Old School Trading Session Just Broke Out

[Mark17]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Yep. Good to see it. In ancient times my brother and I would take our doubles to my friend's house and trade him and his brother the ones they needed for the ones we needed. Mickey Mantle had the same value as Hector Lopez, zero. In fact if you bought some cellos and kept getting Mantles instead of the ones you needed to complete the current series checklist, it was annoying.

I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, and for us, from 1967-1970, any Twins card was worth more than any other card - Mantle, Yaz, Mays, anybody.

When I was a junior in college in 1980, that was the primary thought I had when I decided to become a full-time baseball card dealer. The idea was, buy cards in bulk vending cases for around a penny each, sort them, and sell the Tigers to guys in Michigan for 3 cents each, etc. I knew from my childhood days, I'd rather spend a dollar and have all the Twins, rather than 100 random cards, with likely only 5 Twins.

So, I bought 35 cases in 1980 to test the theory. First team that sold out? The A's. I soon learned about the hot new concept of rookie cards. All the buyer wanted was the Hendersons.

With help from a lot of people the business eventually did make me self-sufficient for about a decade, but with a few teams as exceptions, my original theory was mostly dead right from the start.