One Man's Trash Is Another Man's $200 Million

There was a news item today about a man who bought some glass negatives at a yard sale ten years ago for $45, only to discover they were lost works from famed photographer Ansel Adams and are now worth in the neighborhood of $200 million. By all accounts neither the buyer nor the seller knew that they had in their hands at the time and it wasn't until later that the buyer discovered what they were and went into the process of authenticating them. This, of course, is every yard sale picker's dream - to buy an item at a yard sale for $3 only to discover that it was a doodle George Washington drew while he was waiting to cross the Delaware River and is now worth a billion dollars. When my family had a multi-house yard sale a couple years back there were people that got there before we said we were going to start in hopes of finding something of value before anyone else, including one woman who spent the morning going through a drawer of spoons one at a time and only ended up buying three of them. I am fairly confident that there was nothing of value to them, but now I'm not so sure. I wouldn't think there is anything of value in my attic or basement, unless you want some books that were on a third grade reading list or all the baseball hats I collected between the ages of 10 and 25, but that doesn't mean someone else wouldn't think they are valuable. (Still, it's a pretty safe bet my family won't be appearing on Cash in the Attic.) And, if someone did buy an item off of us and discovered it was of high value, then I say congratulations - it's better than buying a winning lottery ticket. I'm happy for those people.

The people I don't like are the ones who know what they are holding and are quite happy to "relieve" a seller of an item that they are unaware is worth a lot of money. I find those people to be incredibly sketchy. What you are basically doing is stealing right in their face. There is a show on the History Channel called Pickers, where that is all these two guys do: drive around and go through (usually older) people's stuff, buy off them for $50 and then cackle into the camera, "We can turn around and sell that for $150!" Well, yeah, you might have made a hundred bucks, but you did it in a really underhanded way. It makes my skin crawl - I can't watch the show without feeling a little bad for the people they are buying the stuff from. (This is why the much better shows are the ones where the experts help everyday people find stuff to put up at auction instead of taking it from them and gloating into the camera.) Perhaps this is why I have never made a good business person. I like to think that if I saw a signed Joe Montana football at a yard sale I would be the kind of person who would point out how valuable it could be to the seller (unless of course it has no certificate of authenticity, in which case it may as well be written in pencil). If this Ansel Adams story has taught me anything, it's that if the guys from Pickers show up at my door they aren't getting anywhere near my stuff.

-There was another no-hitter in Major League Baseball last night, the fifth official one of the season. (The record for no-hitters in one year is seven, if you were wondering.) What I have to laugh at is all the knee-jerk reactionists coming out and saying, "See what happens when you get all the hitter's off of steroids?! Year of the Pitcher! This is evidence that steroid testing works!" It sounds good in theory and no one is going to take the other side to argue that steroids are good for baseball, so everyone agrees with the premise and moves on. There is, of course, a giant hole in that logic - the fact that a lot of pitchers were on steroids, too. In fact, most of the guys who still get busted for steroids are pitchers. What I think is happening instead is the effects of everyday players no longer being allowed to take amphetamines to get up for all 162 games and thus the guy who only has to play one out of every fives games is much fresher than the guy who hasn't had an off-day in a week. Basically, baseball is back to being played the way it was for the first 80 years of its existence and once again proving that the oldest adage in baseball remains true: good pitching always beats good hitting.