Today sports memorabilia is big business. It wasn’t always the case as this story shows. One enterprising trader was Barry Halper, a New Jersey collector of sports memorabilia, and he made one of the greatest barter trades ever when he swapped six bottles of J&B scotch with Lou Gehrig’s wife for Gehrig’s uniform.

It was the flannel pin-striped New York Yankee uniform worn by Lou Gehrig nearly 70 years ago, when the first baseman declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” In July of 1999 Halper auctioned off the uniform for over $450,000!

In the same year, the Texas Rangers baseball team had the year’s all-star relief pitcher, Jeff Zimmerman (whose record was 9-0 at the All-Star break), a year they had acquired Zimmerman by trading two dozen baseballs to the independent Northern League for his contract.

From these examples one can see that the opportunities to increase one’s wealth, through barter, revolves around ascertaining what your trading partner values (will accept in return).

The BarterNews FastStart Barter Program covers this strategy indepth: FastStart

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Professional Athletics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.