Word: auctions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rules vary from league to league, but basically each team starts the season with a set limit of real dollars (in the American Dreams, $260) with which to assemble an imaginary team of 23 real major leaguers, hired at a cutthroat auction that is equal parts puzzle and poker game. Up to 13 players can be held over from the previous year; the rest are purchased on draft day. The players -- nine pitchers, six infielders, five outfielders, two catchers and a designated hitter -- compete, in aggregate, in eight statistical categories over the course of the 162-game regular season...
...comes the cash: Cleveland's potent Joe Carter, who hit .302 with 29 home runs, 121 RBIs and had 29 steals in 1986, fetches $46; Detroit's injury- prone slugger-speedster and amateur airplane pilot Kirk Gibson goes for $41. More than five hours later, the auction closes with the march of the scrubeenies, the cheap players who fill out everyone's roster. There are still some good buys for those who have husbanded their money, either by design or dumb luck. The Moosers grab Milwaukee's Cecil Cooper for $3, the same price that Nova pays for Catcher...
...paid $39.9 million for Sunflowers? Less than two weeks after an anonymous telephone bidder set an art-world record at Christie's London auction house by buying the faded Van Gogh masterpiece, the mysterious party has come forward: Tokyo-based Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance. Japan's second largest insurance company bought the work, which was completed in January 1889, to help celebrate its centenary next year...
...days later in a lakefront tent at the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Geneva, another event began: the sale of the late Duchess of Windsor's jewelry, organized by Christie's rival auction house Sotheby's. Here was a nominal contrast at least, since though everyone admires Van Gogh, none but a snob or a fantasist (not that we are short of either) could feel much nostalgia for Wallis Simpson and her husband, who abdicated the throne of England in 1936 and was obliged to spend the war years as governor of the Bahamas on account of his thinly veiled Nazi...
Stunned by last week' s record price for Van Gogh' s Sunflowers, the art world looks for reasons. But the sale -- no less than the $50 million auction of the Duchess of Windsor' s jewels -- is only a symptom of hype and greed. The public sense of art is demeaned as a wealthy entrepreneurial class fixates on "masterpieces" and private collectors drive museums out of the market...