Back in 1990, in a baseball card shop just a few Chicago suburbs over from where I grew up, a 13-year-old named Bryan Wrzesinski bought one of the iconic 1968 Nolan Ryan/Jerry Koosman Topps rookies for $12.

Twelve bucks was a whopping sum for us early teen types back then, but Wrzesinski knew it was a wise investment and couldn’t get his wallet out fast enough. The card was normally valued at $1,200, but a card shop worker who didn’t know very much about baseball cards put a decimal point in a spot where there shouldn’t have been one when pricing it.

– ‘Duk, Big League Stew.

‘Duk does a great job recapping a story from 1990 that I entirely missed at the time, despite being in the prime of my baseball-card collecting career. Turns out Chicago-area human interest stories didn’t really get to Long Island back before anyone knew about the Internet.

Anyway, it’s a good one and worth a read. I mention it here for a couple reasons:

1) I have the card in question. Inherited it from my brother. Sadly, it’s not worth $1,200 or whatever it should be worth now because there’s a pinhole in Jerry Koosman’s head. No idea how that happened, but it has been there as long as I’ve known the card. We didn’t do nearly enough to protect the condition of our baseball cards back in the day.

Luckily, I guess, it doesn’t really matter since I have no intention of ever selling off my baseball cards anyway. They’ll stay in storage at my parents’ house where they belong.

2) My brother and I pulled a pretty similar stunt, only on a much smaller scale. Our parents dragged us to an antique shop upstate once, and we found the lady in the store selling her son’s old cards based on a price guide from 1979. I don’t think anything we bought back then is really worth all that much now, but we stocked up, thinking we were savvy as all get-out for taking advantage of an old woman.

MLB source hears #twins have offered OF Aaron Hicks (1st rnd, 08, 900 minor lg OPS) and top C prospect Wilson Ramos for C.Lee.

– Jeff Fletcher of AOL Fanhouse, per Twitter.

By rule, I’m skeptical about all trade rumors. But if there’s any truth to this report, you can probably forget about Lee joining the Mets.

Going by Baseball America‘s preseason ranking, the Mets don’t have a prospect in their system as promising as Hicks, who ranked #19 overall. The Mets’ top guy on that list, Jenrry Mejia, ranked #56 — only two spots ahead of Ramos, who has been reported as the object of the Mariners’ affection in talks with the Twins.

The Mets could certainly match or better that deal if it came down to it, but the cost is probably too high for a rental player. And a negotiating window for Lee, as I’ve discussed, should not be considered added value to any deal for the pitcher.

Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee, Lee! We’re talking f@#$in’ Lee!

– Tenacious D/SNY.tv the last three days.

Has SNY.tv offered four takes on Cliff Lee in the last three days? Yes. You might say it’s a hot topic around these parts. And maybe that’s my fault and we shouldn’t be running so many columns about the same topic, but whatever. It’s on my mind too.

Check out Howard Megdal, Dan Graziano and Sam Borden on the pitcher, making a variety of reasonable points.

But the point I want to reiterate — one I touched upon earlier this week but failed to drive home, I think — comes in Mike Salfino’s take. He writes:

Madden says the Mets “would be well-advised not to make a trade for him unless they can sign him.”

Signing Lee long-term is a minus to the deal, not a plus. If the Mets’ resources were limitless, this would not matter. But overpaying Lee badly down the road, again the likely outcome, will hamstring future pennant pursuits.

Those negotiating windows are not what they’re cracked up to be. It’s not like the Mets are going to get the exclusive negotiating window and be able to sign Lee for far less than what he’ll get on the open market. Everyone involved — and most importantly, Lee’s agent — is smarter than that. A team that trades for Lee with a negotiating window will still have to sign him for a deal similar to the one he’s likely to get in free agency. And since Lee is one of the best pitchers in baseball right now, that’s going to be huge.

Reader and commenter Chris M made a great point via email about this. He argued that the Mets will inevitably pursue an ace — with the “ace” label — this offseason, so they might as well sign Lee if they can snag him. They’re not going to find anyone better on the free-agent market, he pointed out, and they’d have to give up even more young players to trade for anyone else.

But that seems a bit fatalistic to me. That’s just urging the Mets to do the least-dumb thing, since Lee is legitimately awesome and will probably provide at least a reasonable return on his contract for the first couple of years.

To me, the team should worry less about labels and more about putting the best team it can on the field for now and the foreseeable future. I don’t see how offering a long-term deal to Lee assures that. As Salfino points out, it seems more likely to hinder it down the road.

If you look, you will be hard-pressed to find a World Series winner that didn’t have a pitcher who could reasonably be called an ace. So it’s easy to argue, “Well, all World Series winners have aces, so the Mets must make sure they have an ace.”

Only it doesn’t really work like that. Pitching is a fickle thing, difficult to predict. And one ace, no matter how good, will only get you so far. You need to secure as many good pitchers as you can and hope that one performs like an ace instead of overpaying one with a recent history of ace-like performance and assuming he’ll continue it.

So I needed to do anything I could to protect my job, take care of my family. Do you have any idea how much money was at stake? Do you?… Real money, bro, there’s no way you can’t do everything and anything you can to maximize that.

– Lenny Dykstra on steroids.

As Michael O’Keefe and Andy Martino point out in the linked piece, the revelation that Lenny Dykstra took steroids isn’t exactly breaking news. Randall Lane’s new book puts it in context with Dykstra’s personality and provides more evidence that Dykstra uses the word “bro” in about every other sentence, but Dykstra was named in the Mitchell Report.

I like this quote, though, because of the way it speaks to Dykstra’s motivations, and I assume the moviations of many of baseball’s steroid users. Major League Baseball is a massively competitive undertaking and its players are massively competitive people. Many of them were (and many probably still are) willing to jeopardize their longterm health for an additional edge, or, once steroids became pervasive, to be on even footing with their juiced-up brethren.

I wrote this about Dykstra last July:

Look at Lenny Dykstra. He’s a punchline now, filing for Chapter 11 after all that posturing about his financial wizardry. But the things that endeared Nails to the fans — that grit and hustle and desire that so many are looking for and that no one ever doubted in Dykstra — are likely the same qualities that prompted his downfall. Maybe Dykstra couldn’t stop competing, so he thrashed and flailed to stay afloat and took out loans all over town.

Is it a coincidence that, according to Moneyball, Billy Beane called Dykstra “perfectly designed, emotionally” for baseball? Probably. Is it a coincidence that Dykstra was named in the Mitchell Report?

Probably not. I don’t know the guy, and I’m certainly not here to say all steroid users are just like Dykstra, but no one stumbles backwards into the Major Leagues. It takes a ton of work, and anybody who completes that work has to be seriously driven.

It’s sad, really. Everything you read about Dykstra’s career in finance essentially tells of a narrow-minded man striving desperately to get ahead. When Dykstra did everything in his power to win on the baseball field, we celebrated it. He was one of the great dirty-uniform guys in Mets’ history. When Dykstra did everything in his power to win off the baseball field, it was tragic and pathetic. Probably not the type of reward he was used to for his mindset.

It is a testament, I guess, to the Mets’ improved roster management that there’s really no place for Val Pascucci on the 2010 team. For once, they are not devoting a roster spot to a useless bench player that could easily be upgraded with a Quadruple-A masher like Boss. Even though Alex Cora is eminently replaceable, he can at least sort of play the middle infield and so is way more valuable to his club than Marlon Anderson was back in 2008.

But Pascucci soldiers on in Triple-A regardless. And what a show he’s giving the people of Buffalo.

Pascucci has 10 hits in his last 30 at-bats. Nine of them have been for extra bases. Six have been home runs. Over the stretch, he’s slashing .333/.412/.1.033. For the season, he has a .934 OPS. For his six-year Triple-A career, he’s at .907.

Quad-A mashers like Pascucci, and hell, all so-called “organizational” players fascinate me. Are they just ignorant of all the indicators that they’ll never have a Major League career, or do they persevere in spite of them? Does Val Pascucci love playing baseball enough to put up with the crappy accommodations and poor pay that come with the level, or does he shoulder them hoping he’ll finally get a shot, something a little longer than his ill-fated 62-at-bat cameo in 2004?

Who knows? Maybe Pascucci simply loves hitting home runs, and is just thrilled people keep paying him to do so. What a stud.

Oh, and Jesus Feliciano has two three-hit nights in the Major Leagues. No one can take those away from him, even if he’ll likely be the odd man out when Carlos Beltran returns. That’s kinda awesome.