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This Shouldn't
Have Happened
Before hitting the road, Rebecca and Whitney stopped by Bakers to grab a couple late night snacks. Whitney offered to pay for Rebecca’s, but Rebecca refused. Rebecca told her that Whitney had been through enough and offered to buy Whitney’s snack. They each bought their own snacks and went to the car feeling good.
Those positive vibes did not make it to Lincoln.
Pretty quickly, Rebecca started monologuing about her different hobbies. On the interstate, Rebecca really started to dig deep into her love of obscure baseball memorabilia. The way she explained it, boring losers wanted memorabilia from games they’d seen and players they loved. Cool people, like Rebecca, wanted memorabilia from games most people never know happened. They want baseball cards from leagues so small no one ever should have made the cards in the first place. They want foul balls from players who only ever had one at-bat. They want commemorative towels that were only given to volunteer ball boys for one month in 2009 before the team updated their logo. The hobbies were interesting and Whitney tried to be a friendly listener, but found herself getting madder and madder as she went longer and longer without a chance to speak.
According to Rebecca, these are the things that cool people care about. And while some part of Whitney did not believe that to be true, she could not deny that she still found Rebecca very cool. If nothing else, Rebecca was very sexy, very confident, and had a leather jacket. As frustrated as she got, Whitney could not deny those three truths.
In this world Rebecca described, the ultimate prize was a “final jersey.” A final jersey is the last jersey in existence for a team. And not just one team on one day, any jersey from that team ever. Theoretically, this is almost impossible to prove. In a few rare instances, there have been documented cases where teams destroy all of their uniforms except for one. However, this is such a specific situation that it almost never happens. Once, a team was going to repurpose the cotton in their uniforms to support the war effort, but a pacifist player on the team refused to return his. After creating a local scandal, a journalist attended a public event in which every other uniform was reverently donated and then theatrically shredded. The person who owns that pacifist’s jersey apparently paid millions for it.
But in most cases, you can’t prove that a thing doesn’t exist. It is always possible that a second jersey could show up. So, usually, people are not talking about final jerseys. They are talking about maybe-finals. Mostly, maybe-finals are old jerseys from short lived teams with no other likely jerseys in existence. This is harder than it sounds. To start with, the team needs to be documented enough that the buyer can know when the team started and ended. If no-one’s heard of the team, who knows whether they were around for one year or ten? And if they were around for ten, there’s probably still some secret jersey in an attic somewhere that will come to auction one month after you spent all that dough on a maybe-final. But, it’s not uncommon to find that whoever is keeping track of that date might also have some old jerseys. Most counties have a historical society or museum that is constantly collecting more shit than they could ever display. So, most of it ends up in a basement or attic for someone to go through later. This means that even if you find a historical society with a comprehensive list of the baseball leagues in town for the last century that confirms that the team only existed for one year, you’d need to go through their scattered storage to confirm that they don’t have any matching jerseys. And, even still, you won’t be sure that the next county over doesn’t have one. Or another county across the country because someone played on the team and then moved. It’s a nightmare. But, these maybe-finals sell for a high enough price that a few people make it their job to hunt them down. And, Rebecca told Whitney, they’d probably get to see a maybe-final tonight.
“What do you mean, tonight?”
“Remember? I have to stop at Doane before I go to York.”
“No, you definitely didn’t tell me that.”
Rebecca thought about it for a second. “No, we definitely talked about it. At the football field.”
“I remember someone clarifying whether your partner worked at York or Doane–”
“Yeah, that’s why. They knew I was going to Doane tonight. So they got confused.”
Whitney was feeling pretty confused. And more than a little scared. Rebecca explained that she just needed to make a quick little stop and then they would be on their way to York. Whitney was furious at Rebecca’s insistence that everything was fine, but was afraid to cause too much of a ruckus in a stranger’s car in the middle of no-where.
Rebecca continued to explain, “The problem with the internet is that the information is for everyone. Sometimes, that is great. But sometimes, it’s a disaster. If every Joe-Schmoe with a Reddit account could see how much money people are paying for weird baseball shit, they’d all try to open up some side-hustle hawking their dad’s useless old garbage. It would be almost impossible to sort through that garbage to find the stuff that’s still worthwhile.
“And–some people would never admit this, but it’s true–we want to keep the supply low. If everyone started pulling old jersey’s out of their attics, think about how many maybe-finals will be busted. Someone tries to sell another jersey from the same team on eBay and now they are both worthless.
“You can look at me weird all you want, but this is how the world works. The truth is that we can make enough stuff for everyone to have what they need. But that totally ruins our ideas of supply and demand. The big business fuckers spent the last thirty years trying to drive up demand–buy more shirts, buy hotter chips, get seventeen streaming services–but it’s not working. You see that. They see that. We all see it. The future of capitalism is destroying supply. The future and, frankly, the present. Keeping losers from trying to sell their dad’s old baseball jersey on eBay is about as nice and polite as capitalism gets.
“So what we do is meet at designated spots around the world to have auctions. We have a dozen or so different rooms, each with ten to fifty different people who share our interests, and then all those rooms get on a Zoom call. That way nobody has to travel too far, but there’s no online record of what we talked about or what items were sold. Usually the person running the room will keep a paper ledger, but I don’t even know why they do that. But I guess as long as it stays off the web, who cares, right?”
For the first time that night, Rebecca waited for Whitney to reply. Instead, she just droned, “Cool.” Rebecca worried that Whitney was upset about unfair business practices and kept defensively monologuing about the future of capitalism. But Whitney was mad about going to Doane at all. She did not want to sit in a room with a bunch of strangers spending money she didn’t have on memorabilia for a sport she didn’t care about.
And, somewhere in the back of her head, she knew that this was a little suspicious. Rebecca seemed a little scatter-brained, but surely she should have remembered to mention this stop before they got in the car. In fact, she didn’t mention it all until they were already on the interstate and it was too late for Whitney to get out.
Around Lincoln, Rebecca got off the interstate and started heading south towards Doane. A couple miles down the highway, Rebecca pulled into a gas station. She asked Whitney whether she would mind filling the car up with gas while she used the restroom. Then, Rebecca walked away, taking her keys with her.
Should Whitney:
Those positive vibes did not make it to Lincoln.
Pretty quickly, Rebecca started monologuing about her different hobbies. On the interstate, Rebecca really started to dig deep into her love of obscure baseball memorabilia. The way she explained it, boring losers wanted memorabilia from games they’d seen and players they loved. Cool people, like Rebecca, wanted memorabilia from games most people never know happened. They want baseball cards from leagues so small no one ever should have made the cards in the first place. They want foul balls from players who only ever had one at-bat. They want commemorative towels that were only given to volunteer ball boys for one month in 2009 before the team updated their logo. The hobbies were interesting and Whitney tried to be a friendly listener, but found herself getting madder and madder as she went longer and longer without a chance to speak.
According to Rebecca, these are the things that cool people care about. And while some part of Whitney did not believe that to be true, she could not deny that she still found Rebecca very cool. If nothing else, Rebecca was very sexy, very confident, and had a leather jacket. As frustrated as she got, Whitney could not deny those three truths.
In this world Rebecca described, the ultimate prize was a “final jersey.” A final jersey is the last jersey in existence for a team. And not just one team on one day, any jersey from that team ever. Theoretically, this is almost impossible to prove. In a few rare instances, there have been documented cases where teams destroy all of their uniforms except for one. However, this is such a specific situation that it almost never happens. Once, a team was going to repurpose the cotton in their uniforms to support the war effort, but a pacifist player on the team refused to return his. After creating a local scandal, a journalist attended a public event in which every other uniform was reverently donated and then theatrically shredded. The person who owns that pacifist’s jersey apparently paid millions for it.
But in most cases, you can’t prove that a thing doesn’t exist. It is always possible that a second jersey could show up. So, usually, people are not talking about final jerseys. They are talking about maybe-finals. Mostly, maybe-finals are old jerseys from short lived teams with no other likely jerseys in existence. This is harder than it sounds. To start with, the team needs to be documented enough that the buyer can know when the team started and ended. If no-one’s heard of the team, who knows whether they were around for one year or ten? And if they were around for ten, there’s probably still some secret jersey in an attic somewhere that will come to auction one month after you spent all that dough on a maybe-final. But, it’s not uncommon to find that whoever is keeping track of that date might also have some old jerseys. Most counties have a historical society or museum that is constantly collecting more shit than they could ever display. So, most of it ends up in a basement or attic for someone to go through later. This means that even if you find a historical society with a comprehensive list of the baseball leagues in town for the last century that confirms that the team only existed for one year, you’d need to go through their scattered storage to confirm that they don’t have any matching jerseys. And, even still, you won’t be sure that the next county over doesn’t have one. Or another county across the country because someone played on the team and then moved. It’s a nightmare. But, these maybe-finals sell for a high enough price that a few people make it their job to hunt them down. And, Rebecca told Whitney, they’d probably get to see a maybe-final tonight.
“What do you mean, tonight?”
“Remember? I have to stop at Doane before I go to York.”
“No, you definitely didn’t tell me that.”
Rebecca thought about it for a second. “No, we definitely talked about it. At the football field.”
“I remember someone clarifying whether your partner worked at York or Doane–”
“Yeah, that’s why. They knew I was going to Doane tonight. So they got confused.”
Whitney was feeling pretty confused. And more than a little scared. Rebecca explained that she just needed to make a quick little stop and then they would be on their way to York. Whitney was furious at Rebecca’s insistence that everything was fine, but was afraid to cause too much of a ruckus in a stranger’s car in the middle of no-where.
Rebecca continued to explain, “The problem with the internet is that the information is for everyone. Sometimes, that is great. But sometimes, it’s a disaster. If every Joe-Schmoe with a Reddit account could see how much money people are paying for weird baseball shit, they’d all try to open up some side-hustle hawking their dad’s useless old garbage. It would be almost impossible to sort through that garbage to find the stuff that’s still worthwhile.
“And–some people would never admit this, but it’s true–we want to keep the supply low. If everyone started pulling old jersey’s out of their attics, think about how many maybe-finals will be busted. Someone tries to sell another jersey from the same team on eBay and now they are both worthless.
“You can look at me weird all you want, but this is how the world works. The truth is that we can make enough stuff for everyone to have what they need. But that totally ruins our ideas of supply and demand. The big business fuckers spent the last thirty years trying to drive up demand–buy more shirts, buy hotter chips, get seventeen streaming services–but it’s not working. You see that. They see that. We all see it. The future of capitalism is destroying supply. The future and, frankly, the present. Keeping losers from trying to sell their dad’s old baseball jersey on eBay is about as nice and polite as capitalism gets.
“So what we do is meet at designated spots around the world to have auctions. We have a dozen or so different rooms, each with ten to fifty different people who share our interests, and then all those rooms get on a Zoom call. That way nobody has to travel too far, but there’s no online record of what we talked about or what items were sold. Usually the person running the room will keep a paper ledger, but I don’t even know why they do that. But I guess as long as it stays off the web, who cares, right?”
For the first time that night, Rebecca waited for Whitney to reply. Instead, she just droned, “Cool.” Rebecca worried that Whitney was upset about unfair business practices and kept defensively monologuing about the future of capitalism. But Whitney was mad about going to Doane at all. She did not want to sit in a room with a bunch of strangers spending money she didn’t have on memorabilia for a sport she didn’t care about.
And, somewhere in the back of her head, she knew that this was a little suspicious. Rebecca seemed a little scatter-brained, but surely she should have remembered to mention this stop before they got in the car. In fact, she didn’t mention it all until they were already on the interstate and it was too late for Whitney to get out.
Around Lincoln, Rebecca got off the interstate and started heading south towards Doane. A couple miles down the highway, Rebecca pulled into a gas station. She asked Whitney whether she would mind filling the car up with gas while she used the restroom. Then, Rebecca walked away, taking her keys with her.
Should Whitney:
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