But I digress…and we now move into the meat of the subject:

“Having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical but often true”– Spock, Amok Time

Anyone who has ever built a set knows this one. We collectors struggle to complete a set, whether it is a 520 T206 set, a 1961 Fleer basketball set, or even a 1981 Donruss baseball set (try doing that with sharp, centered, registered cards with true colors). I’ve been building a 1977 Topps Star Wars Series 1 set for a while, taking my time, trying to find centered cards with as few Topps-standard print defects as I can. Not an easy task; Topps’ quality control was for shit in the Seventies. I am enjoying the effort, but I know that when I finally build a set that meets my expectations, I am going to sell the sucker. Wanting it beats having it.

I feel much the same way about nearly every card I own; offer me enough and you can buy anything from me. I’ve sold only known examples of early cards, which I literally cannot replace, because a buyer made me an offer too good to refuse. The irony is that I find myself not missing them; I wanted them more than I enjoyed owning them. It’s a strange phenomenon that I never expected to experience as a collector but there it is. Many of my friends who’ve been collecting for decades likewise are willing to sell just about anything and much to their surprise, they don’t miss what they sold. Perhaps I would feel differently if I was to sell the raggedy-assed, dog-eared remains of my childhood collection. I got my first T206, Walter Johnson ready to pitch, from Mike Berkus at an Anaheim show nearly 50 years ago. Cost me twelve bucks, which was a buck more than it should have. It ain’t going anywhere. Same with the beater 1952 Topps Walt Dropo I got when I was about ten. My first 1952 Topps. I used to stare at that thing just marveling at the colors and design. Toss it in the pine box with me. Yet, if someone made me a ridiculous offer for anything I own, even those, I would take it. If I found out that my family photos were worth a million bucks and I hesitated over selling them for sentimental reasons, I think of what my father would have said: “A million bucks? That’s real dough. Sell them, stupid.”

“Oh, the sound of male ego. You travel half-way across the galaxy and it’s still the same song.” Eve McHuron, Mudd’s Women

The PSA Registry. Need I say more? Well, I will anyway. The Registry is nothing more than a wiener-measuring contest for rich collectors and a marketing tool for those who exploit them. I can just imagine the pitch meeting for the Registry:

“Lemme get this straight. You want collectors to spend thousands and thousands of dollars extra on a 10 that is functionally indistinguishable from a 9 because some Cheetos and Red Bull addled drone of ours put a higher number on a holder?”

“Right.”

“OK, well, there must be some huge prize at the end?”

“Well, we’re gonna give them paper certificates and rubber chicken at the National.”

“That’s it? That won’t cost us jack squat. I think you’re onto something.”

Yeah, P.T. Barnum would be proud.

“There seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere...” James T. Kirk, The Apple

Two fools went at it over a PSA 10 1975 Topps common, to the tune of $33,000.00. I know, I know, “collect what you want”, but buying a $2.00 card in a $32,998.00 case just because some rando put a number on it is the universe telling us that someone is not paying enough taxes. It’s stupid. Yeah, I said it: you’re buying shit in a plastic shingle. And sorry guys, but females are not impressed by your Registry ranking. [insert mic drop emoji here]

“Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.” James T. Kirk, This Side of Paradise

This aptly summarizes why I have such disdain for mainstream cards that are available in abundance and shiny shit (not that there’s anything wrong with collecting that). If I can assemble a set at will or even buy one in whatever condition I want (money notwithstanding), it holds no interest for me. I know a number of dedicated collectors who play in that sandbox, and they are as passionate about it as can be, which is great. We’re all a bit off, so collect what you want the way you want. For me personally, though, it can’t be a minute shift of the centering or a bit of white at a corner that makes or breaks a card; just not my personality type to care about nit-picks like that. I dropped out of numismatics when I was nine because the extreme condition focus of coin collecting was not my thing, plus hello, boring: it’s a penny with a different date? Ooohhh, my nipples explode with delight. I like the kind of cards you only see once every year or ten. I knocked an obscure type card off my want list recently after more than a decade. The issue just doesn’t show up. Which is not to say I am without my nostalgia/passion projects in the mainstream, like the aforementioned Star Wars set, but that’s just for shits and giggles, and definitely not in slabs.

BOY: What’s in it for me?
KIRK: What do you want?
BOY: A piece of the action.
SPOCK: You do not even know what the action is going to be.

--A Piece Of The Action

I feel like I am in this episode whenever I deal with kids at a show. I appreciate and admire the nerve on the kids who go around trying to squirm their ways into bargains, but I listen to their pitches, and they sound like little assholes. Obnoxious little used car salesmen; one kid literally said to me “what can I do to put you into this card today?” Maybe we were obnoxious little assholes too, I don’t know, but every kid today seems to be out to not just trade but to rip off everyone they encounter, and that is behavior that we have modeled for them, and a little piece of me is a little sad that they do. Or maybe I am just a bit disgusted with how adults behave in this thing of ours.

“There’s no such thing as the unknown- only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.” James T. Kirk

My greatest challenge and my greatest joy in collecting is figuring out the puzzle of early card issues. When were they made? How were they made? What is the checklist? Why are there variations? Vintage cards were made when card collecting was still a childhood activity and adult card collectors were weirdos who never outgrew their toys, not a serious business. Of course they reused artwork year after year, why wouldn’t they? The same art with a different crop or caption saved production budget, and these were penny toys for boys, not artworks designed to last the ages. Decades later, researchers like me deep dive into the minutiae of these products. We see trees where the card creators saw forest; the small variation that is monumental to us was nothing to the creators. What we often discover is that the assumptions made about many issues were just plain wrong, like ascribing a 1933 date to the U.S. Caramel baseball set (1932) or assuming that Bond Bread made the Bond Bread cards in 1947 (evidence is mounting that they contracted for the cards with Aarco, a card maker, for its own cards, which appear to have been mostly pirated or licensed from a photo studio called “National” that made souvenir photos). My friend Peter recently discovered the manufacturer of a 100+ year old postcard set. That’s bitchin.

“Fascinating.” Spock

Watch the attendees at any card show from a vendor’s vantagepoint in a booth. The cosplay, the hustling, the amped up kids bouncing from table to table, even the dreaded Sunday morning Stroller People. The hobby is more and more a vibrant cross-section of humanity rather than a white, middle-aged sausage fest. Now, if we can just get some scantily clad cosplaying female collectors at shows, maybe the young guys will eat a salad or two and hit the gym to impress rather than being deep-fried double-wide aisle cloggers with giant man-purses…

And finally:

“Get a life, will you people? … You’ve turned an enjoyable little job that I did as a lark for a few years into a colossal waste of time!”-- William Shatner, Star Trek Convention Skit, Saturday Night Live, season 12, episode 8

When Upper Deck created the insert cards they were modeled on Willie Wonka’s golden tickets. They were supposed to be rare and special. And so they were, for about five minutes. Now, this insert and parallel shit has gotten way out of control. It’s what we do in America: overdo. Create a burger and fries that people like and it touches off an arms race to make them bigger, badder, and more desirable, and fifty years later they are triple the size, have a million options, and are chased with a bucket of soda so big it could be used to put out a small brush fire. The same thing has happened to shiny shit (not there is anything wrong with collecting that). I bought a box of Panini NASCAR cards and when I opened it, I was shocked at the plethora of variations and designs. Every other card seemed to be numbered and there had to have been a dozen ‘base’ card designs, plus the ‘hits’ in the box. It was so much variety that I needed to find an online article to decipher what I had. And that is just one of dozens of issues that the card-makers barf out every season. I don’t think we are going back, but I find it to be so overwhelming to keep up with every minute variation and detail that has been intentionally put into these cards that it isn’t fun and I just don’t want to bother.

Next week, I yell at clouds and chase more pesky kids off my lawn.

One box had all the publications and large photos I found at the show. The other box contained the cards.

When I picked up the packages in Burbank a few days later, I found some curious damage. The publications box had a hole punched in the box side just large enough for a finger to reach in and feel around. The short side of the box right next to the hole was slit open and some padding that I had inserted was missing.

Hmm.

The second box had a similar puncture, but no slit.

Now I am beginning to smell a rat because two boxes just happen to get punctured in roughly the same spot with roughly a finger hole, and padding is missing from one? Yeah, sure, it’s just innocent damage, nothing to see here, folks.

Here is my hunch as to what happened. Someone at the USPS is punching boxes to search for valuables. The pubs box had a stack of magazines, programs and large photos in bags and boards and a binder and some foam padding. I guess the miscreant felt the padding and maybe the plastic backers and boards and decided to slit the side and see what they could slip out of there, and they pulled the padding to do it. They then saw what it was a stack of magazines and a notebook and gave up. The box arrived open on that side, but the contents were intact except for the missing padding, at least as far as I can tell.

I suspect that the second box wasn’t messed with beyond the punch hole because I fortuitously wrapped the card stacks in one of those canvas backpacks that they give away at the show (it was good for something after all) to keep them in tight order instead of just stacking the cards in the box loose and letting them get slopped up in transit. The thief probably reached in, felt fabric, and realized that it was not a good candidate for sneak-pilferage. If it had been just cards loose in there, I have little doubt that I would have received an empty box with a slit side and all of my cards gone.

This is not an isolated thing; I have heard storied of quite a few collectors who have received empty boxes or had cards stolen out of partially opened boxes. I have lost several items in customs over the years from UK sellers; all mysteriously disappeared in New York’s international postal center.

I took a lot of pictures, and I filed a criminal mail tampering report with the postal inspector. I won’t hold my breath on getting any real investigation of the incident, let alone someone getting fired or arrested.

The first takeaway from this situation is registered mail. It is slow, expensive, you have to pack with special materials and stand in line at the post office to drop it, but it is tracked from end to end; any shenanigans are logged when the item hits the next set of hands and the miscreant is instantly fired. Second, for those items that do not merit the cost and PITA of registered mail, I will pack cards with inner packaging that will be very hard to compromise without pulling apart the box entirely. It almost certainly saved my cards from being stolen. My final thought is that the next time I ship stuff home, I will buy a box of utility knife blades and tape the razors all over the edges of the inner wrappers. The lowlife who reaches into that box with a finger to feel around for valuables to steal is going to get one hell of a surprise.

Now, why am I so outraged by this? Because I am sick and tired of the rampant top-down scam culture infecting this country. There is a line between human and criminal scumbag scammer, or “scambag”, and if you are a person of integrity and good character, you don’t cross it, even if the prices on everything are rising while your pay is flat and your so-called role models are stealing with three hands and prospering. At least I like to think so, which is why I continue to be outraged even as the outrages pile up. Otherwise, Devo is right: we are in a state of devolution and it is time to shut up and dance The Poot.

Speaking of devolution, I reopened my eBay store last Saturday and by Tuesday had multiple candidates for eBay Jackass of the Week. But one stood out. I am selling a raw 1997 Michael Jordan card. I’d call it a 7 but under eBay’s non-conforming, wildly inaccurate grading system the card is best described as “near mint or better”. Since that is a seriously ambiguous phrase, I put the following in my descriptions:

“I do not warrant that a card listed as “near mint or better” card is free of any and all defects; that would be a mint card or a gem mint card. If I thought that I had one of them I would send it to PSA myself. In other words, if you are looking for a ‘perfect’ card that you can send to PSA and pull a 9 or a 10, please do not buy a near mint raw card. If you want the certainty of a specific numerical grade, please look for a PSA or similar third-party graded example instead of what I am selling.”

With that in the listing, of course this is the PM I get:

“Brother is there any flaws you can get a photo of”

Nevermind the bumpkin grammar and the vague general ask, what a terrible question for a dealer to handle. Does that mean that flaws I cannot photograph are OK? Seriously, the problem is that if I say no and he buys it I know that he will reinterpret his question as “are there any flaws at all” and my “no” as a statement that there are none, and expect a mint card, which is precisely what I am trying to tell buyers not to expect.

His next PM:

“You obviously dont think it would be a 10 but what would be ur hobest grade out of 10 I dont grade my cards i just keep my collection how I buy them but I dont usually spend over 100 on a raw card.”

10? I don’t think it is a 9 or an 8 or even a 7.5. And my “hobest” (honest) grade? As opposed to my (dishonest) one that I already posted? Asking for my honest grade after I have already stated a grade is like ordering an iced tea and asking for a clean glass; it’s insulting to the integrity of the person being questioned. Honesty (or a clean glass) is the default setting, not what you have to ask for specifically.

Now, lemme test whether you fine folks have been paying attention: if a collector claims that he doesn’t grade his cards and he doesn’t sell his cards, yet he cares about the numerical grade a card would get, what is he? If you checked “True Collector Troll” you are a winner. Obviously, he cares and obviously he is mining the raw listings for slab-worthy cards that he thinks can make money with, under a disingenuous (that’s Lawyer for “bullshit”) cover story.

I have to give it to this one, though. After I cited the description that he clearly did not read, he stopped pestering me. That’s unusual; most of the time after I do that and refuse to play ball, the final PM from a True Collector Troll is the one that calls me, his “brother”, an asshole. Yeah, guilty with explanation.

Gad, I hate dealing in shiny shit. Not that there is anything wrong with collecting that, I just feel so dirty selling it, like it’s the sober morning after a one-night stand, but I gotta go where the money is, and that means from time to time dealing with the nattering nabobs of knavery who proliferate in modern collecting like mushrooms on cow flops.

One example of this from the 2026 NSCC is a vintage snapshot that I purchased at the show. What engaged my eye when I saw it is the thing that I always look for in vintage amateur photography: good composition, interesting subject matter, clear focus. Most amateur photography looks like crap: bad focus, poor choice of subject matter, terrible composition. My father once shot a picture of my 4th birthday party and despite shooting a room full of kids, somehow managed to frame the image around the only empty space on the floor, with the kids (me included) around the edges like we were photo-bombing his study of old linoleum. And I had my finger up my nose, naturally. When I find a vintage baseball snapshot or real photo postcard with a compelling image, I generally buy it if the price is reasonable even if I do not know that much about the subject matter because I know that it is going to be an easy resell, especially if I can provide some context.

The snapshot shown here caught my eye because of the obvious Major League ballpark and the very clear and readable advertising on the outfield fence.

The tie in with Fatima cigarettes and baseball cards is known to any vintage collector and was a big selling point. I knew the photo was old based on its physical characteristics, but how old and where it was taken, I could not determine at the time. I showed the photo to several people at the NSCC, and no one could quite figure out which ballpark it was. When I got home, I ran it through an artificial intelligence agent (or 2). Whatever else may be said about the accuracy or inaccuracy of AI, when it comes to diving into esoteric research, the results can be startlingly good. In this case, the agent readily identified the photo as the Polo Grounds in New York City. I checked the agent’s sources and found that it was indeed an image of the Polo Grounds after the 1910-1911 remodeling. What it could not do was precisely match the image to anything on file, which I expected given that it is an amateur shot of the game from the grandstand. I have actually had some luck with perfect photo matches via AI agents when the image is professional and published.

At that point, I knew 1911-onward. The Fatima sign on the outfield fence narrowed the date to 1913 or later: Fatima launched in 1913, so no Fatima ads predated the existence of the brand. A 1913 or so baseball ad at an MLB ballpark fit well with the T200 (1913) and T222 (1914) Fatima MLB baseball card issue dates.

I attempted to refine the analysis by asking the agent about signage combinations in the outfield. The signs are so clear and there are enough of them shown that the odds are it could narrow the dates to a small window just based on the sponsorship changes derived from known databases. At that point I started to get some hallucinations from the agent: it posited that the picture was from the 1913 World Series game one at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Athletics. That would be a hell of a find if it could be proven. What the agent could not do, unfortunately, was give me any credible information as to how it made that specific determination. In other words, the conclusion was probably made-up; I say probably because when it comes to research like this, you can never say “never”, just not this time.

My next step was to reach out to an expert in vintage baseball photography, my buddy Jim Chapman, winner of the SABR 2024 Larry Ritter Book Award for his book Baseball Photography of the Deadball Era: Rediscovering the Early Lensmen and Their Images. Jim posited a date range on the photo and sent me over to his colleague Deron Dixon, who runs a website called Gumshoe Baseball. Deron’s specialty is analyzing old ballpark photos and attempting to pin down where and when they were taken. As is the case with so much of the good part of our hobby, these fine gentlemen were happy to help me in my quest to figure out what exactly I had purchased. Deron homed in on 1914-1915 based on the ads and stadium painting schemes; most likely 1915. 1914-15 Polo Grounds Giants game action works for me.

The Majors are one thing, but baseball was everywhere and it seemed like everyone who had a team had a team portrait done and made into postcards. I saw hundreds of them at the show and bought quite a stack of them for resale. A town ball team may leave behind a great image, but without much else to go on, that RPPC may not be identifiable; identify it and the value can soar. Which is why it pays to take some time and read the back of the postcard. One RPPC I found at the show grabbed my eye; a strong image of an old-time ballplayer. The back clued me into what it was. The back is an AZO real photo paper with 4 triangles up, which dates it pre-WWI. It had a Made in Canada imprint indicating that it is a Canadian product so likely a ballplayer in Canada. The inscription on back says Golden BC Elmer Lee with a 1915 date. Some light digging online and I confirm based on the uniform that I found the manager/organizer of the Golden, BC town ball team.

Sometimes a team name and crisp image of a uniform can be enough. A team photo with a unique name on the jerseys and that is sharp enough to be able to discern and describe the uniform characteristics like striping has enough to maybe ID it. A baseball uniform featuring an “R” logo on a striped/pillbox hat paired with a pinstriped jersey that said “Raymond” on front likely is from the Raymond Cougars. They competed in the Class-D Washington State League in 1910-11 under two different names, and won the league in 1910.

This last one I wish I could figure out but I probably never will.

As difficult as white baseball stuff is to pin down, black players and teams are a quantum leap more difficult. About all I can determine for now is that it has a divided back and a Cyko back stamp box with a “place postage” marking and a hollow lettered “C”, which pegs it to between 1907 and the 1920s.

Still, an early image of a black ballplayer is a nice find.

The back of the postcard does illustrate one pitfall of identification that I call The Joe Jackson Effect. Ever since it became apparent that the T202 Lord-Tannehill with an uncredited action photo of a sliding runner being tagged out at third is Joe Jackson sliding, there is a tendency to see Joe Jackson or some other icon in every period piece. It is to be expected when a positive ID can multiply the value of an item dramatically. I think the back of the postcard says “Ella” but someone could see “Effa” as in Manley, the Negro League HOF executive, and infer that this player was perhaps part of one of the Negro League teams she ran. I wish.

I fell prey to the Joe Jackson Effect on a 1939 Yankees photo that I thought showed Lou Gehrig until a few of my friends pointed out that the date of the photo was well after he’d retired that season due to his fatal illness.

After some research I think it is a photo of the celebration after the Yankees clinched the American League pennant on September 17, 1939. Manager Joe McCarthy is obvious, as are coach Earle Combs and Bill Dickey. Sadly, no Gehrig for me; the tall guy I thought was him is probably Lefty Gomez. And I thought I saw Ty Cobb, Joe Jackson and Jackie Robinson in there too. Yeah, that’s the ticket…

I honestly have no idea what I am going to do on Sunday at the show; I used to go home on Saturday because I had to work Monday. I have approximately three hours at the show until I need to leave for the airport (and check out of my room) so I left my bags in the room and I can roam the floor unencumbered. I suspect most of my time will be spent saying goodbye to friends some of whom I will not see again until next year.

Waiting to get into VIP time, I try to put some perspective on the week. Coming to the show used to be all about the picking; I could count on paying for the trip with a portion of the profits from what I found. That may turn out to be the case this year if some of the items I found hit the multiples I hope. With the cost of attending the show so inflated, more likely the picking makes it a break-even proposition. I am undeterred, of course; I will be back for as long as I can physically and financially make the trip. Not only is there always the potential of a big score, but given that I am retired and expanding my card side hustle into a full-time business, just attending the National in and of itself has a significant business value to me now. I made connections with other collectors and dealers that may yield private transactions in the future far more profitable than anything I would ever have had access to had I not attended the show and met them. I already have several collectors I met in person for the first time at the show eager to purchase some of the items that I have in my inventory, minus the nearly 20% eBay “tax”. That would not have happened absent my attendance at the show. I was also able to meet with and discuss various potential consignments with multiple auctioneers at the show, something that simply cannot be done except face-to-face but that is essential if you are looking for the best place to sell a rare or niche item. I believe I have established connections with one auctioneer who has a consultant in So Cal who volunteered to come and pick up a lot of my bigger material in Los Angeles, which is invaluable given how expensive and difficult (and fraught with risk of loss) shipping stuff is nowadays. And I was able to meet with the grading staff at CGC once again to discuss potential subs of rare and obscure cards; last year that allowed me to submit two incredibly rare Argentinean cards with assurance that they would be graded. Now that CGC has penetrated the market and entered the Hobby consciousness big time (e.g. the Olbermann Wagner), my decision to go with CGC is looking better every day, and I would not have made it absent the face-to-face at the National. All great reasons besides the picking to attend the biggest trade show in the business, er, Hobby.

But the picking was great, don’t get me wrong. I have never had this much material to take home from the show; I guesstimate that I am lugging back at least 40 pounds of stuff. Indeed, the biggest difficulty of the last 12 hours has been packing everything. The small empty duffel bag I brought is insufficient to cover everything because I need my entire roll-on bag to transport cards and memorabilia, plus part of my backpack. Part of my dilemma is age-related: I’ve had some physical issues and the hotel pillows were destroying me, so I had Amazon deliver a neck pillow like I have at home. Helpful tip: Amazon delivers to a hotel. Forty-something bucks and worth every dime not to wake up with neck spasms so profound that it takes ten minutes to sit up. Aging sucks giant donkey balls, BTW. I ain’t leaving that behind, either. As a result, I am going to go to the airport carrying on a very full backpack and my roll-on bag (and hope that they allow me to take both onto the plane), and checking a small duffel so stuffed that it looks like a Ballpark Frank on the grill just before it bursts. Since I am flying first class, I expect I will be able to get away with it. If not, I am going to pull the backpack apart at the gate to pull out the valuables and gate-check the damn thing. The Whatnot tote bag that I was given on the first day as the goodie bag then will serve as my personal item; I guess it will come in handy after all. Next year, full size duffel.

But I digress...

The biggest change I noticed is the expansion of the show to include non-mainstream sports and non-sports cards. I mentioned it during my daily coverage but looking at what I bought and what I saw, it really bears discussion. In the past, it was rare to see non-sports and varied sports material at any table. I could count on one hand the number of tables that would actually have anything more than a few modern non-mainstream sports cards available. Not so at this show. I saw a dozen and dozens of tables with a supply of vintage non-sports and various sports items. Granted, most of them were overpriced things I had no interest in except for an investor-picker interest in understanding the market, and that is a normal situation with an emerging collectible field: the dealers price SWAG because they don’t know the facts, but they will readily negotiate, especially if you use the picker trick of bundling, because they really do not know if their ask is reasonable. I knocked 40%-80% off stuff all week long simply by haggling. One dealer quoted me $5 per card for 1961 Topps Sports Cars (in really nice shape), then reduced the price to $1.10 a card when I bundled it with some high # Topps Wheels, which were already priced below market. I suspect I was the only one who had expressed any interest in the Cars cards, so he went for it. Another dealer quoted me $80 ($20 a card) for some motorsports cards and $30 for a ticket, then dropped the price to $90 for the lot, effectively giving me the ticket for $10. When there is no market guidance, wheel and deal away, my friends, because it is all SWAG pricing.

My crucial takeaway on all of this is that dealers have become conscious of the existence of these markets in the last year or two and are trying to feel their way into them. It is nice for those of us already inside. Instead of dealers looking at me like I am a Martian when I ask for something like the aforementioned cards or trade cards, one in ten has something available but little idea of what they are really worth. I found well-priced obscure baseball trade cards for the PC this year just for the asking and many more for sale at prices I thought were too stupid to pay, and other esoterica that has gained traction. Yesterday, for example, I picked up an unbelievably rare 1930s racing program that the dealer SWAG priced; what few comps I am aware of are 10x-15x what I paid. That should cover the week’s breakfasts when I sell it (no reason to hang on to it for the PC—Mauri Rose finished eighth).

8:44 and I can hear a muffled announcement inside the hall but, alas, we are not going to get an early today. I guess the crowd is not large enough to merit it. Frankly, however, they should let us in: the crowd here is now grown to about the size it was on Friday.

9 o’clock rolls around and still no entry for the VIPs at the Poor Door on the side; they are instead admitting VIPs from the lobby. We can see it from the Poor Door and of course there is a stampede towards the main entrance to try and get in. Freaking idiots; the Poor Door opens as they are surging into the lobby and I walk right in ahead of the dorks who waddle-ran for the lobby.

Not that it matters. The morning at the show on Sunday is sparsely attended relative to the other days. It looks like a typical Friday used to look back before Covid. I went back to The Booth again, of course, and pulled another hundred bucks worth of stuff out of the detritus of the big sale. Nothing earth shattering, just more good inventory pieces. I had been looking for some items I stupidly put back on Wednesday; they were long gone, of course.

Now for the eye candy: amidst all of the resale material, I also managed to find some tremendous items for my personal collection, not an easy lift given how long I’ve been doing this and how esoteric my interests have become. Sure, I infilled three of my passion project sets (1961 Topps Sports Cars, 1965 Donruss Spec Sheet, 1976 Topps Star Trek) with some cards I needed and with some spiffy upgrades that I did not need because you do not leave eye candy like that behind when it is way underpriced. I turned up rare cards and postcards, and a number of memorabilia items that fall precisely within the wheelhouse of what I collect. They reflect, I think, the evolving nature of my interests, as well as the Hobby’s evolving and expanding reach. Without further ado, here my personal best in show NSCC 2026:

Joe Louis Wittone Advertising Flyer: In 1937, new champ Joe Louis lent his name to promote a ‘snake oil’ called “Wittone Tonic”. There are a few different cards and related items: a postcard-sized photo card of Louis captioned “The Sportsmans Gazette” (that publication never existed), a snapshot-sized portrait real photo card with Wittone advertising on the front, and two large premiums. I catalogued the Wittone premiums and cards in my first few boxing card encyclopedias and made some assumptions as to the whys and whats about the issue. What I had never seen before was any promotional item for the set shedding some light on the issue. I found one at the show and snapped it up happily.

E282 Oh Boy Gum Cards Jack Dempsey-Tom Mix: As I mentioned earlier this week, I found this gem in the first handful of postcards I looked through on Wednesday morning. Designated E282 In the ACC though really an “R” card, Oh Boy Gum was a Goudey brand, and this was one of Goudey’s very first card sets if not the first. Best thinking is that it was a point of purchase handout of 32 postcard-sized, blank backed cards depicting scenes from various films from the 1920s; the set is so rare that we don’t even have a complete checklist (we have 31 catalogued so far). The Dempseys I had seen in the past (under 5; rare card) were all red, including a brandless legend variation. This one is blue. Bingo! Also picked up a German RPPC made from the same image; I sold the one I had fairly recently and missed it. Now I have another, in better condition.

1907 Gans v. Britt Postcard: I am by no means claiming to have an encyclopedic knowledge of boxing postcards, but I am pretty, pretty good. I found one at the show that I had never seen before from a series I knew. I am a big fan of Jimmy Britt. A California fighter, he had a short career but fought a majority of his bouts against Hall of Famers; should be there himself. I know that a series of cards was made to promote his 1907 fight with HOFer Joe Gans. They are really, really tough to find. I have two that cost me a bundle some years ago. I found a third. It cost me a lot smaller bundle. I now have three. I rule!

1921 Dencio and Flores RPPC: I got this one because the image was compelling but the back story is even better. Some world class boxers emerged from the Philippines in the WWI period and the 1920s. Gaudencio “Kid Dencio” Cabanela, Sr. was a superstar in Asia, packing stadiums. At one point, he held the bantamweight, featherweight, and lightweight titles of the Orient. Francisco Flores fought Cabanela four times starting in 1918. Flores won the Orient Featherweight Title from Cabanela in 1918. The two men developed a friendship over their quartet of battles. Francisco was in the audience watching his friend Dencio fight in Australia when Dencio was killed in the ring in July 1921. I have not seen cards of either fighter before, but this early image of boxing Pinoy greats hits all the high notes.

1966 Atlanta Braves Team Issue Eddie Mathews: Mathews was in ATL for such a short time in 1966 that if you blinked you missed it. Didn’t look too thrilled with life when they shot this photo; is it me or does the “A” look airbrushed in?

1944 Mutoscope Follies Girls “Knots To You”: Yeah, I’m a dog; I can’t just collect dead guys in costumes. I like my pinups too. I have an 11 x 14 version of this image but hadn’t seen it as a card, which is not all that surprising since the Follies Girls is the toughest of the Mutoscope line and this image is only in that set. She’s pretty, isn’t she?

19th Century Actress Cabinet Photo: I’ve been getting into vintage photography for a while now and this larger format (11+ inches tall) card was in a sports dealer’s picker bins rather than in the showcase where it would have been at a paper fair:

Jefferson Burdick used to say that card collecting is: “a magic carpet that takes you away from work-a-day cares to havens of relaxing quietude where you can relive the pleasures and adventures of a past day—brought to life in vivid picture and prose.” It sure as heck does at the National, hence the title to this piece. The week before I left I was working on a substantial real estate deal. Friday before the show I said: “screw this, I’m playing with cards next week,” and was whisked away on Burdick’s magic carpet. By the time I get through a week at a show like this, a sense of unreality sets in. I suppose it is similar to what happens when you are indoctrinated into a cult, or take a Disney cruise: bad food, disrupted sleeping habits, a constant flood of activity from the moment you wake up until the moment you finally crash into bed. It gets to the point where I do not know what day it is, let alone what is going on in the overall world. I will catch up on my deal emails and news stories on the way to the airport and while sitting there waiting for my flight.

Thanks for reading and listening and for all the kind comments I received at the show about my effort at gonzo coverage. It is weirdly satisfying to have people quote me and to hear from people who say that they are very happy to read my brain drippings every day.

Finally, a few words about Kenny Cole, a friend who was supposed to attend the show but who passed away on the 5^th. Kenny was one of the go-to experts in Negro League cards and owned, at one time or another, just about every notable prewar NL card. He was also a genuinely down to earth, giving, funny and generous man who was a blast to hang out with at the [fill in the hotel bar at] the National. I will miss him. RIP buddy.

I headed across the sky bridge at 8:35 with all the other losers getting ready to stand in front of the VIP entrance to rush the floor. Right now, there are some jackasses protesting on the street and snarling traffic in front of the show. I don’t know what they are protesting and in the moment I do not care. Don’t fuck with my show access no matter what the cause; you could be in favor of preventing child labor, but if you are messing with my access to the card show, I want you gone.

I’ve been in New York looking for real estate and some of the buildings there were constructed with moderate- and low-income housing and have separate doors for the people in those units. In New York real estate slang, they call those entrances the “poor doors”. As I wait to enter the show, I realize that I am going through the poor door, NSCC style. I’m such a special little snowflake. The lineup today outside the poor door is twice the size it was yesterday. It is going to be twice this tomorrow. I suspect that by midafternoon Saturday the corridors here will be impossible.

The best way to describe the main floor is a horseshoe around the main lobby. The former show floor is to the left. Vast swaths of the new areas are devoted to the breaking and panels and other interactive stuff, and PSA seems to have eaten most of the right side of the horseshoe. Upstairs is the most congested, uncomfortable show space I have ever seen.

I popped into the breaking/livestreaming area for a while. Best I can describe it is showbiz for socially awkward, annoying people.

Yesterday afternoon I finally started my careful, organized traverse of the show floor after two days of randomly picking. I started at one aisle and worked my way all the way down to the very end stopping where I need to and methodically track it all the way through. It is the best way to rule out entire sectors of the show that are full of shiny shit (not that there’s anything wrong with collecting that) and trying to see it all. I pick up where I left off and by 4:00 I have covered the whole main area. One reason for this strategy is that dealers can surprise you. I found one table with lots of manufactured memorabilia but also with a few Indy 500 pit badges, which I had been seeking. I picked up a 1958 badge; the year AJ Foyt debuted. Another table had a stack of high grade 1961 Topps Sports Car cards; I needed all but one of them. He also had some of the difficult high number 1955 Topps Wheels cards. It was an expensive walk.

In walking the show floor, it appears that most of the expansion of the show has been breaking areas, trade displays, and services. The actual quantity of dealer tables dealing in vintage sports memorabilia seems to be static or perhaps even a bit smaller. That said, the vintage dealers I’ve spoken to here have reported strong sales. Some of them have had record-breaking sales. I have seen more than one dealer actually re-pricing items at the table to reflect the increased demand in certain sets.

Here is a photo that explains exactly why it is just about impossible for an average attendee to book a hotel room through the conference housing system that the national uses:

The dealers choosing their rooms at the previous year’s show all but wipe out the rooms that would be allocated to the average person. I found it expeditious to reserve my room directly through the Hilton Honors program rather than waiting for conference housing nonexistent block of rooms to become available. The cost of all these rooms has become prohibitive.

At 10 o’clock I had to head back to my room for a conference call. The walkway into the center from the garage was absolutely jammed with people. Here’s a photo of the street scene outside.

To give you some idea of scale the end of the traffic jam end of the line of people is about a half mile away from the show. I am almost not looking forward to this tomorrow on Saturday. Heading back to my hotel, I noticed that the VIP area had been secured, which was not the case a few days ago. Having seen the monumental crowds outside the center, I now understand why. Oh, and to the jackass who taunted me for “leaving the show already”, yeah, nimrod, some of us still have to pay the bills. I made $5K for that hour off the show floor; how much does your job at the moron farm pay?

The most positive thing about the show is the huge number of young collectors getting into the Hobby. Outside the show floor in the VIP lounge and all over the halls, they sit and do business buying, selling and trading. From what I can see, the future of the Hobby is well on the way to being secured. As they progress and deepen their interest, they will get into vintage. Same as it ever was.

For all of the size and scope of the show, there is actually relatively little variety. What I mean by that is that the vast majority of cards here are post war issues from mainstream manufacturers in the major sports. I actually purchased cards from only half a dozen vendors and I find myself returning to the same vendors repeatedly because no one else has anything that unique. It is an unusual place to be as a collector. It reminds me of an observation I had when my wife was shopping for jewelry at the jewelry marts in Los Angeles and New York. After trekking through building after building after building filled with all manner of jewelry, I realized that gold and diamonds are not rare. The same is true of postwar mainstream cards in general. I am by no means suggesting that demand is not there; demand is crazy right now. The sheer volume of money changing hands in this building is staggering. I would not be surprised, as I discussed with a friend yesterday, if there’s not $200 million in cash in this building and $500 million or more a value in the inventory. All that shit is moving; it is not just sitting here looking pretty. I just become indifferent to it all after a while walking past yet another 1952 Topps Mantle. What would be a jaw-dropping table at any regional show is just another table at the National. Another reason you owe it to yourself to do the show at least once.

One interesting thing I have noticed is that the penetration and prices are through the roof on the 1960s-1970s non-sports iconic sets. I suspect that most of this pricing is aspirational because the numbers do not look like what I have seen on eBay; I don’t think they went up 4x since last week. I simply cannot believe how much there is and how incredibly high the prices are on sets like 1966 Donruss Marvel, all 1966 Batman series, and a few others, like the various 1977 Star Wars issues. Prices at least as marked are through the roof on high grade cards. Even lower end cards are quite expensive. The number one card in the Batman black bat series (“the Batman”) is offered at high three and low for figure prices even in lousy condition. Again, I am kicking myself for having sold off mine a few years ago. The wildest thing is that whoever decides these things has decided that certain cards in these sets are the rookies of certain characters and has driven those cards in particular to unprecedented levels. Why? The 1966 Donruss Marvel set is a 66-card set printed in one series. Every card of every character in there is a ‘rookie’; the only cards that should draw premiums are 1 and 66 due to the stacking damage theory of being the end cards in the stack. Common sense and card sense often pass each other in the night.

Given what is going on with prices, a key question is what strategy to follow if you are a small investor/collector. What I have been doing throughout the show is mining at various tables for cards priced to reflect the market six months ago. When I find them, I clean them out. I am sorry in fact that I sold some of last year’s acquisitions as quickly as I did: they have more than doubled in that time. One dealer said to me that the price today is the cheapest it’s going to be and lower than it’s going to be. Not a bad way to look at it when hunting at the Natty.

I got in a few more hours of sleep Thursday morning and went to the show feeling somewhat normal.

I started out the morning comparing notes with other collectors about our acquisitions at The Booth yesterday. All of the vintage guys hit it and all of us missed things that the others picked up: you can’t be expert at everything after all. Some of us simply miss things because of the speed at which we had to move.

I skipped breakfast, just peanuts, electrolytes and coffee midmorning. They had the taco in a barf bag Doritos thing at the show, but I chickened out and had the normal tacos instead for lunch. Not terrible.

Unlike yesterday, I did not have any most-favored-nation status to get me into the show early, so I was just a VIP badge bitch standing in the lobby with a thousand other losers.

Standing there I thought that will be interesting to see the surge from inside the crowd. I wondered if it will be as intense as a Green Day concert? The floor crowd at the show I went to in Pasadena literally carried my daughter and I forward 50 feet towards the stage before it settled down. Gonna have to watch my shins in this one; lots and lots of hard cases being swung by people with no conception of where their bodies are in space.

8:45 and they are opening the doors early again: no surprise since the line down the road was already a couple of blocks long as I walked over. And here goes the surge. Fortunately, it’s a lot of fat people in this crowd and they don’t move all that fast unless there’s a pizza at the other end of it.

One new phenomenon about these shows in the post Covid era is the number of people roaming around with highly customized very large containers of material: slab cases, customized packs, and so on. Another sign this has become a serious business rather than idiots in a church basement doing God knows what with old toys.

I’ll give you one guess where I went. Yup, The Booth. I had to retrace my steps yesterday and look at some of the boxes that I skipped. Good thing I did, too. I found two vintage signed snaps of one of my favorite players, Don Newcombe, as a Montreal Royal. Very pleased to add those to my collection. There were several early Japanese postcards that I passed up yesterday because I can’t read Japanese. I was so tired that I forgot that I could use Google Translate. I did that today and ended up with an outstanding bromide of HOFer Kaoru Betto. And bunch of other odds and ends that I missed yesterday including two H804-10 Corner Clef baseball trade cards. I found two other booths worth picking, a huge glop of crap piled in each without any semblance of order. Just the way I like it. Best item there, for me, was a signed card of comedian Jonathan Winters.

Here is my story about Winters: I had a Hollywood memorabilia business around 35 years ago and I used to set up at a movie show where a lot of C- and D-List celebrities would sign for pay or drop in and get some free adulation. Winters came to one and wanted a Chuck Jones-signed Wile E. Coyote sketch that I had for sale. I remarked on his identity, planning to get an autograph, and he denied he was Jonathan Winters. Steadfastly and vehemently. He was a true performance artist, and a little off too, and he would not break character no matter what I asked him. He then tried to negotiate a discount on the sketch. I said I would give Jonathan Winters a discount. He got a twinkle in his eye. He knew I’d cornered him. I could see he was thinking about it for a few seconds, but he didn’t want to give in and break character, so he didn’t get a discount and I didn’t get an autograph. I got one now!

The show is insanely big and the cash sloshing around is crazy. I sat down in the VIP lounge for a breather. This morbidly obese young man sat down across from me at the big roundtable, opened his case, and started counting out $65,000! Seriously, six bundles of Benjamins in bank wrappers and a loose stack that he was counting. “I had a big sale,” he said. Yeah, I can tell. As can anyone else in the space looking to rob someone. Never count your money in public. When I returned to the hotel to chill for an hour before dinner and write this, I saw two guys in the lobby dividing at least $30,000 in cash. Right in the lobby in plain view.

Someone told me that PSA was so overwhelmed with submissions that they had to shut down all further subs for on-site grading. I would not be surprised since there were people who spent hours in line to get in and then hours in line at PSA’s booth. Reminds me of Disneyland; stand in line for 45 minutes, have a five minute ride, repeat.

Prices…wow. I wish my cards were worth the marked prices I saw. I would liquidate. I did not see a single vintage Babe Ruth card under $1,000, no matter how beaten. Prices have risen so fast and so far that many dealers use the “K” instead of writing out the prices; must get tedious writing “,000” over and over. The few booths with good prices were swarmed with collectors and picked clean quickly. The ‘action’ is at the shiny sellers’ booths. Lots of interest, lots of money. What is also amazing is the trajectory of certain 1960s and 1970s iconic nonsports cards. I saw this starting last year, but it has reached really crazy numbers. 1966 Donruss Marvel and the various keys in 1966 Topps DC are through the roof, even in middle grades. The stuff I sold six months ago has doubled or more. It is just a boom. One dealer had an impressive array of 1960s and 1970s soccer at 4x the standard prices. Funniest one I saw was a 1958 Remington Pele signed matchbook cover from The Pele Collection with a long explanation of the Heritage sale of the piece at a very high figure. Too bad the most recent sale was only 15% of the sticker price.

More tomorrow.

So I am thrilled that I decided to come in a day early. I should be happy that I got here when so many are not going to make it, and I am, but I was also frustrated as heck on Tuesday. Again. Look, I spent years with a dealer pass, shopping Tuesday and Wednesday ahead of the crowds. Last year and this year’s Tuesday, not. Over drinks at the bar in the evening after Tuesday’s set up, a friend described the light attendance except at one booth: THE BOOTH from last year. He said that the dealers were cleaning out the inventory. I am not sure what will be left for us mere mortals by Wednesday at 1:00; what I do know is that a lot of vintage guys are going to bolt for it and I expect a full rugby scrum over there.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Around 10:00 Tuesday night over beers we concoct a scheme to get me in on Wednesday morning. I may get in and get picking, I may get arrested and barred from the show, or I may end up in between those two extremes. I figure I will try it because:

“Every now and then, saying ‘What the fuck’, brings freedom. Freedom brings opportunity, opportunity makes your future.”

I wonder how many stupid life decisions were made on the basis of “Risky Business”? At my age and station in life, do I really need to be saying what the fuck over baseball cards? I am definitely not going with the red Ferrari shirt and trying to sneak in. If I am on a WTF mission, it is plain dull t-shirt time. I do not want to stick out like a turd in a punchbowl. I pack my red Scuderia Ferrari hat in my bag. When I get in, I will put it on and hide in plain sight when the manhunt for the illegal immigrant commences.

Wednesday morning arrives and I am actually nervous about our scheme. WTF…was I thinking? I’m no risk-taker: I hover crap at public restrooms so I don’t accidentally touch my dick on the toilet seat when I sit down. But there I am, ready to crash the Academy Awards of this thing of ours.

I won’t say how we did it in case I need to do it again next year, but by mid-morning I was inside and at The Booth, nearly three hours ahead of the crowd.

I ran into that grinder troll from last year. He’d tried to call me a few times over the year but after that issue we had and his reluctance to make good on the fake cards, I want nothing to do with the guy, so I ghosted him. “Don’t you answer your phone?” he asked. Nope, not for you. He tried to cadge some free valuation information from me over some deal he was trying to make but I wasn’t interested, so he walked away. I later ran into another niche boxing guy who also knows him and when I explained last year and told him I’d ghosted the guy as a result of last year, he laughed and said that he never takes his calls anymore. He said that he has to chase the guy away from his table at shows because he hangs around and interjects himself into every sale. “I’ve lost so many sales because of him,” he explained. The guy stands there and offers opinions to the customers, sometimes telling them not to make a purchase because the card isn’t that good. That’d be a cardinal sin: never fuck with another man’s livelihood.

I’ve been trying to sell off a lot of my boxing stuff (in “I” words, I am overweight that sector) but The Booth had a large boxing collection and a lot of it was really rare stuff or something I have never seen before (which is saying something since I wrote the friggin’ book on the subject). One of the nice parts of collecting a niche is that most collectors and dealers lack the expertise to recognize rarity, so the boxing stuff at The Booth was still primo. The first handful of postcards I pick up has an E282 Oh Boy Gum Cards Jack Dempsey-Tom Mix in it. An incredibly rare card and this one is a color variation I have not seen before. It was $300 but worth it. I found not one, not two, but three 1946-47 Fotos 5 boxing postcards from Mexico. I haven’t seen one of those in years. The hits kept coming. I filled a box with stuff. I ended up with so much stuff in my backpack that I had to go back to the hotel around 3 to unload; must’ve weighed 20 pounds. Even with low prices and a 20% discount off the sticker prices, my burn rate the first four hours was like an AI company; half my capital vaporized by the time the VIPs came in at 1:00. Worth it.

At 12:30 they announced that due to the massive crowd they were going to let the VIPs in early at 12:45 instead of 1:00. At 1:35 I heard a similar announcement about the regular admits. Someone told me that the line to get in was half a mile long. I can believe it. When I headed towards the hotel to drop my stuff, people were still in the regular admission line waiting to get in. Oh, and if you want to see something funny as shit, watch a herd of obese, scruffy men running across the convention center; you’d think they just put out a new pepperoni pie at an all you can eat pizza buffet. Most of them were heading to the PSA pavilion to get in a massive line for extraordinarily costly onsite grading services. Even with the shutdown and all of the customer service issues, these folks were dying to hand PSA copious chunks of money to slab shiny shit (not that there is anything wrong with collecting that). Gonna be a hell of an IPO some day.

I took some photos for you:

As you can see, the crowd was enormous, the equivalent of what used to be a Saturday crowd. Show survival tip #2: poop at your hotel; and if you feel the urge to purge on the floor and you are within walking distance, hold your mud and go back. By 2:00 the bathrooms at the show were unspeakably fouled. I wouldn’t touch ass to seat there on a bet by then.

To give you some idea of the surge, I went by the eBay booth to redeem my VIP goodie bag ticket; they were all out of packs. Now, the curmudgeon in me has to ask how that could happen given that the show limits the VIP passes to a set number. You’d think a principal sponsor would make up enough redemption packs to satisfy the demand. eBay once again takes but does not give.

The show has leveled up too in terms of the trade show aspect. Monumental displays, lots of eye candy. Lots of dead space that I do not have to walk again. Ditto the various event pavilions.

The international section was upstairs in that zoo space they set up. About a third of the dealers were not there yet as a result of the air traffic disruptions. I did not expect much but I hoped to see some great vintage foreign cards. Nope. Shiny shit (not that there is anything wrong with collecting that). Only one card pre-1980, an Italian soccer card. I saw more vintage soccer on the main floor. Grotesquely overpriced, but vintage.

I did not find any vintage racing on Wednesday except for the odd item here and there, but I will keep looking. I was able to knock one card off my 1965 Donruss Spec Sheet set, which is nice since they are not easy in the condition I am chasing. I will keep digging.

By the time the evening session ended at 8, I was dragging ass. Ten hours at a show will do that to you. After dinner I literally collapsed into bed. I was so worn out that I woke up four hours later and realized I’d fallen asleep wearing my glasses.

More fun and games today; another report tomorrow.

I noticed that they had a Puma factory outlet there. Puma makes the gear for Scuderia Ferrari’s F1 team. They have a hell of a team. Lewis Hamilton is the GOAT and Charles Leclerc is a fantastic driver too. I was unable to find F1 gear in New York last week; the F1 store near Times Square closed and the Ferrari store moved from Park Avenue to New Jersey just recently. I scored at the Puma store and picked up a Ferrari racing crew jersey and hat. They had some other stuff too but it is really expensive even at an outlet mall. They had shoes for McLaren but no gear, and BMW gear too. I tried mail order F1 gear, but a lot of the stuff is sized for Europeans, so the Aston Martin shirt I bought in XL is laughably small. Guess I have my shirt for day 1 of the show. I was about half an hour early so I sat down for a tea, called the wife, and relaxed. The sports people are arriving. I was wearing a new yellow and green Brasil soccer jersey shirt that I got in New York at a World Cup pop-up store. A guy came over to me while was on the phone, fist-bumped me and said something in Portuguese to the effect of “Go Brasil!” As this thing of ours becomes international and attracts visitors from all over the world it is gonna be fun.

Mission accomplished, I let the shuttle take me to the front door at the center and went to register. As you can see from the photo, they were busy, especially as compared to last year.

The fabulous VIP Lounge:

I went over there at the same time last year and basically walked right up. It only took about ten minutes; they had four lines for VIP and two for Super VIP. The biggest time lag was that the goodie bags weren’t fully assembled. That, and the need to hand out tickets for the signatures. I guess in order to spur early registration, the NSCC had Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams and Bill Madlock scheduled to sign on Tuesday. I got every Madlock card I had signed last year and I didn’t want the Williams ticket (or for that matter the sheet of other VIP autographs), but I find it easier to take them and give them away than to try and give them back: can’t go against the flow or it blows a bureaucratic gasket. I asked some fathers if I could give the tickets to their sons and got rid of them that way. I always ask the father rather than being the creep who offers something to the child directly.

The show still uses lanyards and badges, and I think it always will. The show is just too big for e-ticketing at the door: do you really want to wait in line for 30,000 people to get scanned in? Me neither. It has gotten tighter, though. Where I used to just give my name, they checked ID carefully before giving me the badge. Signs all over the place warned that if you lose the badge, it will not be replaced: for the next five days that badge is worth as much as a passport.

I have to say, the staff of the show is really nice, but they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. I asked the lady handling my registration when the VIP lounge opened. She said 2:00 Wednesday. The show itself opens at 1:00 Wednesday for VIPs.

I stopped at a table and dissected the goodie bag; here are some photos.

Last year’s bag was a big pile of ads and very little in the way of cards, and no supplies. Much, much better bag this year. I was tickled to see a box of Ultra Pro Card Preservers. I always appreciate free supplies. I like the product and I brought a box with me, so this literally doubled my supply for the show. Nice. I also got a package of 50 PSA slab sleeves, which will come in handy for my packout of cards in Card Savers, and two magnetic holders with redemption cards in them. I might redeem the eBay one just so I can say I got something for free from eBay. There was one more magnetic card holder but it was a joke: it had the National logo screened on the back blocking the view of the reverse of the card; how useless is that?

The card packs: 2025 Panini WNBA regular pack, Humongous Hoard 5 card mystery pack, Leaf NSCC football pack, Panini NSCC pack, two Upper Deck Prominent Cuts packs (I was only supposed to get one, so yay), a pack of Vee Friends Super Stickers Farm Fights (no clue), a pack of Wild Card 7 Card Studs All Quarterbacks SP Promo (I assume some sort of football product), and a pack of “onit” NSCC VIP collegiate trading cards. I ripped the Panini WNBA since it is just a regular pack: no inserts, a few base Angel Reese cards. I also ripped the HH pack since I like their stuff and as I recall there was a discount coupon in last year’s pack. No hits there, either, and no coupon. The cards were two advertising cards, Dave Winfield, Jaromir Jagr and Fergie Jenkins. Last year they had a drawing for signed cards and I won a Cheryl Miller. I will see if they do that again. I busted the Wild Card QB thingy after confirming that it has variable SPs and autographs:

John Elway 3/5…might have something here. The Panini set was just base cards. The onit pack potentially has chase cards so I busted it. No idea what the heck they are. The rest of the packs I am going to hold because there are no possible ‘hits’ in them.

A lot of adverts in the package; tossed those and the useless small backpack from some auctioneer. eBay’s large backpack should be a good dirty laundry bag for the week. Also got two magazines. Something called “ghostwrite” had a scratcher card and I got “5 extra bids” on some sort of doll auction? Not my bag, man. Card Ladder offered two months of free pro services, which I will use, as long as it isn’t one of those lame-ass subscribe and cancel deals. I hate wasting my time on that nonsense.

On the way back I ran into a dealer in the elevator, young guy. We chatted about the show. He said that his team expects to be super busy, mostly buying. I asked what they were looking for and he said modern, “but I have some vintage, I think.” Shows you where the game is at right now.

Hope you like the photos and get some feel for the events. I think this is going to be bananas.

This year’s travel day was a very difference experience for me because I have been in New York City instead of Los Angeles. 1.5 hour flight instead of 4.5 hours in the air. I am flying out of La Guardia, not JFK. Never done that before. On United first class. I forgot I booked first class, but when I realized I had I then recalled that the price differential was under $200 each way when I added in the bag fees and the extra leg room fees I’d otherwise have paid. Damn glad I did, too. My leg still aches, so having a first class seat I can stretch out at is a godsend.

Going to the airport is really wonderful in New York City because it has invested in public transit, it has great infrastructure, and I had several options to get to the airport for a fraction of the cost to get an Uber or Lyft in L.A. I chose to take the subway and airport shuttle. Costs me three bucks total. In the olden days, LaGuardia was the preferred airport from Manhattan because it was a lot easier to drive there than to JFK. Now that there is public transport to both, JFK is the quicker trip. I caught an express train to Manhattan; 18 minutes from the air train to Penn Station.

The train and shuttle bus to LaGuardia airport are really quite efficient… If you know where the fucking stops are, because they don’t announce anything and the signage is for shit. I wandered around the platform at 74th St. in Queens like a moron for 10 minutes lugging two bags and trying to find the elevator down. Turns out the signs all point towards the elevator until you get to the place where you actually have to turn to get the corridor to the elevator, then there’s nothing. I’m a bright guy and I missed it twice; eventually, I figured it out.

Once I got down to the street level (I had to guess at which level I needed), I followed the signs to the bus for the airport. I stood at the stop and watched the bus roll right past me. Turns out that the “bus stop” is not actually THE bus stop. The actual bus stop is in a sheltered bus dock around the corner from the bus stop where the signs point. I ran back inside and asked the person at the desk where the bus stop is for the airport bus, hoping not to miss the shuttle. He said behind me, I went out the doors behind him, and it’s the wrong bus. Buses. The bus that I wanted is actually the third bus bay down the street. No cut out on the sidewalks so I’m lurching two heavy bags up and down sidewalks across three active driveways. All good to know for the next time.

Thanks for the added stress, MTA.

I gotta say, LaGuardia is really nice. They did a great job on the remodel. One small quibble: it’s about a half mile’s walk from security to the actual gates. If you’re gonna travel through this airport, make sure you bring a rolling bag because if you’re carrying a 20 pound backpack, you are gonna regret it.

T-minus 19 minutes until the alleged boarding time and there’s no plane. The flight still shows on time: yeah, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. I figured there would be a delay; at this point I am shocked if we ever fly anywhere on time. That is the reason I’m leaving on Monday rather than Tuesday: I hope to get to the hotel by the end of the day Monday. If I am only three or four hours late, I’d consider it a moral victory.

At least there is a cavalcade of people to watch and make fun of; that’s the best part of air travel in this era of routine delays, performative customer service and cattle car planes. The garbage cans at this airport require you to step on a pedal to open the door. I pass the time watching people trying to figure it out. It is a great way to sort the idiots, imbeciles and morons (history note: 100 years ago, these were medical terms denoting lessening degrees of mental retardation. An idiot with lots of training might someday rise to be an imbecile but could only dream of being a moron). I actually saw one guy just walk away frustrated because he could not figure it out. That’d be your village idiot. I wonder what he’s going to do with his trash?

T-minus 4 minutes from the alleged start of boarding, and our plane finally arrives. I wonder what Kalshi would say about our odds of getting to Chicago on time? I am beginning to have a glimmer of Hope. It would be nice since I perhaps stupidly scheduled a video conference call for a few hours after I was supposed to arrive in Chicago. Hopefully, I can make it to my hotel in time and not have to take the call in the corner of an O’Hare terminal.

We board a little late and have the usual ritual of too many roller bags and gate checks. I must have an aura or something; lately, I get into altercations everywhere I go. I am in my seat on the plane on my phone with my daughter and some Grandpa Munster-looking old fart in front of me turns around and says that he can hear me through his headphones and would I mind not talking? I said yes I would and ended the conversation as quickly as I could without hanging up on her.

I am obnoxious and maybe I was too loud but I am not a total asshole; I ended the call. He was not satisfied by my ending the call. Maybe it was the double negative (would I mind not; yes). I suspect that he wanted a Karen-style apology. Nope. He kept ranting. I asked him whether he could hear me on his wireless phones. I was concerned that we had an inadvertent Bluetooth match. That really set him off. I finally had to tell him to chill out or he would get us kicked off the flight.

It wasn’t me, my dear readers. A guy standing there who heard the whole thing patted me on the shoulder and said: “you’re fine.” I guess I’m just an asshole magnet. Did I mention that he ignored the instruction to stow his laptop for takeoff? If I miss the show, it will be because I had to kick his ass in Chicago.

The whole flight, Grandpa Munster is staring daggers at me. Every time I get up to go to the bathroom or stretch my legs, he’s looking death at me. After we land and get to the gate, everyone does the customary stand up quickly and stand around bit. I get my bag out and wait. Grandpa Munster shoves his way back through the crowd to grab his bag out of the overhead bin, which is directly above me, looks daggers at me the whole way and says “excuse me” in that very loud and pissy way that really means “fuck you.” I say: “you’re excused.” He grabs his bag, yanks it out and smashes it right into my chest. Whether it was on purpose or not, it was certainly reckless. Not a word of excuse or apology either. Figures. On the way off the plane, the flight attendant who saw this rolls her eyes and says to me: “life is too short.” I agree. I hope that dip shit is not at the Hilton or at the show. I am at the point of life where I’m trying to avoid this kind of nonsensical aggro.

We actually landed in Chicago 15 minutes ahead of schedule: they routed us around weather through Canada. We then got to the airport and experienced a delay of a type I have never heard of before, the airline equivalent of losing a ground ball in the sun. Apparently, there were lightning storms around the airport and the baggage handlers union deemed it too unsafe to go out and get the bags, so we had no bags. We sat at the carousel for almost as long as the flight itself.

I am here at the hotel and made my meeting with 45 minutes to spare. Onward and upward. Let’s talk cards a bit.

There has been some buzz in the sports collecting social media about whether the Pokémon-TCG invasive species will colonize and eventually take over the National. I would prefer to see the NSCC remain the NSCC rather than become the NPCC (National Pokemon Collectors Convention).

Yes, I hate on TCG world regularly, yet that is not why I am against TCG at the National. I don’t think heavily mixed genre shows work for anyone. The ‘omnivore’ shows I’ve been to and set up at aren’t really that good, even if they are well-run and huge. Front Row is a great example. I love the management there: they run well organized, family-friendly shows. Big ones, tool the show I worked in May was 700 tables. On paper, it was everything you could want as a collector. The problem was demographic. A large part of the crowd has no interest in a large part of the show. When the space is finite, it is hard to hit a critical mass of customers. I was set up with vintage sports, because that is what I was asked to do, and had waves of people walk by without a second look because they are there for Pokémon, comics, etc. Conversely, the vintage sports guys usually are happy to find me in a sea of irrelevant (for them) stuff.

If there are going to be mixed shows, it is time for the promoters to separate the genres. I love that the NSCC has a dedicated space for the European dealers this year. I look forward to visiting it and having a chance to maybe pick up some interesting foreign cards without those annoying tariffs and the items coming in through the thieving USPS international depot that has claimed so many of my cards over the years. I haven’t set up in Anaheim in a few years, but I was really impressed with the initial show I did there in terms of set-up because all of the TCG dealers were separated from the sports dealers. We could stay in our space, and they could go to theirs. I think show promoters should do more separation of classifications of sellers. Not prohibit one class from having any cards of any specific type but require a dealer to state a specialty and carry predominantly that genre’s items. Buyers certainly would move around between pavilions to see whether their stuff was in another space, but it would really simplify and improve the show experience for attendees.

Back at you tomorrow with a first look at NSCC check-in and the legendary VIP lounge.

My focus turns more and more to cards the week before the NSCC. I cannot wait to get to that trading floor and start hunting for cardboard gold. Did my ancestors feel this way before heading out to the steppes of northern Europe, thinking of bagging a mammoth? Did they know in their heart of hearts that they were fated only to bring home a bunch of rabbits instead?

I’ve had some ‘fun’ physical challenges this summer. Started three weeks ago when I damaged myself at the gym. I’d been working with a trainer for months trying to reverse the decrepitude associated with having had to use a wheelchair for months while my feet were broken and we were making good progress until he had me try a new exercise, a crunch with a cross punch at the end. I am not Rocky Balboa, unfortunately, and I felt something not right in my back on a right cross. A few days later, raging sciatica down my right leg. It flared last week while I was in NYC and it may flare during the show. Whatever. Isn’t stopping me from going; there are drugs for that. And a cane. No pain keeps me from cards and I do not have a work commitment to mess with my attendance this year.

Recently, a card I’d never seen before but wanted came up on eBay. One of my searches flagged it. The card, a 1968 Atlantic Oil Billy Williams, was listed for $5,000 and sold very quickly for $3,000. The 1968 Atlantic Oil Play Ball game set is one of my passion projects. I first saw these ugly but endearing unnumbered contest cards in 1977 when I got a big collection from a friend of my parents whose kids were grown, and I was intrigued. I later learned that the set has many challenges. The way that it was given out, as two card sealed packets with the cards themselves comprising the packet and surrounded on all four edges by a perforated border strip, like those annoying tax forms that infect your mailbox every January, makes collecting it in nice shape an extreme challenge. Removing the sides of the packet will usually crease the cards or damage the corners or the full-bleed surfaces, and even if you are lucky enough to break a pack cleanly, the sealing glue will usually have infiltrated at least one pack edge and damaged the faces of the cards. I have a pretty clean set of 40 cards in roughly vg-ex overall that took years to collect and is a perpetual work in progress as I find upgrades.

Did I say 40? That is the base set. There are 12 more subjects; a master set has some print variations but adds no new subjects so I don’t care. The 41^st subject is a pink instant winner card redeemable at the gas station in 1968 for an almanac style stats booklet. It is a scarce short print. A recent eBay check had none for sale and none sold in the last 90 days; the booklets are readily found, so it looks like lots of cards were redeemed.

The PSA pop on the winner card is 4. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us a lot because the overall pop on these cards is heavily weighted towards the superstars. Hank Aaron = 104; Felipe Alou = 9. What is interesting in the PSA pop numbers is the spread of grades. Of 935 total cards graded, only 95 are 7-8-9-10, including qualifiers; 91 of those are 7-8. There are also 94 graded a 6. Those 189 cards are 20.2% of the pop. For a 1960s set, that is a very low percentage of higher-grade cards; in 1968 Topps about half are 6 or better. I’ve found that anything ex or better is a tough card to find in Atlantic Oil.

Went down the rabbit hole a bit there…sorry.

The 42^nd subject is a rare error card of Ron Swoboda. You see, the game was to match a series of players in a batting order sequence to win cash. Swoboda, #7 in the NL batting order was supposed to be the common card component of a pair of cards that would win ten bucks (righteous bucks in 1968) when Swoboda was matched with NL player #6, which is an SSP (discussed below), but a few Swoboda cards were issued offering $5 when matched with NL player #8, Jim Bunning, another of the base cards. The company obviously caught the error early, probably after shelling out some finskis to lucky winners, and killed the Swoboda $5 card but some went out and were not redeemed, so we have them today. Another eBay check, another zero, past and present.

Then there are the ten prize-winning cards that were the keys to the matching game; five per league conforming to $2,500, $100, $10, $5 and $1 prizes. The prize winner cards are unimaginably rare SSPs, which is understandable since they were cash money when paired with a common card. We know that the winner cards were meant to exist because the rules on the back of every packet that explain the game say that they exist: “Collect players with batting order #1, #2 and #3 IN THE SAME LEAGUE and win $2,500.” Now whether the company cheated and never issued a card, a la the 1933 Goudey Lajoie, I cannot say, except that four of the winner cards have been confirmed including the $100 second prize AL match, Tommy Davis. Doesn’t seem realistic to me that they issued the 2nd prize card but not the lesser prizes. They did not print the number of each issued, but we can pretty much assume that the cards got scarcer as the $$ increased. I am guessing that the $2500 winner is a 1/1 for each league. There are some unopened packs out there, most of which originate from a find 30 years ago in the southwest, so the winners may still be out there. About 100 packs have sold at auction over the last few years and if you are gambler, there are a few on eBay. I recall opening a few when they were available for $25 each; struck out.

Conventional wisdom has checklisted the ten SSPs as the following: Agee, Banks, T. Davis, Etchebarren, Fairly, Freehan, McCraw, Osteen, B. Williams, E. Wilson. The dedicated coterie of nuts who love this set (like me) can only confirm the existence of Davis, Osteen, Williams and Wilson. The rest have not been seen, or maybe they have been seen but whoever has them is bogarting the proof. Which brings me to my actual point of today’s rambling word salad:

Where the hell do we get our checklists, anyway?

Where did the 1968 Atlantic Oil SSP checklist originate? Honestly, we have no idea; no one I know who is into this set can tell me. I do know that the checklist with the six unconfirmed cards has been faithfully reproduced for decades. This is a commonplace occurrence in the Hobby: a checklist is created and propagates like a computer virus, yet no one can confirm its origin. It is something that has plagued me when writing books and articles about various sets. I’ve managed to debunk a few urban myth-style checklist entries, but most are frustratingly still used.

My modest proposal for the Hobby is that we start using only confirmed checklists and note the unconfirmed cards as such. That would be coupled with a long-term fantasy of cataloguers like me to create an accurate online database of record, like the old Standard Catalog, that would catalog old and obscure issues with images and checklists, a catalog raisonne of vintage cards where all updates and discoveries could be vetted and enshrined for the Hobby’s use. Some of my fellow cataloguers/historians have kicked around the idea for a while but to make it really happen us old farts could use some young(er) enthusiasts with the technical expertise to build the site and actually get it moving, and a benefactor who could fund the project until it becomes self-sustaining with donations, memberships and ads.

Anyhow, I am traveling today; more musings and many, many complaints to come over the next week.

I do not want to get political in this column, but when governmental policies affect this thing of ours, I cannot just ignore it. I have to call balls and strikes, so to speak. The political decision to go to war with Iran and the myriad ways that the corporate plutocracy is allowed to game our system have the potential to damage the smaller scale retail sector of the Hobby, hence the title of today’s column, which is a quote from Peaky Blinders’ Alfie Solomons:

“Big fucks small always, actually. There is a fight going on out there between big and small. Big will fuck small.”

I will start with the war on Iran. Whether you support or hate it, I don’t care, whatever, just do me a favor and don’t get all butt-hurt and whine about the politics of it in the comments about my briefly raising the subject. I check my politics at the door and ask you to do the same. What I will say is that the direct result of the war has been an 8% surcharge on postage until at least January. I think we can all be adult enough to admit that an 8% cost increase on card shipping is material and is fair game to discuss in a card collecting and investment column. Hell, an 8% cost increase in financial asset management costs would eat up an average projected year’s ROI in my securities portfolio. How I think postal rate hikes impact sellers like me is discussed below; unfortunately, there is more to the story than just the 8%.

You know that feeling when you go on vacation and you find out that there is going to be a total shitshow at work when you get home? Well, I have it right now, courtesy of the USPS. I am on vacation right now before heading to the National next week. I closed my eBay store for the duration, so I haven’t had any mail order sales to deal with since the 10th. In case you missed it, on July 12th the USPS commercial shipping rates were changed to provide that all packages that weigh under a pound are charged a one-pound rate.

How that affects sales on eBay is best explained by example. I ship slabbed single cards in a 7 x 6 x 1 box that weighs 5-6 ounces all in. For a 5-ounce package traveling from LA to NYC (Zone 8), the standard commercial price jumped from $5.89 on July 11 to $8.40 on July 12—representing a 42.6% increase. That rate includes the 8% temporary fuel surcharge that might go away in January and leave us with ‘only’ a 34.6% price hike.

The first fallout from this little turd nugget is that I now have roughly a thousand items on eBay that I will have to consider repricing. Others I may have to bundle. I also will have to adopt a flat fee bundled shipping policy for up to a pound of cards and rewrite every sales item to accommodate that. It is a giant Pain In The Ass for me and every other seller with a store inventory.

The longer term knock-on effect is more pernicious. In my view, the rate hikes are going to have the worst impact small retailers of sub-$100 cards because I’ve seen it happen in other collectibles sectors. As I mentioned in my discussion some time ago of my worst deals ever, I have been repeatedly kneed in the ‘nads on publication purchases because increasing shipping costs gradually have choked out the mail order market for all but the most expensive and desirable publications. A $10 Sports Illustrated effectively became a $20.00 Sports Illustrated over the last few years because the rate to ship a magazine plus a bit more to cover packing materials and those obnoxious eBay fees on the postage is roughly $9-$10. It is a perfect IRL example of what escalating transaction costs can do, and I am concerned that it will happen to cards too.

Interesting aside here: before the Pasadena show, I remarked that wanted to push publications because I was unable to sell them TTM due to high shipping costs. It turns out that I actually sold all of my baseball related Quick magazines and a few boxer related books too. Quick was a small format magazine that could be ‘pocketed’ readily for a train rider’s entertainment. It was a tabloid with lots of cheesecake, sports and entertainment covers. The magazines retail from around $5 on up, with a nice baseball cover in the $10-$20 range. They sold well at a show because there were no shipping costs to raise the cost for the buyer by 80% or more.

Looking at the rate hike from a macro level, I think that it favors larger retailers in two ways. First, a larger retailer might absorb the hit for a while, but a small retailer with a smaller sales base simply does not have the financial capacity to pay a third more for shipping and not pass it on. I would deem that “fairly unfair”, if that makes sense; a change that affects all shippers equally means that the stronger (usually larger) business will handle it better, and those businesses ‘win’ the right to absorb the higher shipping costs and take market share from the smaller guys who do not eat it. But that isn’t the whole story of the latest rate change. The headline should be that the new rate is not just pricing in inflation for the sake of cost-coverage across the board, it is transferring wealth from smaller retailers and consumers to corporate plutocrats. Buried in the fine print is the fact that the big shippers with negotiated sweet discount deals are exempted from the rate hike. In other words, small retailers now are subsidizing the USPS infrastructure so it can be used by the Amazons of the world at a discount.

“Big fucks small always.”

In an unrelated item, I have been having an interesting dialogue with @thebaseballcardinvestor1 about my column on alterations. We have been kicking around the idea of what someone can do to protect themselves from altered vintage cards. My only suggestion besides putting in the hours to learn enough to spot an alteration is to build a solid trade relationship with a reputable, stable dealer who will stand behind his wares even if there is no contractual or legal need to do so. It will cost you more, no doubt, but knowing that if there is something bad you may be able to circle back for a refund may be worth it. I have actually had that happen once with a really good counterfeit card that I did not catch for a while. The dealer made good, no questions asked, to preserve a fruitful long-term trade relationship. On the other hand, I had to chase down a guy over two counterfeit cards at the National (I wrote about it last year), and that wasn’t pretty.

My bottom line for investors is that if you don’t know enough what you are investing in to act at an expert level, either work with someone who does or just buy something else.

Our discussion does once again raise the interesting question of whether it really matters to the majority of the Hobby whether I or anyone else think that the card is altered if the card is in a TPA holder. The answer is “maybe”. My position when I sell graded cards is that I am selling you an integrated product, and you are buying PSA or SGC or CGC’s opinion of the card, not mine. What I think doesn’t matter and I am not going to say a word unless I know something is bad because I made it that way. That I would have to disclose. Otherwise, it is just my opinion v. PSA’s opinion, or as we call it in lawyering, a whore fight. You like and trust PSA, I am not here to tell you otherwise. Collect as you want. As a buyer, however, you bet your sweet bippy that I am going to scream bloody murder if I think a card is altered, regardless of what some grader thinks. Each of us has that choice to make.

I will throw one more log on the alterations fire: common sense. I have heard some really idiotic stuff come out of TPAs in regard to alterations. They can’t catch a simple trimming on a 1950s Topps card but they can invent all sorts of nonsense on esoteric issues, which is probably why my signed 1968 Crack Pele card from Argentina is identified as hand-cut on the PSA label. It ain’t: I can show you a picture of the packs the cards came in. I will give you another great example, 19th century photos. They are rare as hell and delicate. I recently found an 1890s photo of Jim Corbett (the heavyweight champ) from a theatrical appearance that was shot by a famous photographer. I was actually able to pin down the precise session it came from by matching it to other known cabinet photos that the photographer made where Corbett is wearing the exact same suit and tie. This one is a unique portrait pose but 100% from the same photographer and session. I would have to be a friggin’ idiot to try and alter it, let alone make it into a Frankencard cabinet. If the photo itself is rare as hell (and very expensive) it doesn’t make financial sense to mess with it, but that does not stop TPAs from hallucinating all sorts of things when they are out of their wheelhouse.

Next week’s column will be delayed until Monday as I travel to Chicago to spend a week with 125,000 other card dorks. My griping will resume Monday the 26th. If you are joining me, safe travels.

I bring this up now because Keith Olbermann’s restored T206 Wagner has been authenticated by CGC and is being sold by Love of the Game Auctions. LOTG’s proprietor, Al Crisafulli, is a dear personal friend and overall great guy for the Hobby, KO is a legendary collector, and I am absolutely thrilled that at long last, finally, we are getting art world treatment of our little works of art, all up-front and disclosed as it should be, as Mr. Olbermann aptly put it in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter:

“You don’t stick arms back on the Venus de Milo, you don’t do it on every occasion, and you don’t have to do it with every card, but I think it would be better if the restoration work that has been done on cards in this hobby were up front…”

I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, the Hobby hasn’t quite caught up with us yet. Many collectors are of the mindset that as long as PSA or SGC or some other TPA they like vouches the card as a specific grade, it is that grade, regardless of whether it is altered, and the “A” on the holder is a scarlet letter worthy of scorn. I completely understand how that mentality evolved; reliance on authority figures or organizations is very comforting when money is involved. Hell, I rely on a financial manager to manage and invest my money because I don’t have the requisite expertise to do so. But I do not abrogate my critical thinking functions in the process. Likewise, it is also dangerous to rely on purported card experts uncritically. I’ve been collecting T206 for 45 years, and in that time, I’ve seen two things starting with the rise of TPAs: (1) more high-grade T206 than ever existed in the wild, and (2) so many skinny high-grade T206 cards that I feel like Goldilocks when I try to add to my collection, searching for one that is “just right”. At the root, all you are relying on at a TPA are other people, in this case with alleged expertise that often is not as deep as a collector who is into a specific set or type of card. I know; I’ve consulted on boxing and Exhibit cards for TPAs. I’ve actually had people pull me over to TPA booths at the National to explain what a specific card is, and it gets into a slab based on what I say. Considering my obvious defects and prejudices, that’s some pretty scary power to let me wield, right? Yet, that is the way the TPA sausage is made.

The reliance on TPAs and the negative view of any and all alterations incentivizes people to try and slip slop past the TPAs and leaves collectors vulnerable to all sorts of manipulations. For the moment, let’s set aside the evildoer in the basement or garage using sophisticated techniques to shave a card (I will come back to that bozo; he should have his balls in a vise) and discuss the more prevalent activities, the myriad submissions that are ‘prepared’ before being sent in.

I am not against anything being done to a card. That would be silly. You want to wipe off the front of your shiny shit (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and make it even shinier before you white-glove it into a Card Saver for the yearlong journey to and from PSA, be my guest. I am also for beneficial alterations.

The most obvious example of a beneficial alteration is a properly performed effort to conserve deteriorating paper. In the next few decades more and more of our old cardboard is going to rot away, courtesy of Mr. Lignin. Lignin is a compound in wood pulp, which is what was used to make many old cards. It interacts with environmental conditions to create acid that destroys paper. That toning you see on some older cards, like strip cards or 1940 Play Ball, that is acid slowly eating up the card. The chemical reaction can be halted and some of the damage reversed with proper conservation techniques. Otherwise, the cards get brittle, brown and ultimately crumble like old newspapers. Soaking old cards out of scrapbooks can be another example of conservation; scrapbooks are typically made of cheap paper that is highly acidic, which is why they are crumbly and have a certain odor to them. That acid eats at the cards, as can be seen when a card is soaked out and has a toning pattern on the areas of the back where the paper wasn’t buffered by water-soluble paste. The good news is that much of the older cardboard is of high quality, probably with substantial cotton rag content, and is not showing the same signs of age as 1920s strip cards and other obviously lignin-affected issues. You can also slow down the process by getting them away from the acid source and with proper storage. Soaking and buffering a deteriorating card to preserve it, or removing it from a scrapbook with proper techniques, yeah, I am all for that. You don’t let artworks or historical documents fall apart on you.

I am also keen on removing extraneous crud from cards, like wax or pencil marks, if it doesn’t damage the card itself. That stuff wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. One common clean-up is to remove wax. Many postwar cards like Topps have varnished fronts. All that means is that a layer of sealant is applied to the front of the card to give it that glossier finish. Typical pack-sealing wax does not penetrate that layer (gum stains are a mixed bag). If a card was at the back of the wax pack facing out, the wax sometimes stained the card front. Since the varnish makes the card surface impermeable to wax, however, the wax sits there for decades, inert but picking up dust and dirt until the front of the card looks freckled, but it is almost always removable with proper technique. Wax on, wax off doesn’t affect the card and shouldn’t affect the value.

Markings are highly variable. Many postcard vendors lightly pencil prices onto the card backs. Sometimes you find a beautiful Exhibit card or postcard, flip it over, and see a price mark. If the mark is lightly applied pencil and does not break the surface layer of paper or create an indentation, it can be erased with a specialized art eraser to the point where the removal is undetectable.

Any honest grader worth a damn will admit that these things are undetectable and are not going to result in a rejection. And they should not, as far as I am concerned. I see returning the card to its as-issued state without adding to it as a form of conservation, and it is high time that our cards are treated as what they are: preservation-worthy small works of art with aesthetic and cultural importance.

A removal ostensibly falls under the heading of “conservation” if properly done, but trimming a card has only one goal: fool a TPA to get paid. And the card doctors are really, really good. PWCC (pre-Fanatics; nothing but respect here for Fanatics) built a business on selling trimmed cards that doctors had gotten past TPAs to inexperienced and/or greedy collectors who bought the flips instead of the cards. I had one purchase with PWCC, and my dance with the devil in the pale moonlight did not go well. In 1948 a Spanish gum company called “Tabay” issued a ridiculously tough set of small real photo cards. The cards were issued in series, one series per month, and given away by retailers to gum buyers. Each card had a minuscule print run. Tabay issued some boxing cards, including Joe Louis, who I collect, so I had to have it. They do not come up for sale often. I bought a graded ‘near mint’ Louis card from PWCC and when I got it and compared it to my other raw examples from the issue, it was clearly severely trimmed. PWCC gave me a very hard time returning it, BTW, despite their money-back guarantee. Serves me right for laying down with dogs…

The trimmers have been in the shadows for the most part, though one of them, a former NFL player turned card dealer and trimmer named Evan Mathis, posted a step-by-step trimming video on TikTok (later deleted). In addition to outing his own shady practices—never a good idea for a card seller—Mathis later doubled down on his indiscretion. When asked on Twitter whether he disclosed trimming to card buyers, ‘MENSA’ Mathis wrote “Only when they say ‘Show me the CARDFAX.’” Har-dee-har-har. Yeah, I can see the card buyers who read that after seeing the video just rushing to do business with Mr. Comedy there. Just in case you are wondering, selling a card that you trimmed as an unaltered card without disclosing that you trimmed it is fraud even if a TPA blessed it, and if you use the mail to send it and an electronic payment service to get paid, welcome to the wonderful world of mail and wire fraud. Ask Bill Mastro: he went to prison in part for selling the trimmed PSA 8 T206 Wagner without disclosing that he had personally trimmed the card.

Not to say that raw cards are safer, far from it. I have come across many altered cards in the wild. When I was building a 1971 Topps baseball set by hand, with the nice black borders and atrocious centering, I found a ton of cards with alterations, mostly recolored tips but also trimmed edges. I am certain that I have some altered cards in my collection (besides the ones I bought with full knowledge of the alterations); I don’t know of any, but the odds simply favor it being so. About all I can say is that if you want to avoid getting burned with altered cards, you must develop a feel for what you collect, and that takes experience. Substitute reliance on a TPA for developing experience and you are primed to be taken to the cleaners.

Regardless of where you sit on the conservation-alteration spectrum, one thing we all need to get over is the childish resistance to discussing these things intelligently. The issues are varied, from helpful (buffering a card with ongoing acid damage) to benign (soaking a card out of a scrapbook, wax or writing removal) to hit you over the head obvious fraud (undisclosed trimming). There is no single approach to all of it. That doesn’t stop collectors from being truly silly about card alterations. Just think critically and for yourselves, folks. A skinny, high grade T206 that isn’t an American Beauty is a big, flashing warning sign even if it made it into a TPA holder. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but if you really want that percentage to go way up, go after the sheeple who blindly rely on graders.

Not that the graders would ever admit that they make mistakes. Maintaining the facade of infallibility is critical to their marketing efforts. In my not so humble opinion, the investors backing the people at the top of the grading food chain are the type who would sell their own sisters for a dollar, so expecting those avaricious pigs to do anything except try to max out their ROI is just pointless. Whenever I read their blather about serving collectors rather than making money, all I can think is: “yeah, pull the other leg and it plays Jingle Bells.”

Our eBay Jackass of the Week isn’t so much a jackass as a seemingly normal person who is unfamiliar with the concept of a “you” problem. The card is logged with the USPS on June 9^th in Burbank and tracks as delivered in Texas on June 12^th. The buyer files a request on June 14^th claiming he doesn’t have the card. He also posts feedback stating he still doesn’t have the card. I respond to the request with the tracking info, which he can see too, and tell him that I won’t agree to a refund. His nonsense response is that he wasn’t asking for a refund, just the tracking. Bullshit. He can see the tracking on his purchases page and can click the same USPS link as I can to check it. The only reason to open a formal request is to set up for a refund claim. That claim will be a dead-bang loser. All eBay and I can go on is what the post office says and if the post office shows it as delivered and it isn’t an obvious mistake (like when they accidentally scan it in and mark it delivered at the same time, which I have seen), that’s the end of it as far as my duties as a seller.

I don’t want to accuse the buyer of being a crook because there are a number of good faith explanations for this:

--The carrier marked it delivered today but still has it on the truck and will hand it over tomorrow.

--The item was stolen out of an unsecured mailbox.

--The item got mixed with the mound of circulars and junk that we all seem to get and got thrown out.

--The item was delivered to the wrong address. That happened to me once. A 2^nd year Bobby Orr card got delivered one block over. The neighbor didn’t want to walk it over to me, so he put it back in the box with a wrong address note. Six months later the card appeared in my mailbox in Los Angeles; must’ve gone back to Boston and walked across country.

Regardless of what he says he is doing or why, the “I didn’t get it” bit is the buyer sniffing around for a refund, and I won’t have it. I want to act aggressively in those cases to cut off that kind of crap right at the knees. I don’t need to deal with a refund claim, even a spurious one, so best to peremptorily disabuse the buyer of the idea that he has a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting one if he files a claim. Again, I am not trying to be an asshole, but I have found it most efficient to assume that everyone else is, for my own protection. Like the referee says, protect yourself at all times.

Note that I am putting my store on a summer break status, so this will be the last jackass segment for a while. I am going to Chicago in a few weeks and will post daily columns from the heart of the Hobby; don’t miss it.

One vendor had what must’ve been 30,000 cards in a series of 3,600 count vendor boxes. Given the layer of filth on the holders, my guess is that the vendor picked a storage locker for them. It was a pile of crap ranging from 1970s baseball in lower grade through cards as recent as two years ago but the way it was organized and stored suggests to me that it was the wreckage of another dealer’s defunct operation or maybe even a store. There was no way on earth that I was going to go through all of that stuff in any amount of time, nor was there any way that I was going to be able to buy it all from him because he was charging $3 a card and wasn’t discounting. At three dollars a card at least 90% of what is there clearly was not worth buying but there might have been some needles in that haystack. I could not budge the dealer off a mid-four-figure payout for the whole, so buying it out was a dead letter.

That said, I could not resist going through some of the cards because the first row of cards I flipped through casually had a 1983 Topps Joe Montana a few cards in. The third year Montana is worth several dollars in nice shape (and this one was in really nice shape), and I don’t have one. That was enough incentive to keep me looking. Every row or so I ran across a few other cards as well that were good buys and kept me going. I must’ve spent about 40 minutes there before I finally decided to throw in the towel and leave.

The last card I found was a minty-fresh 1990 Leaf Frank Thomas. If you were collecting in 1990-91 you might recall the Thomas card as the single hottest card of that time. The Big Hurt was the real deal, and the 1990 Leaf set was Donruss’s triumphant answer to Upper Deck. In 1991, the card booked as high as $150 in the Beckett Baseball Card Monthly price guide. That’s $362 in today’s dollars. While the card has fallen by 95%+ over the years inflation adjusted, it still sells readily for $15 or so raw, so it was a good pickup for me.

I was happy with those cards until I found a booth literally at the farthest end of the flea market with a seller who had about five or six boxes of cards. The cards were in holders, and it appeared that they were another batch of dead dealer inventory. He told me that the 50s cards were $3 each and the later cards were $2 each. I started in on two boxes of baseball and other sports cards. I saw a stack of 1972-73 Topps basketball and the first card was Earl Monroe; a good sign that the group was unpicked, so I stayed. Pulled an Artis Gilmore RC, some early football, and a couple of minor fifties baseball rookies.

A guy who had gotten there before me was going through the box of cards on the left side. I happened to glance over as he pulled a 1988 Fleer Michael Jordan card out of the box of $2 Pokemon cards. And he knew it.

I wanted to puke. I didn’t find anything remotely close to that level of value in the cards I was going through. If I’d been there earlier instead of wading through that morass of crapola at the other table, I’d have had a $200 Jordan card for two bucks instead of a $15 Thomas for three bucks. Watching a home run like that sail past is one of the worst experiences a picker has. It happens and I will enjoy the Thomas card in my PC, but…D’oh!

I’ve also noticed some things about vendors in the last few months that I think is a signal to the rest of us. First is the way that cards are offered. In the past, I would walk around and see accumulations of cards in roughly the format they were found; a shoebox or a tote, never holdered, rarely an actual card box, and offered in bulk readily. Lately, however, most all of the accumulations I see are relatively organized and in hobby-related boxes. Most are in holders. Prices are $2-$3 per card, getting discount prices on a buyout basis is like pulling teeth (and the demands are astronomical when they do respond), and a sizable minority (still) of dealers have showcases with cards they think are worth more. Which can be pretty amusing when they know jack squat about cards but maybe know sports. In other words, a lot more flea market dealers are full-on retailing cards because they know enough not to blow them out.

I am not sure what this means exactly, but my suspicion is that we are reaching a maximum level of information penetration about the value of cards, which may mark the potential apex of the market for cards. When the “ignorant” masses figure out that cards are valuable and they start to behave like hobby dealers, I think that the gold rush has entered the nth stage. That sort of behavior, in my opinion, has proceeded market tops in every other big run we have had. A further sign of the information saturation is that our local Fox News affiliate had a rather lovely local reporter outside of Burbank Sportscards doing man-on-the-street interviews when I dropped by there on June 30^th to get some holders. No, she did not talk to me. The place was mobbed, no spots left in the parking lot in the middle of a Tuesday, and she was doing some human-interest piece on rising card prices.

Non-hobby news interest, jammed card stores, everyone and his uncle thinking they are dealers and getting in on the game: maybe it is time for the pros to take some profits. Joe Kennedy was rumored to have sold his stocks shortly before the 1929 crash (and then made even more when he shorted the market) because he heard shoeshine boys giving stock tips and figured if everyone is all-in, he wants out. I’m of the same mindset so I am cashing out some highly appreciated items. Things may still go up a ways but you have to know when to be a piggy and when to get out of the pig pen.

Our eBay Jackass of the Week is a seller (for once) and is a perpetrator of one of the worst sins of mail order: tape. I ship with the low-adhesion blue painter’s tape to avoid the inevitable damage that other tape use will cause if there is a mishap. I wish others did the same.

There are two forms of bad shipping practices when it comes to tape. The first and most common is the sellers who mummify their wares in tape sarcophagi without regard to the fact that the recipients will then need to get their cards out of all that packaging without damaging them. I would really prefer that the act of retrieving my new card from the mail not include an extraction procedure that requires the precision of getting a spy out of Moscow in 1955.

This seller didn’t mummify my card but did commit the other cardinal sin of tape management: if you are going to use a toploader, put the card in a penny sleeve and then seal the fuckin’ holder! I won a raw card auction in three figures and when it arrived, I found that because the seller didn’t use a sleeve or seal the toploader, the card slid out of the unsealed holder in transit and lodged under the scotch tape the seller used to secure the top loader to a mis-sized piece of cardboard. The front of the card is now stuck under the tape. If I try to remove it, I will tear off a nice half-inch wide piece of paper right on the front of the card. The seller sent me a refund, but due to his negligence the card is wrecked. I am especially disappointed because the card in question was the last one that I needed to finish a signed run of a really tough regional baseball issue. I didn’t bid on one in another auction that coincidentally popped up because I had this one in my sights.

As Bernie Sanders might say: “Enough with the damn tape already!”

The source of my epiphany about dumb money literally was “Dumb Money”, as in the film about the GameStop meme stock short squeeze that broke a short selling hedge fund and damaged others. The story explained that Wall Street professionals contemptuously refer to retail investors (all of the rest of us) as the “dumb money” investors. Spoiler alert: some of them got pantsed by the dumb money when they tried to break Game Stop. The reasons why people stepped in on Robin Hood and invested completely irrationally in the stock were varied, ranging from someone who just liked to visit the store and didn’t want to see it close to social networking, to those who felt that “buy and hodl” [sic] was a statement of class resistance to the plutocrats behind the corporate bust-outs that have enriched themselves and destroyed thousands of working-class lives.

As I watched, I realized that I was seeing behavioral patterns on the part of the Wall Street elite that tracked my comments on investors in what I affectionately call “shiny shit.” Just because I do not see the investment logic behind buying the stuff doesn’t mean the investors in shiny shit are wrong. To paraphrase George Carlin, never underestimate the power of dumb money acting in big enough numbers. As was the case of the short squeeze in the movie, dumb money in sufficient quantity can defy the gravity of rational analysis. It is a trend and momentum play that may not be forever, but it is a real thing, and as a supposedly dispassionate card investor, I should focus on the trend rather than just poo-poo the people chasing it as dumb money.

Which isn’t to say that I am going to run out and become a Pokémon acolyte. As far as I am concerned, they are still shitty and I have no interest in them per se, but I am not going to make money on 1973 Topps Kung Fu and 1976 Topps Star Trek (even if I did correctly anticipate and get in on 1977 Topps Star Wars and the 1960s and 1970s Donruss and Topps Marvel cards and stickers). What I plan to do is some deep dive research into TCG (including but not limited to Pokémon) and keep my eyes open for opportunities, especially in lesser-known game sets where there may be information asymmetries at work. At Pasadena I was set up across from someone who dealt exclusively in Dragon Ball (don’t ask me, I just know it is anime related). Seems like that might be a good contrarian play in the TCG arena.

Now, on to funner vintage stuff. I was listening to an investment analyst talking about what to do in a frothy stock market and I thought he had some good ideas as applied to this thing of ours, especially given the way prices have gone up so dramatically over the last year on vintage baseball. I have a few ideas. As always, this is not investment advice, just some of my brain farts: should anything go wrong, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck, Mr. Phelps:

Hedging: I wish we could use options to hedge against a downturn, but hard assets like cards don’t work like that. My hedging plan is to get some money off the table now by cashing in appreciated cards that I don’t really appreciate. I have been selling lower grade postwar mainstream superstars lately. Prices are strong for these cards, I am way up on them, and they are readily replaced if I want when the inevitable downturn hits. I am also going to sell off some of my underperforming dogs and harvest some losses to offset the big gains. No reason to throw a third of my money in the tax toilet come December.

Cowboy Account: For those unfamiliar with the term, it is slang for an account you establish with a small percentage of your funds (5% of your portfolio at most) that you use to gamble on whatever SWAG investments catch your fancy. If you score, great, but if you lose, it limits your losses. I would consider doing the same with some cash, maybe buy and break some unopened and see what I pull. If nothing else, it might be fun.

Long term holds: I think of this as active re-focusing. I maintain a list of my cards worth more than a certain threshold and I watch them. If they rise substantially, I reassess whether I want to keep them. I’ve sold off some valuable cards this way and have never regretted it.

One thing that complicates all investing strategy is collecting; I don’t just try to profit on cards, I collect them. I can’t just dump a highly appreciated card if I want it to be part of my collection. If I do, I am betting on a price drop in the near future of sufficient magnitude to make it worthwhile to buy it back AND that a replacement copy of the card will be available when I want it. I am still waiting in vain for a 1952 Topps Mays to crater. On that card, sure, I can try to arbitrage it when there is a downturn; an N300 Mayo, maybe not so much.

This eBay Jackass of the Week cracked me up. I am presenting it verbatim, so you can see what I mean:

“what is the best price you can offer because shipping was high, im a teacher so its summer and trying to stay on a budget, thank you so much”

So, probably not an English teacher and definitely not grammar. I’d grade that one a D.

The teacher reference is the classic appeal to emotion fallacy. Teacher, hooker, serial killer: I don’t care. You’re buying a collectible, not interviewing to be my kid’s nanny. What you do is irrelevant.

Oh, and the budget part? A $15 item with $7.90 shipping is a budget breaker? Wow, that must be some tight collecting budget. Maybe I can help a brother out, but before I do I check Teach’s feedback: 881 purchases in the last twelve months. 68 in the month since school let out. Budget, spending spree; po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

No discount for you! Come back, one year!

I am skeptical of sinking today’s exorbitant grading fees into a low to midgrade mainstream card in the hope of a ROI in the future. Obviously, this does not apply to a marquee card like a 1952 Mantle or a 1954 Aaron RC. Insanely high demand cards appreciate in every grade because people want them regardless of condition and I would not hesitate to send in even a beater. Hell, I have:

And I am very happy with the results, aesthetically and financially speaking.

I feel pretty safe in that position, but I cannot predict the future; I ain’t Criswell. Or a member of Congress. If I was, I’d be insider trading stocks right now instead of sharing time with you fine folks. What I do think is worth considering is this:

1. “You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity.” —Bullet Tooth Tony: ignorance of grading standards is swelling the population of lower and mid-grade cards in slabs. Most people sending vintage cards in for grading simply are not competent to assess the condition of their cards accurately to determine whether it makes sense to grade them. The result is a ton of lower grades and disappointment. At Pasadena, a whole bunch of newbie collectors told me they planned to submit cards for grading that I can tell in a momentary review just will not achieve a grade sufficient to justify the cost of the service. I know one guy who spent thousands with PSA grading what he was sure was a find of near mint or better 1950s cards. He got back mostly 2-5 range grades and was just apoplectic over it. When he showed me the encapsulated cards and the hundreds of raw cards he still had that he said were comparable, I knew why: the cards were absolutely beautiful examples with mostly crisp corners and edges and booming gloss, great eye appeal, but there were technical flaws in all of them due to storage damage over the decades that would drive down a formal grade; a warped 7 looks fabulous bit grades a 2. Had he asked anyone with experience submitting cards before he sent them in, he would have been advised not to do it. What he ended up with were gorgeous low-grade slabbed cards not worth the sunk fees.

2. Evolving standards in grading has long been the case depending on who is running the TPGs. What is different now is the pace and inconsistency of evolution. They have sped up with the wave of expansions of TPG staff since COVID. G.O.D. [the Grader Of Death] has always existed at PSA; what has gone up as a result of the boom is the frequency and unpredictability of G.O.D.-like outcomes. I have been doing this a very long time. My prediction rate on my TPG submissions was about 90% within one-half grade of actual (there was usually a 1-in-10 wild grade or no-grade in there). Even with that level of experience, I am now surprised with every order I send in by at least 20% of the results, either way, regardless of which service I used, and the surprise margins are bigger. It seems that everyone hands me a few gift grades and a few Please Submit Again grades. I know players in the high-grade mainstream postwar card field with similar time in the game who have been shocked lately at the inconsistent grades they are getting. We are a small minority in the collecting community simply by reason of our decades as collectors, but we are bellwethers in terms of outcome. If we can’t get it right as often as before, it is a low odds crapshoot for collectors with less experience and skill at assessing cards to lay out $30+ to get a grade.

What this means overall is that there are a ton of low-grade and mid-grade slabs out there with a pop growing every day as suckers, er, customers send in more unworthy cards for slabbing on a hope and a prayer.

What does a growing pop of these cards mean over the long term? I think about modern cards as an analogy: with rare exceptions, the glut of slabbed cards with similar technical grades means in the long term is that all you will really compete on is price. While that effect is not as profound with vintage simply because time has worn cards differently in different collections and you don’t have thousands and thousands of identical looking cards for sale at the same time, it is a question of scale more than a difference of market dynamics. I had a very good example of that at the Pasadena show: I had a showcase full of postwar mainstream HOFers and superstars in lower grades marked to market. So did some other dealers. I did not sell one of them, but I sold several similar cards on REA’s marketplace at about 80%-90% of market over the same weekend. I could undercut eBay results and prices due to the lower commission at REA. Call me crazy but I do not want to be invested in something so commonplace that the only way I move things when I need to sell is to undercut the market, wherever the market price may be at the time. I want my long-term investment holdings to be items that are either objectively rare or very high demand (preferably both attributes in the same item) regardless of grade. I have some cards like that, and I am not exactly surprised whenever another example hits the auction block and the crowd goes nuts.

For my money, if I wanted to get low-to-mid-grade mainstream postwar cards in slabs, I would not submit them. I would shop for the cheapest examples of graded cards with the best eye appeal for the grade rather than bucking the tiger and sending in my own raw cards. In that regard, the market actually favors the experts because of the submitter ignorance I mentioned above. Disappointment is profitable. I don’t want to tell you how little I paid for that poor sucker’s inventory; suffice it to say that his sunk grading costs were far more than I paid for the entire collection, graded and raw, and I turned a profit on the deal at his expense.

Our eBay Jackass of the Week is of the ‘so stupid that I am scared that he drives’ variety. Simple set of facts: I sold a $15 card, eBay standard envelope shipping, it got lost in the mail. After we waited a few weeks past the due date for the card to show up, he PM’d me that it had not arrived and asked what to do. I told him:

“It’s lost. Please start a refund claim with eBay and I can then apply for an insurance reimbursement.”

Now, what would you do? File a claim for an item not received? Pretty foolproof, but the problem with fools is that they are so ingenious. How about instead of that you request to return the card you say you never got? Yeah, that’s the ticket! I receive a return request with this message:

“I semt a.return and you have to accept.”

Umm, how is he supposed to return a card he never received? My response:

“No, I do not. You cannot return an item you say you never received. You need to call eBay and explain that you never received it and opened the wrong kind of case by accident.”

Did he do that? Not so far.

I think I know what happened. The menu for a purchase has a “Return an Item” button but doesn’t have a single click button for “Item not received”. It does have a button for “Help and Report”, which is where you have to go to deal with an item that never arrived. Once you get to that page, it has a visual menu for “Need help with a recent order?” where you can pick your item and make a claim. I guess that was too much for Mr. Shitwit to manage, so he filed a false return claim instead. I declined the return and reported him for a misuse of returns.

Now, just in case you think I am being a dick about it, I would refund him for the loss—neither of us is at fault—but not if he kills my opportunity to use eBay’s shipping insurance to be made whole. The insurance won’t pay off if the item appears to have been delivered, and filing a return request means exactly that. I can’t and I won’t follow him down the rabbit hole of a false return narrative. The problem, of course, is that if I participate and accept a false return request, there is a spiraling set of absurdities and consequences that ensues. eBay generates a return shipping envelope for Mr. Genius to use. He has nothing to put into it. If he doesn’t ship back that tracked envelope, he doesn’t get a refund. When he figures that out, his next Sheldon Cooper-esque move no doubt would be to ship me an empty envelope or an envelope with a different card in it. I would then have to file a misuse of returns report with eBay due to my not receiving the item, and we dance on and on. See what I mean?