Wow

The auctions on Sportlots have always been hit-or-miss for me. Sometimes there's a proliferation of interesting items listed, and other times, it's just a bunch of glorified dime box cards. There are rarely enough new items listed each day to warrant my looking through them that often, but I have a found a couple of really good deals on there over the years, so with that in mind, I do go and skim through the relevant (to me) listings every couple of days or so. It usually only takes a couple of minutes, so even if I don't come across anything of interest, I don't feel like I've wasted much time, if any, looking.

Yesterday was one of those days that I went to look. Upon landing on the site, I noticed a familiar listing right there on the front of the site where they feature the auctions that are ending soon. I say familiar, because it feels like I had been seeing it for months, which, when discussing a Sportlots auction, is entirely possible. As an aside, for those that don't know, Sportlots auctions are ostensibly 3-day listings, but every time a new high bid is entered, the listing resets to day 1. So if there are enough interested parties, an auction on there could, in theory, go on almost indefinitely. I've never liked that format myself, but others seem to be okay with it, so maybe it's just a me thing.

Anyway, back to this old listing...

Oh, sorry, another quick aside, I've just finally learned how to take screenshots with my laptop and phone, so if anything looks off here, I'm still trying to get the hang of it.

Ok, so this the listing the caught my eye yesterday morning. I knew that I had seen it before, but it felt like it was many months ago. As it turns out, it was a rather old listing.

I couldn't get the whole history on to one page, but you can see that this auction started over two months ago. It looked like it might finally be ending when I saw it yesterday, and since you can't look at completed auctions on this site, I decided grab some of these images in case it was gone this morning -- which it was.

I didn't think to grab a close-up until after I had closed down my laptop last night.

I realize that I'm completely out of touch with just about everything at this point, and I'm sure that there are people out there who still go gaga over relic cards, and I'm also sure that someone's gonna tell me that a Mike Trout relic/patch something-or-another just recently sold for a million dollars (or some other ridiculous sum), but I just find it hard to believe that anyone would pay this much for one of these newer relics of very questionable origins (I also find it hard to believe that at least two people spent the last couple of months bidding back and forth for this particular card)  And this has nothing to do with the player featured, I mean I collect Roger Maris, or at least I try to; but even if money weren't an issue, I couldn't see myself ever paying more than a couple of dollars for this glorified insert.

The card itself is butt fugly, and Panini's guarantee on the back is just downright silly. It says something to the affect of "Panini of America guarantees that this game-worn material is authentic". Ha! It sure doesn't sound like Roger ever even saw this material, does it? In fact, that sort of disclaimer makes me think more of Stu, from the mail room, wearing this "material" during a recent game of Monopoly. And slapping a 1-of-1 on the back doesn't make it any more authentic. Now that I think about it though, maybe these bidders were both collectors of all things "Stu"? In a funny sort of  way, that might actually make more sense :)