Becooz. Just Becooz.

There is a trading-card equivalent to practically everything, including trading cards. The trading-card equivalent of trading cards is trading cards, and the trading-card equivalent of trading cards that are the trading-cards equivalent of trading cards is trading cards, and the trading-card equivalent of that is Sean Hannity beating on your skull with a hammer.

Yes, Virginia, there is even a trading-card equivalent to the age-old question, "How long after a breakup is the right time to start seeing someone else?" The correct answer to that question is 10-15 minutes, which is not the same as the answer to the trading-card equivalent of that question, which is, "How long after someone is retired or dead or good as dead (i.e., hitting below .270) is the right time to issue a set of cards showing no one else but them?

Just as there is an infinite range of answers to the first question, provided you have an atomic stopwatch, there is an infinite range of answers to the second question.

When the subject of the set is Sam Horn, the correct answer is there is no correct answer. Never is the right time for a Sam Horn set. For Star Company, the Sam Horn set was a spurned suitor who chooses a life of celibacy over more heartbreak, which brings to mind a fantasy-baseball story.

Scheduling issues had made it so the Krause Publications fantasy-baseball draft was to be held on opening day. Though this was in Iola and long before the ascension of the sports bar, there was a TV set above the bar at the Lakeview, and the drafters were paying attention to the game, the Red Sox and the Orioles, between picks.

This game just so happened to be the solitary game when Sam Horn transmogrified into Babe Ruth. He cranked three homers that day, prompting one of the Krauseites to jump on Horn in about the third round.

Naturally, that was it for Sam Horn for the year, but the picker remained defiant. He had gotten enough home runs out of Sam Horn to win his matchup for the week. He was happy and secure in the knowledge that everyone hated him anyway, even without dragging Sam Horn into it.

When the same thing happened even more inexplicably with Tuffy Rhodes, a Krauseite picker was all over him, too. But that person eventually regretted his choice. Besides, no one hated him.

Focus, Kit, focus. The reason this question is asked is not Sam Horn but someone who was as far removed from Sam Horn as you can get without leaving town. This player was epochally great, a winner, bald, and old. We are of course referring to Bob Cousy.

In Boston the right time to issue a Bob Cousy set is ... what time is it now? Bob Cousy and Bobby Orr are all the Beantowners need for life besides beans. And for Fenway Park to remain the charmingly anachronistic dump it is now, with bathrooms that make Adrian Beltre yearn for the slums of San Pedro de Macoris. And another world championship for the Celtics over the Lakers right now. Wait for basketball season, my eye. Oh, and something involving a Kennedy, any Kennedy, even Ian.

Sorry; back to Cousy. Bob Cousy has never been shy to admit that Bob Cousy was the greatest thing to happen to basketball since they booted the women in bloomers off the court. In this regard he is the basketball equivalent of Bob Feller, who we wish a speedy recovery while also noting that he never met a baseball that he didn't think could be improved by the addition of his signature. And that'll be 55 bucks, sonny.

Therefore, a Bob Cousy commemorative set – commemorating what? Oh, any old thing – is in Cousy's mind a capital idea.

In all fairness the set was not positioned as a commemorative set but as the "Bob Cousy Card Collection," which implies that it contains as many cards as my collection, which is somewhere in the millions, even if you leave out the Star Sam Horn set, which suffered fatal injuries by throwing itself in front of a rogue shredder, sacrificing its life to save the lives of its fellow (and much more valuable) cards, including its special friend, the Aurelio Monteagudo Traded card.

And seriously, the fact that this set is devoted to Bob Cousy means there are highlights aplenty, as opposed to the Sam Horn set, which by card three is delving into Horn's exploits with sunflower seeds in Pawtucket.

The Cousy cards are not unattractive, if you like rummage-sale signs. The fact that this card is a numbered specimen from the "Preview Edition" means its value has appreciated from nil to twice nil.

Listen: Cousy was a great basketball player – one of my favorites, truth be told. There would have been a Pete Maravich had there not been a Bob Cousy, but we would have deprived the ill-informed of the opportunity to say otherwise. But the question resonates like the bells in the Old North Church: Why Cousy? Why not Mantle or Mays or Orr or Russell or Williams (who, in all fairness, had his own card company) or Schmidt or Killebrew or Aaron or anyone but Cousy?

Simple: 'Cause someone with a little bit of money convinced Cousy it'd be a good idea. That's how it usually works, and that's how it worked here. That's how it worked for Sam Horn, too. And that's where the similarity ends – even in Boston.

Straw Dogs

Aw, to heck with it. I can't find this week's card. But here's the post anyway.


As I’ve mentioned several times on these electronic pages, when it comes to sports collectibles I have the world’s largest collection of worthless rarities. I am the person you call upon to fill out your Comic Ball 3 set, to score that elusive Pro Line Portraits autographed card of Aaron Cox, to hold in your hands the glory that is a Star Company Sam Horn set.

But what does that mean exactly? Does that mean I am the world’s greatest pure collector of sports memorabilia in the same unbearable, unlistenable way that Ornette Coleman was the world’s greatest pure musician, because I do not allow the joy of collecting to be sullied by the ogre of value?

I hope not. I wouldn’t wish that on BP. Besides, I have kids to put through college.

But to continue, grasshopper, what makes a worthless rarity outside of its lack of value, which is self-evident?

I guess to do that you need to know what makes a valuable rarity.

The valuable rarities I’ve seen have a couple of things going for them. First, they have a story. The Wagner card is the Wagner card in part because of the story, apocryphal or not, that it was pulled from circulation because Honus Wagner did not want his visage associated with tobacco products, Henry Reccius cigar cards notwithstanding.

Second, they need to be associated with a mainstream card set. There are baking issues and candy cards from the 1910s that are much rarer than the Honus Wagner card, but they’re also from obscure regional sets. It’s much more newsworthy when a T206 Honus Wagner showed up in a Maine farmhouse than when the aforementioned Reccius card appeared in a Louisville cigar box.

Then there’s star value and eye appeal, and after that is perhaps the most important thing: quantity. Having the only example of a collectible is not the road to the fortunes of Kubla Khan. Ideally you need somewhere between 10 and 25 examples of a collectible for it to be actively sought-after. Fewer than that and the known examples don’t show up frequently enough to keep the fervor bubbling along. More than that and the rarity deteriorates and takes the value along with it.

That’s why owners of one of 24 known valuable cards root with the fervor of a drunken Scottish soccer fan the existence of No. 25. They don’t want to spend $500,000 for a picture on cardboard and wake up one morning and discover it’s been replaced by a Kia Rio.

Here’s how this wickedness works. About 20 years ago an auction-house proprietor named Joshua Evans turned up what he claimed to be the most valuable card in existence: A U.S. Caramel card from 1932 showing Hall of Fame shortstop Freddie Lindstrom. The Lindstrom was the one card necessary to complete one of the toughest sets from the ‘30s and at that point was the only known example of that card.

This card has star value after a fashion, if you believe Lindstrom qualifies for Cooperstown on his accomplishments and not because Ted Williams got the Veterans’ Committee smashed on grain alcohol and Lithia water and what they wrote sure looks like “Lindstrom” from here.

It has a story. The Lindstrom card was withheld from circulation because kids who got a complete set of U.S. Caramel cards could redeem them for a baseball glove and U.S. Caramel wanted to keep the glove expenditures to a minimum. As in zero.

It wasn’t the best-looking card of the era, even before someone cancelled it. And while the U.S. Caramel set was national after a fashion, U.S. Caramel did not have the zillion slimy tentacles of the tobacco trust. So compared to the Wagner card the Lindstrom card was definitely minor-league.

But Joshua Evans laughs at such hindrances. He dubbed the Lindstrom card “The Million-Dollar Card” and took it on a barnstorming tour that made what C.C. Pyle did with Red Grange look like REO Speedwagon’s summer schedule.

And then he sold it. For less than a million. For less than $100,000 even. For around $90,000, if reports can be believed.

Again we ask, wha’ happen? The easy answer: not enough star power and too much scarcity. One card cannot make a market. Two cards, which is currently the number of known Lindstrom cards, cannot make a market, even if the owners of these cards, once they get them home, realize that $90,000 in the raw is far better-looking, even if it’s in pennies salvaged from automobile upholstery.

(Let this be a lesson to all those Fleer Flair and Stadium Club collectors waiting for the right moment to cash out their one-of-one Terry Puhl cards. Amen.)

So to bring things ‘round again, a worthless rarity has to lack star power, eye appeal, national scope, a marketable quantity, and a story. In short, it needs to be one of nothing.

Meet the 1989 Saranac Glove Darryl Strawberry card.

Let’s dispense with the story, such as it is. Green Bay-based Saranac Glove wanted to package a baseball card with its batting gloves and didn’t think a photo would properly showcase its product, so it commissioned Green Bay artist Dan Gardiner to paint Darryl Strawberry wearing a Metsish uniform and sporting Saranac gloves. It came off fine except for one thing: the Straw Man didn’t like his nose.

Now, Darryl Strawberry resembles nothing so much as a resident of the planet Zorg. For him to complain that they got his nose wrong is like Clint Eastwood complaining that they missed a wrinkle.

And it’s not like Gardiner missed Strawberry’s nose by much. Maybe he was thinking Darryl “Sausage Nose” Hamilton and painting Darryl Strawberry, but it’s close. And, hey, whatever happened to artist’s license?

Still, Saranac Glove would rather pull a perfectly good card off of the market than pay millions to a large-nosed, baseball-playing space alien. So the Saranac Glove card was history. Gardiner got a few, and the company ostensibly kept some, and the rest were destroyed.

Twenty years ago this would have been the perfect collectible storm: Hot player, legitimately scarce card, national distribution, not too ugly, interesting story. But between then and now Strawberry’s career came up short of Cooperstown, which in the card market meant he had the baseball career of a raisin. And no one pays extra for a picture on cardboard of a raisin, no matter how scarce.

So if you were looking for the quintessential worthless rarity, here's your answer. Though a Fleer Flair Terry Puhl sure looks like it qualifies from here.