I am grappling with myself over the purchase of Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball for $3 million. Did the buyer, whomever he is, get a good deal?
At first, you only sense the outrageousness of anyone paying that kind of money for a baseball — a damaged one at that; bam, McGwire blasted it out of the park, must be a dent there somewhere. But someone actually paid $640,000 for a Honus Wagner baseball card in 1996 and it's only a tiny piece of cardboard.
For a while, I doodled about what I could buy with $3 million instead of a baseball. Well, a baseball manufacturing plant, for one. Also, three cruise missiles to fling at mud huts in Iraq. Or about three miles of interstate in Oklahoma. Or the next five Olympics.
And then it hit me: I could hardly buy a weak-hitting second baseman for that.
Everything is relative. There is a plane over which some people levitate where expenditures are not determined in hundreds or thousands of dollars but in millions. Most of us cannot relate to that.
Last month, millions of dollars were spent on pay-per-view to watch ear-biting, foul-mouthed rapist Mike Tyson battle with someone named Botha. I don't know how much Tyson earned for that one, but he got somewhere around $30 million for the fight in which he dined on Evander Holyfield's ear. One fight. Thirty million!
More than a decade ago, a Japanese consortium paid more than $80 million for a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. That drastically raised the price of paintings by the masters, even took it out of the reach of the average millionaire.
Movie stars won't step on the set for less than a couple of million, and professional basketball players ...well, that's another story. People are spending $25 a pop to smoke a cigar, corporations are paying a thousand dollars or so over face value to buy tickets to the Super Bowl, then they are renting jets to fly them to the game.
Meanwhile, everyone moans and groans when Ted Kennedy suggests we raise the nation's minimum wage, as if any of us will be able to buy Mark McGwire's 70th or Diana's wedding gown with it.
How do I get in on this great deal of American extravagance?
A start: I have this baseball, and it is a rarity. I bought it for $5 in 1988 at a West Palm Beach spring training game between the Atlanta Braves and Montreal Expos. Then I had it signed by Buddy Biancalana while he wore a Braves uniform. (He earlier played for Kansas City and Houston and had a lifetime home run total of six.)
What makes the ball unique is that few recall Buddy, and he never played a regular-season game for the Braves. He was cut from the squad several hours after he signed the baseball for my then 6-year-old grandson.
"Look at that," I hustled my grandson, "Buddy Biancalana signed the ball."
He had been expecting Dale Murphy or Phil Niekro. He got Buddy. "Who's Buddy Brancicollar?" he asked.
Buddy was no slouch, I told him — unaware that the Turk was waiting for Buddy to get back into the clubhouse. In earlier seasons, he'd batted .194, up to .242. By today's cornucopian salary standards, he probably could earn two or three million a year.
Understand that Buddy signed the ball. Mark
McGwire did not sign the ball that went for $3 million. He's signed hundreds of other baseballs but not that one. Buddy, however, signed mine and mine isn't dented by the blow of a bat. I bought it at the concession stand. It's in mint condition.
Buddy was cut that day and I have the very last baseball he ever signed in a major league uniform. How many have such a Buddy Biancalana-signed mint condition ball? It's a rarity, I tell you.
How about it out there? What do I hear from you opulent collectors?
Howard Kleinberg, the former editor of the Miami News, is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address is hkmiami@aol.com.
