Used gum a flavorful item for collectors
azcentral.com
April 5, 2002
Chew on this: Luis Gonzalez's used Bazooka wad is currently worth more than a good view of the D-Back left fielder in action at Bank One Ballpark.
Jason Gabbert, owner of a Wood Lake, Minn., sports memorabilia shop, had a bright idea after witnessing Gonzalez discard his gum during a D-Backs spring training game last March. He had a security guard retrieve Gonzo's gum from the ground.
Gabbert, mastermind behind those excellent "No Contraction" t-shirts, is now accepting bids on the gum – and the glass case that houses it – at worldseriesball.com. Money earned from the sale will be donated to the local high school athletic department, he said.
Bidding runs through April 15, but you better check your credit line because the price is already up to $600.
Gonzo's retired Bazooka is the hottest thing since a late 90s Internet stock.
What They Said
Here's what Gonzo and his teammates thought of the auction:
Curt Schilling brainstorms other bodily fluids that might be of value
Gonzalez learns his gum is worth more than a Larry Walker ball
Mark Grace doubts the potential value of his gum
Damian Miller considers the potential value of used gum
What in the name of Ruben Rivera is going on here?
This is not even gum with sentimental value. It didn't drop from Gonzo's mouth while celebrating his broken-bat single in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 of the World Series. It was routinely discarded by the slugger after hitting a lonely single in a meaningless game the first week of spring training.
I'm suspicious. There must be some ulterior motive for the most recent bidder.
I imagine some burned out Little League dad, whose only son chose ice skating over what would obviously have been a Hall of Fame baseball career, bidding on it in hopes of extracting some DNA to clone his own personal all-star left fielder.
Or maybe some Major League scout intends to examine Gonzo's chewing technique with the idea of finding a hole in his swing. Don't laugh. Scouts would study stool samples if there was a remote possibility of extracting the tiniest bit of baseball data.
Who else could it be? Stalker with a tooth fetish? Crazed dentist?
Or perhaps the high bidder is Gonzo himself, because Bazooka gum actually gains flavor with aging – that's a longtime baseball insider secret.
Gabbert says he was told by someone who really knows the business of baseball collectibles a $500 sale price wouldn't be surprising. At the current rate of acceleration, the winning bid will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $3,000.
Needing to explore the broader range of Used Gum Value (UGV), I placed various calls to Rivera's "people." If anyone would know this, the ex-Yankee, thief and eBay expert would.
Rivera never returned my calls for some reason, and pressed against a deadline, I called my ace in the hole, superstar autograph and memorabilia collector Tom Bunevich.
Bunevich literally wrote the book on collecting, a publication aptly titled Sign This Book. He said the price is as simple as supply and demand.
"I wouldn't pay a whole lot, because I don't think in the long run it's a big collectible," he assessed, "but the novelty – whose gum it is is driving the price up."
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