Baseball Cards: 1912 Boston Garters | Hacker News Reader

Baseball Cards: 1912 Boston Garters

cycleback.com

28 pointssamclemens10 comments

A century ahead of their time.

(Possibly nsfw)

Elastics were so bad back then that they needed something to hold them up. They’d just bunch up like ankle warmers without the sock straps.

It's true. I wore garters as a kid playing hockey. Everyone used them to hold up their hockey socks. It's amusing thinking back now.

This post got me wondering whether baseball players in the early 20th century earned enough to live by playing the game. Apparently not.

> In 1906 Chicago Cubs pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown won 26 games leading the Cubs to the National League pennant. Despite his stardom, he made just $2,800. He took a coal-mining job at season’s end to help pay his bills. Fellow all-star Christy Mathewson pumped gas at a service station. Walter Johnson dug postholes for the Idaho Telephone Company while Lefty Gomez removed sludge from refinery tanks for Union Oil.

https://www.splicetoday.com/sports/when-ballplayers-had-offs...

Time's were a bit harder back in the day, kudos to the all-stars though for doing what they needed to do to get by.

https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1905?amount=2800 says $2800 was 95k 2022 dollars after CPI.

If I had found these I would have held on to them but also never considered them of any value beyond an unusual oddity

I wonder how often things actually go down like that. Like if I found an actual Van Gogh painting I'd probably think "wow this art student was studying van Gogh. That's pretty good. Looks just like him. Cool"

The opposite probably happens at least as often. "Wow this is such a good painting it must be a missing van Gogh. I'd better pay someone to verify it so I can become rich!"

These are only rare and valuable because (a) enough people alive now know about this kind of thing and (b) when they were relevant, most people threw them away because they were junk.

That’s a both (1) an uncommon thing, and (2) interesting to society.

I think there's more at play because you also just described my Bitcoin wallet from 2010.

It's still just as much junk. There's some weird fetishism that goes with it. Like some kind of hoarding. I'm sure there's a vast body of psychological literature on this I've never heard of

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