I picked up a fugazi Shohei Ohtani card

Off a random table towards the end of a card show run weeks ago, I saw what I thought to be a 2013 BBM Shohei Ohtani of some sort displayed on a seller's table and the price seemed to be right [$25] - how cool would I be, if I picked up a Japanese era Ohtani for about the price of a blaster?

Maybe I can pick up this card as a big splash out of a relatively lower-end purchase - without trying to trip over myself, I had to take the chance and couldn't wait to pull out some money to pick up this card.

Of course after getting the lousy card in-hand, I wanted to look it up to figure out what card it exactly is - it's a dual image card of Ohtani with nothing else to indicate anything else.

I found a link to an eBay listing selling the card as part of a lot basically saying they are fake with a warning - not buy the card for investment purposes.

I think if it was priced any higher, I would have ignored it as just another card that ended up not being real after all - but the card was put there on a tee, where I fell for the bait.

Random pick-up - Rocky Perone

Back when the team was still kicking, I might have casually followed the Fullerton / Orange County Flyers baseball team [of the independent Golden Baseball League] - I tried looking up one of the standout players [Rich Pohle] on the team to see if he'd had any history with a MLB organization [Pohle played in half a season with Ryan Howard on a Philadelphia Phillies short season A ball team in 2001].

As is, I became vaguely aware of the story of his father, a ‘Rocky Perone,’ who was actually a one-time minor leaguer named Rich Pohle Sr. - the elder Pohle had a short, cursory stint as a professional ballplayer with an affiliated big league organization in the 1960s, but actually tried to make it back to the pros as a 36-year old disguised as a 21-year old Australian in the 1970s.

Pohle Sr.'s story got him some notoriety and if taken at face value, Pohle Sr.'s story wasn't an entirely unsavory tale - I’ve never heard of these Broder like, custom ‘home brewed style’ Monarch Corona cards, but I caved in and picked this one up.