How Your Baseball Card Investment Is Doing

The date: the November 14, 1989.
The place: your idyllic childhood neighborhood, teeming with family owned drug stores, people who say hello to each other on the sidewalk, and Richard Marx cassettes.
The scene: you, begging your parents for a couple of bucks to go to the baseball card store. “They’re not toys,” you cry in a reedy voice that betrays a luckless adolescence. “Baseball cards are an investment.” You show them your Beckett Baseball Card magazine, revealing a series of numbers with arrow signs pointing up.

The date: November 14, 2013.
The place: a Value Village. People still talk to strangers, except now they kind of mumble things and smell slightly off. Richard Marx cassettes still present.
The scene: Your partner is looking at baby clothes that said baby has, in the time it takes the human brain to process visual information, already outgrown. And as you’re glancing through bright, plastic, potentially deadly toys, you find this:

Your baseball card portfolio has been underperforming.

Provided for the sake of perspective are the following objects that, as determined by the invisible hand (as guided by the back room staff of the Value Village), are of equal value to the prized possession of your youth:

1. A pair of Furbies, crafted from plastic and the nightmares of the insane and the damned

2. A couple of Halloween… I don’t even know what these are. Wands? Drumsticks? A random arrangement of plastic that will, in its landfill grave, outlive us all?

3. Two decks of actual playing cards, suitable for games of rummy in airports

4. A book on how to invest in baseball cards (copyright: 1989)