The garage door was open and Duane & Shirley were already there when I arrived at the garage sale 45 minutes before it’s advertised starting time. As I walked into the garage, Duane had just picked up an old baseball glove off a table and was looking at it.
“What do you think? Not a bad looking glove, huh?”, he asked as he held it out to me. It was a kid’s glove from the 1930s to 1940s with the standard player’s name embossed in the leather. No one I’d ever heard of but in nice enough condition to easily bring $25 to $35 on eBay at the time.
“No price. I wonder what they want for it”, he said as I handed it back to him. I looked around the garage, didn’t find anything of interest, and when I left Duane was still holding the glove as he waited for Shirley to finish going through a pile of doilies.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later they arrived at another sale just as I was leaving. “What did you have to pay for the glove?”, I asked.
Duane answered, “I didn’t buy it. They wanted $3 and I decided that was a little too much.”
Too much for him maybe, but not too much for me. I jumped into the Explorer and hightailed it the six or seven blocks back to the sale to see if it was still there. When I walked back into the garage there it was, laying in the middle of one of the tables - still no price on it.
I picked it up and asked, “how much for the glove?”
“I told someone three dollars but he thought that was too much. How about two?”, was her response. I gave her two one dollar bills and left with the glove.
That evening I wrote the eBay listing for the glove starting it at $9.99, and the following Sunday evening the auction went live. Within 24 hours the bidding was over $100 and I was scratching my head trying to figure out what was happening. When it hit $200 the following day, I did a Google search for the name on the glove - Pepper Martin.
It turned out Pepper Martin was a pretty popular player during his day. He was also a pretty good baseball player. He played his entire career, from the mid 1930s until 1944, for the St. Louis Cardinals. He still has the third highest World Series career batting average ever at .418, and is tied for ninth in World Series stolen bases with seven.
He also had a reputation for punching umpires at times when he didn’t agree with their calls. When he retired from actively playing, he managed several minor league teams where is reputation for assaulting umpires grew. At one point he was suspended for choking an umpire over a disputed call.
Oh, and after seven days, the glove sold for $353.07.
The eBay Moral Of The Story - Actually, there are two of them.
One, don’t be in a big rush to get things listed all the time. Sometimes, even just five or ten minutes spent doing a little research can greatly increase what an item finally brings. If I’d Googled Pepper’s name before listing the glove, I would have included his name in the auction headline. That might have attracted even more bidders and driven the final price even higher.
Two, even when you don’t know what your doing, you can get lucky on eBay once in a while.
Photograph by Jim Epler.
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