Baseball cards were as hot as hot could get in 1990.
It might have been the era of hype and card company printing presses run amok, but it sure produced some interesting stories.
One of the best came out of the Chicago area, where one of the thousands of card shops in operation at the time was embroiled in controversy.
It seems a 12-year-old boy came into the store, picked up a Nolan Ryan rookie card and got a very special bargain. The shop owner had someone running the counter who wasn't quite in tune with the value of baseball rookie cards. The sticker said $1200. She thought it meant $12.00. It illustrated the point that there were still a lot of people out there who couldn't believe a baseball card could be worth over a thousand bucks.
It touched off a firestorm of national publicity as the shop owner tried to get it back and the kid and his family refused.
Yahoo Sports takes us into the wayback machine for the story.
The saga wound up ending happily, but the whole thing made us think of only one thing.
Don't you wish Nolan Ryan was still pitching?