The yr is 1995. San Diego teammates Bip Roberts and Tony Gwynn, seated in an empty dugout, reflecting on a hard-fought labor battle or maybe the loving contact of an Arizona spring afternoon breeze, are speaking about baseball playing cards. Particularly, Roberts’ personal 1986 rookie card, which he declares to be price $275. “Twenty years from now,” he confides, “Who is aware of? One thousand, two thousand…”
Gwynn, idly thumbing by way of a value information, corrects him, noting that it’s truly price 4 cents. In glorious situation, Roberts retorts; ten cents in mint.
Roberts isn’t a lot of an funding adviser, because it seems. That ten-cent card, by way of the magic of inflation, would want to double in worth simply to maintain up with the price of residing. In actual life… nicely, it hasn’t. Sarcastically, the baseball card bubble had already burst by the point the industrial aired, because of the mixed forces of the lockout and the business’s mutually assured destruction by way of huge overproduction. Roberts’ true rookie card (technically 1987, not 1986; Bip did have a trio of 1986 playing cards, however they had been out there solely by way of interest shops, not commonplace units, so didn’t depend on the time) got here in what would later be described because the “junk wax period,” as producers cranked out cardboard at unfathomable charges. It isn’t price 20 cents.
