SoCal Theologica: Musings from the West Coast

I am typically not interested in sharing the stupid things I do.  However, this one was pretty novel.

When I was 12 years old my friends and I were into baseball cards.  None of us were serious because they were just baseball cards.  Right?  It came about that I bought a card off my buddy for a nickel.  We laughed about the guy’s name because none of us had heard of it before.  A few weeks later I went to my first baseball show, where an adult at the show noticed the funny named card as well.  He asked me if I was a fan of the recently deceased Thurman Munson.  I looked at him as though he had three eyes.  Who wasn’t a fan of Munson?  So he gave me two Munson cards for the one funny-named guy.  It was no problem to trade.  After all, the card was much smaller and nobody had heard of Honus Wagner.  Everybody knew Thurman Munson.  Of the countless times in my adult life that I have all but dissolved into a silent string of profanities over that deal so long ago, this news story almost pushed me over the edge.

Here is an excerpt from a news story about the same card that was worth two Thurman Munson cards in the Fall of 1979.

CHICAGO  —  An Arkansas man bought a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card for $1.62 million at a memorabilia auction in Chicago, a sports auction company said Saturday.

The record price for a baseball card is $2.8 million — paid in 2007 for a near-mint condition Wagner card released in 1909 by the American Tobacco Company.

John Rogers, 35, of North Little Rock, Ark., said his winning bid for the T206 Wagner card is the realization of a decades-long dream.

“I call this the holy grail of baseball cards,” Rogers said in a phone interview. “I’ve looked at a number of other specimens, sat in a few other Wagner auctions. But this is the one that makes collecting worth while.”

That’s right. . . 1.62 million.  Oh well, read the whole story here while praying for my sanctification.