Back in my youth -- heck, even up and through early adulthood -- I was a sports card collector. While I collected football, basketball and hockey cards, my greatest passion was baseball cards. By early adulthood, I had nearly 20,000 of them!
As a kid, I used almost every penny of my weekly allowance plus any money I earned to purchase the 5 or 10 cents wax packs of baseball cards. Along with 5 or 10 cards, you also received this really crummy stick of bubblegum. I usually threw the gum away.
These days most collectors simply buy each year's set all at once. But back in the 60s and 70s, the ability to plunk down some cash for a complete set wasn't available for the average kid, so you bought the wax packs in the hopes that you eventually might get all the cards for that year. Generally, it didn't work out that way because the savvy Topps Company (the folks who made the cards) printed loads of cards of the journeyman players and a scant few of the big stars.
Consequently, one of the ways to get cards you didn't have was to trade with other collectors. The best trades involved doubles (once you had a card of a player, any additional cards of that player were called "doubles," regardless of how many you had). For example, if I have two Mickey Mantles, but no Hank Aarons and you have two Hank Aarons, but no Mickey Mantles, we could do a straight up trade of Mantle for Aaron and neither of us would lose a primary card.
I have supplied this basic information to use as a backdrop to a situation I found myself in.
When I was about 8 years old, an older friend -- I think he was 11 or 12 -- came to our house with his folks for a day. He brought his baseball card collection with him because he needed some key cards for that year's set and I think he thought I would be an easy mark. He kept trying to engineer trades which, if I had have bitten, would only have benefited him!
He was hoping to convince me to trade away some of my non-double big stars of the day. He was aiming to dupe me out of cards for Willie Mays (my favorite player in the whole world!), Ernie Banks (a very close second to Mays in my heart), Eddie Matthews, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson and several more. He kept offering nobodies (everyday players) and then lying about their statistics and prospects.
Unbeknownst to him (even to me at that point in my life), he was dealing with an aspie who had memorized the statistics for every player of the last several years! Each time he fudged on a stat or tried to sell me on a bald-face lie, I started rattling off the real statistics. In a short amount of time, he came to realize that he couldn't fool me, so he gave up in a huff.
The point of this long tale is that a smart person armed with accurate information is not a weak negotiator. When you come prepared to the bargaining table, it doesn't really matter what hijinx the other side might try to pull, you will see through their subterfuge very quickly.
Everyone seems to agree that our president, Barack Obama, is a very intelligent fellow. He is a graduate of two Ivy League schools and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. Despite these facts, some people will have you believe this erudite man can't negotiate his way out of a paper bag! That the GOP continually confounds and confuses him.
I am certain that a 50-year old Obama is smarter than I was at age 8. If I couldn't be swindled out of my star baseball cards then, I don't think the GOP could pull anything over on him now. If my supposition is wrong, then maybe I should be president!
[Note: The Mays in the title is, of course, Hall of Fame player, Willie Mays. The other fellow is Joe Pepitone who played first base for the Yankees and a few other teams. Pepitone was no slouch, but only hit .258 for his career and certainly wasn't in Mays' league.]
As a kid, I used almost every penny of my weekly allowance plus any money I earned to purchase the 5 or 10 cents wax packs of baseball cards. Along with 5 or 10 cards, you also received this really crummy stick of bubblegum. I usually threw the gum away.
These days most collectors simply buy each year's set all at once. But back in the 60s and 70s, the ability to plunk down some cash for a complete set wasn't available for the average kid, so you bought the wax packs in the hopes that you eventually might get all the cards for that year. Generally, it didn't work out that way because the savvy Topps Company (the folks who made the cards) printed loads of cards of the journeyman players and a scant few of the big stars.
Consequently, one of the ways to get cards you didn't have was to trade with other collectors. The best trades involved doubles (once you had a card of a player, any additional cards of that player were called "doubles," regardless of how many you had). For example, if I have two Mickey Mantles, but no Hank Aarons and you have two Hank Aarons, but no Mickey Mantles, we could do a straight up trade of Mantle for Aaron and neither of us would lose a primary card.
I have supplied this basic information to use as a backdrop to a situation I found myself in.
When I was about 8 years old, an older friend -- I think he was 11 or 12 -- came to our house with his folks for a day. He brought his baseball card collection with him because he needed some key cards for that year's set and I think he thought I would be an easy mark. He kept trying to engineer trades which, if I had have bitten, would only have benefited him!
He was hoping to convince me to trade away some of my non-double big stars of the day. He was aiming to dupe me out of cards for Willie Mays (my favorite player in the whole world!), Ernie Banks (a very close second to Mays in my heart), Eddie Matthews, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson and several more. He kept offering nobodies (everyday players) and then lying about their statistics and prospects.
Unbeknownst to him (even to me at that point in my life), he was dealing with an aspie who had memorized the statistics for every player of the last several years! Each time he fudged on a stat or tried to sell me on a bald-face lie, I started rattling off the real statistics. In a short amount of time, he came to realize that he couldn't fool me, so he gave up in a huff.
The point of this long tale is that a smart person armed with accurate information is not a weak negotiator. When you come prepared to the bargaining table, it doesn't really matter what hijinx the other side might try to pull, you will see through their subterfuge very quickly.
Everyone seems to agree that our president, Barack Obama, is a very intelligent fellow. He is a graduate of two Ivy League schools and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. Despite these facts, some people will have you believe this erudite man can't negotiate his way out of a paper bag! That the GOP continually confounds and confuses him.
I am certain that a 50-year old Obama is smarter than I was at age 8. If I couldn't be swindled out of my star baseball cards then, I don't think the GOP could pull anything over on him now. If my supposition is wrong, then maybe I should be president!
[Note: The Mays in the title is, of course, Hall of Fame player, Willie Mays. The other fellow is Joe Pepitone who played first base for the Yankees and a few other teams. Pepitone was no slouch, but only hit .258 for his career and certainly wasn't in Mays' league.]
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