Rookie Card Prospecting Gone Wrong – Rob Deer

Let’s jump into the time machine and head back to 1986.  If you weren’t born by then play pretend.  I had recently gotten back into card collecting mainly because a friend of mine who lived around the block from me, Frank, told me about all the comings and goings of the card industry.

The hot rookie at the beginning 1986 was actually Lenny Dykstra.  ”Nails” was staring for the Mets and being from NJ, all my friends were suddenly Mets fans.  Gooden was pitching lights out and Clemens was starting to show dominance.  The 1984 Fleer, Donruss and Topps Mattingly rookies were going bonkers. Also hot at the time were Puckett and Ripken rookie cards.  Frank and I wanted to find the next big thing and “invest” heavily.

We had come up with several players, but this post is going to talk about one of them, Rob Deer.  I still remember the day, we were at the Englishtown Flea Market, where my parents would take us every weekend. Frank had come along and we decided to do some “investing”. He said the only guy we should sink our money into was Rob Deer.  He had just had a tremendous Spring Training where he was just ripping the cover off the ball.  He was hitting the long ball like crazy.  So we found a guy at the market that had 100 1986 Rob Deer cards for sale.  The guy wanted 20 cents a card, we each had 10 bucks so we decided to go all in.

The next weekend, we decided to have a card show at his house, I broke out all my cards and marked prices on them, and we pooled our Deer cards together and listed them for a $1 each.  Every kid that came up asked who he was, and Frank and I would give this long story explaining how he could become the next Babe Ruth.  I think we sold 3 of them at a dollar.  We were fine with that because in our minds his card was going to be hitting $20 each soon enough.  Every day we watch the boxscore and got happy for every homer Deer was hitting.  Of course we also saw that he was a 0.230 hitter.

We also didn’t see what he did in the minors, or the fact that he was originally drafted in 1978.  No, we knew he was going to be the next Babe Ruth so we didn’t care.  As the season wore on, his cards sat at the 50 cent level, we sold another 10 or so of his cards through out the year for various prices but never at a dollar, usually for 50 cents or a quarter.  In the end we still had over 85 cards left.  As we know now, Deer had power, but little else.  I am still a huge fan of his, even though my “investment” never panned out.  You would have thought I would have learned from that mistake, but oh no I didn’t.  However, those other stories would be saved for another post.

To this day I have a case dedicated to those 1986 Topps Rob Deer.  I still talk with Frank and we always ask each other, remember when we invested in Rob Deer and it usually elicits lots of laughs and “what were we thinkings”.  Oddly though, it’s not the prospecting that you do right that you remember or make the best stories.  Instead it’s the ones that went bad (really bad) that make the best stories.

Awesome ‘stache!