you, you’ll have to beat his price.”
The seller being no fool
(and probably thinking, "Is this guy really trying to pull the old ‘beat the fake price’ scam on me?") scrolled around on his phone, and then said,
“One just sold for $1,300 and the few before that went for between $900 and a grand, so my price is on point. I suggest you go buy that other guy’s card as quickly as you can.” I had to turn my head away so no spit flew out of my mouth as I guffawed. When the silly deceiver left the table, I noticed he didn’t head in the direction of
the other Satchel Paige table. Funny.
4. Rapporical Question
There’s a sales tactic at shows where dealers will ask you something related to the team on the hat or shirt you’re wearing in an attempt to form a quick kinship and draw you in as a customer.
One guy pointed at me and said,
“That’s an old Buffalo Bills hat, right? Yeah, I get it, I’m from Carolina.” (I have no clue what the tie-in between Western New York and North Carolina coud possibly be...except that they are both east of California...so I had no idea what he was getting at.) And he happily said he’s also a big
Bills fan.
(Let’s be honest, I am probably the only Buff fan within a 2,000 mile radius, so I decided to have some fun.) Half-jokingly I said,
“Okay, you love Buffalo? I will buy something off of you if you can name a single Bill other than Josh Allen.” Knowing I had him, he chuckled and said,
“You know...that heart attack guy or whatever from last year.” At least he made me
(uncomfortably) laugh, so I bought a card off of him.
Another guy looking at my hat told me,
“I wish I had bought Josh Allen rookies when I had the chance. You realize the same thing is going to happen with Brock Purdy cards, right? Now is the time to buy ‘em.” As he pointed at the group of Purdy cards in his display case, I replied,
“Wow, that was quite the quick transition there from the Bills to the Niners. Smooth. I’m going to call you ‘Mr. Segue.’”
It gets better. After lunch, I put on my
Mets hat instead. Passing by tables, someone semi-shouted,
“Mookie Wilson, right?” (I guess he was playing some sort of name a random Met from the past game??). I said,
“Dude, don’t you remember talking to me?? I was the guy in the Bills hat just an hour ago!!”
5. Language Barrier
You know when you’re clicking around on your TV and end up on some foreign channel and have no frickin’ idea what anyone is saying? Or pretend you’re stuck in a
UN General Assembly meeting, but left your translation earpiece back at the hotel. That’s exactly what it felt like when I was checking out vintage cards at a table which abutted one selling the shiny modern stuff. The words, phrases, players, etc., emanating from the assembled masses was a profound mix of hi-tech sounding gibberish and gobbledygook. Lord knows what they were talking about.
But you know what’s the same in every ‘language’? The outrage over crazy pricing. No matter how many unintelligible-to-vintage-collectors adjectives and descriptors were being thrown around while describing
(I assume) modern cards, when I heard,
“Wait, you want $400 for this card??!! That’s crazy!!!” I didn’t need a translator to understand it.
6. Red Headed Step-Grader
I didn’t run into too many
CSG holders, but when I did, their size disparity had them situated unceremoniously in the backs of the boxes of slabs, almost entirely ignored.
(Warning! Not a scientific assessment...) You get the general feeling that buyers/sellers don’t yet hold the company in high esteem
(meaning, of course, as moneymakers), and I didn’t notice anyone buying the slabs, especially since dealers usually had
‘PSA-worthy prices’ attached to them. That just won’t fly at this point in time.
7. Having a Coniption (Perfect) Fit
There seems to be a lot more dealers using those overly snug ‘perfect fit’ type of graded card sleeves to house their wares. For a casual lookie-loo like me, it is a nightmare. Argh!!! I want to view each card out of the sleeve to get as close to it as possible for an assessment. But you need the delicate dexterity of a neurosurgeon to free a slab from one of those guys. In at least one attempt in three, pushing my
(non-sausage) finger inside one to get the card out caused it to rip along the seams!!
People say cards present really nicely inside of them,
but those same f*ckers will tell you fat guys look marvelous in skinny jeans.
8. Universal Acclaim Disclaim
Everyone loves to complain. It’s in our
DNA. If you’re reading this thread, you’re undoubtedly complaining about it. That’s life. But when every single person is complaining about the same thing, there’s gotta be something to it, right?
This show had an incredible amount of newly graded
PSA/SGC cards available for sale. Everything obviously just came back from the
TPG’s. It didn’t matter which table you stopped at or which dealer you talked to, you heard him
(or her, see #10 below) bitterly complaining about the grades their vintage cards received as they showed them to potential buyers:
“In what universe is this Morgan Rookie ONLY a 5???!!!”
“I always predict my cards will get lower numbers than they deserve, so I won’t be disappointed later...but all my stuff came back EVEN LOWER than what my fake lowball predictions were!!! It ain’t right!!!”
A guy referring to one of his PSA-graded cards called it a
“Tom Thievery!!”
At every table, every minute of the show there was
number-unhappiness...but will people stop sending off cards to be graded?
NOPE.
9. Don’t Get P.T. Barnumed
The famous showman once said
(although there’s no evidence he said it),
"There's a sucker born every minute," so make sure it ain’t you.
A couple of tables were filled with
PSA graded cards with cert numbers starting with 7’s and numbered relatively sequentially. The dealers obviously just recently got everything back from
PSA. However, their displays also had one or two major cards that did not sit inside of holders. The immediate thought was,
“Wait, this guy ONLY sells graded cards, EVERYTHING he has is graded...so why weren’t these big-money cards also slabbed??”
Sure, you can choose to believe nothing's up and he just happened to get them in the days before the show, but were I a betting man, I would wager all of my money that
he did, in fact, submit them with everything else to PSA, but they were rejected and he has no intention of disclosing that information to anyone.
I could be wrong, but as
Sergeant Esterhaus used to say on
'Hill Street Blues,' “Let's be careful out there.”
10. Day Laborers from the Modeling Agency or
Attack of the Table Hussies (no disrespect intended)
There seemed to be a serious uptick in the amount of
‘hot chicks’ (no offense) hawking cardboard to the masses at this show.
When most of us think of ladies at a card show
(my apologies), it would involve a chubby, middle-aged guy sitting beside his similarly proportioned wife, both of them chowing down food from styrofoam takeout containers as their lips smack and they try to swallow before answering any questions you may have, neither of them deigning to even stand up. But at yesterday’s show, it was a
Bimbo Blitzkrieg (no offense intended or implied). A whole bunch of sellers had their
wives/girlfriends/other out front and center, womaning
(wait, why does “manning” have two n’s, but “womaning” would only have one??) the show tables.
It certainly makes sense. Collectors are base creatures.
If the right girl smiles at us, we would happily pay $200 for a PSA 3 1991 Score #270 Mickey Tettleton card if she said that was the price.
One seller told me,
“My prices are firm, they aren’t changing. So, tell me, who would you rather buy a card from, me or giggling Sarah (no offense, as she was literally prone to chortling) over there?” There’s a lot of wisdom in that statement. I got the distinct impression that not only did she know nothing about cards, but she had no connection to the seller and was probably just hired for the day.
This method should be outlined in Business 101 textbooks.
I don’t want to exaggerate, but he had her at one end of his table while he stood
(with all of his card knowledge being squandered) alone at the other. If that table was a ship, it would’ve been listing, because of all the people crowded in front of her. One disappointed patron bemoaned his failure to impress her, by muttering,
“If I was still good looking, I could’ve gotten her (no offense, females should not be looked upon as prizes to be won).” Sadly, he had something in his hand as he walked away, so she obviously used her
feminine wiles (no offense, wiles are independent of gender) to coax him into buying something.
Foolish man.
11. All’s Fair in Love and War and Baseball Cards
When I told a seller I was chatting with how it wasn’t fair to the other dealers to have a
stone cold 10 (no offense, it is always appropriate to assign number grades to cards, but never to women) at your table to draw old, ugly guys like me to their tables, he told me,
“No way!! I used to play that game by having my hot wife (no offense, all women should be respected for the entirety of their being and not solely on looks) work shows with me. Doing shows is expensive, so if Bethy in a low cut top helped me cover my nut, I was all for it.” (The odd thing is, although you hear the phrase “cover my nut” here and there on TV, I don’t think I ever heard someone say it in person before.)
Looking me over to gauge my age for a proper reference, he further added,
“She was “Hot for Teacher” video girl hot. Swear!” (I don’t believe him.) I joked that it sounds like she deserved a
Nobel Piece of Ass Prize (no offense intended, as honors should never be awarded based on outward appearances). Suddenly his demeanor turned a bit melancholy, and he concluded with,
“But she divorced me, because she said I was so crude and swore too much.”
Assuming that
“swearing” was the left coast version of
“cursing,” I said,
“Fuck yeah!! I fucking curse all the fucking time!!” A tear nearly came to his eye as he told me that comment made his fucking day! God, I like that guy!!
Until next time, my fellow collectors complainers!! 