When it comes to trading baseball cards as a kid, sometimes you make good trades and sometimes you make bad trades. Sometimes you make a trade that brings an irate parent to your door to confront your mom because you ripped a kid off.

When I was seven years old, I had just started collecting and trading cards with the kids in the neighborhood. We all had our favorite players, with mine being Jose Canseco.

I would trade nearly any card for a Canseco card at this point in my life. If I had a '52 Mickey Mantle and you had a dog-eared 1988 Donruss Canseco, I would have traded you for that card, no doubt about it.

For whatever reason, I had 1989 Topps cards coming out of my ears. One of the cards in the set was a "flashback" card featuring Hank Aaron breaking the all time home run record.

I proposed a trade to my neighbor Tony: My Hank Aaron card ("he's in the Hall of Fame!") for his 1989 Donruss Jose Canseco. He thought he was getting the best of me- a real Hank Aaron card! I was thrilled to add another Canseco to my growing collection.

The trade was made and I went on with my day, until there was a sudden loud and angry knock on our front door. As it turned out, Tony's mom realized that the Aaron card wasn't vintage or valuable at all-- it was just a common card from the 1989 set.

Canseco cards were all the rage at the time and very valuable, so she demanded I trade the card back to Tony. After a little argument with my mom about the trade being fair and final, she finally relented and made me trade him back.

I don't think I consciously meant to rip him off, because we had very little knowledge of card values at the time. I eventually got my '89 Donruss Canseco- don't know where, don't know when.

That Hank Aaron card still has a spot in my shoebox of favorites, however.

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