Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
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Mark Webb of Santa Clarita, California, walked into a sporting goods store in Northridge looking for some socks and left with a baseball glove. An Alex Rodriguez model glove. Except it was more than that. It was really Alex Rodriguez's glove. As Ramona Shelburne of the Daily News reports:
Thanks to Jon Weisman for the heads up.While he was looking around in the baseball equipment section of the store, a tan glove at the end of the used-glove rack caught his eye.
He stared hard at it. The name had been stitched into the thumb in cursive letters: Alex Rodriguez.
No, it couldn't be. Could it?
Webb had played a decade of minor league baseball, so he knew a professional player's glove when he saw it. The leather is the best quality; it's perfectly broken in with glove oil. Sometimes there's extra padding in the pocket. And the player's name is always perfectly stitched into the leather along one of the fingers.
But what the heck was A-Rod's glove doing here?
Couldn't be. Nah.
So he went back to the sock rack, picked out a pair and headed toward the register.
He made it about 5feet and stopped. He just had to know. So he went back, took the tan glove off the rack and saw two little words that made his jaw drop: "Pro Preferred."
It was real.
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Each glove cost about $100 to $150. Webb was no expert, but he guessed each glove would be worth at least triple that to a collector.
"I said to the guy at the register: `You just sold a small fortune in gloves. You really should call the owner and let him know,"' Webb said.
It turns out Webb was wrong. Each glove wasn't worth triple what he paid for it. The tan "Alex Rodriguez" glove alone is up to $2,800 on eBay and could go as high as $5,000 to $7,000 by the end of the auction Friday.
And, dang, that's my local store!
That's why, Bob 1, the guys this does happen to ruin it for the rest of us.
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