Strategy

I’ve taken to collecting White Sox team autographed baseballs. In fact, I’m toying with the idea of constructing a family tree, with marriages or births marked with a team ball from that particular year. God and lottery willing—1939 will be the starting date—I might just be able to pull this off. I also want a run of balls, 1960-1980, teams from after Comiskey ownership and before Jerry Reinsdorf. This period marks the time from when I first became aware of the game to the peak of my fandom. Marriage and parenthood helped temper things. Anyway, I just got a ball on eBay from 1970, and I’m ecstatic. It’s hard to explain why, exactly. I mean, this is a team that went 56-106, with the third-worst winning percentage (.346) in franchise history. Not worst, mind you, but third-worst. This gives you an idea what it means to be a Sox fan. And, still, I loved this team, enough to want the autograph of someone like Bobby Knoop more than fifty years after the fact. I recently got outbid for a ball from 1991, the year of Clare’s birth, so I went into serious bidding mode. What, exactly, was the most I was willing to spend? An almost surefire way to win an eBay auction is to bet a huge amount on an item. That way, if someone comes in at literally the last second, you won’t get underbid. I’ve never spent more than $500 for an item, and there’ve been plenty of times when I’ve lost out at the last second, like on that 1991 ball. If I’d bid $1000 for something that wasn’t going to sell for close to that, what could possibly go wrong? Going up against someone with the same strategy, that’s what, but only a dollar cheaper. Somebody bids $999 for an item worth $200 and I bid a dollar more, you have yourself one happy seller and one severely burned buyer. No, thank you. So, I set an absolute top price I’d pay, waited for ten seconds left in the auction and bid it. Up until the last minute, only five people had bid on the baseball. I was one of three bidders in the last twenty-eight seconds. Two people guessed low, I won high. Let me note here that my high bid isn’t what shows; the winning price was merely a dollar over what the other guy bid, which was way below as high as I was willing to go. But second place comes away thinking, “I was outbid by a measly buck.” Better them than me. Buddy Bradford and Jerry Janeski, come to Poppa.