Rookie Mistake

I only got back into collecting last November. I am still a rookie and have made a few mistakes. I've been less than perfect about updating wantlists and have managed to purchase a few cards that I already had. I also dropped almost a C-Note on that box of Upper Deck Yankee Classics I wrote about recently. I also made a dumb error at last weekend's show. I was pawing through one seller's $2 box and it was a mixture of vintage and modern cards. I was managing to find a few 1977 star cards I needed and a 1973 Clemente in what I would call VG+ condition. Then I ran across this card:


I was pretty excited about finding what seemed to be a decent Mike Schmidt Rookie card. I didn't know how much it was worth, but surely $2 was a bargain. So, I got it. Then I got home and took it out of the toploader and penny sleeve to a closer look:


Did you see that? No? Let me zoom in a bit:


Yeah.

I didn't find a 1973 Schmidt rookie card. I found a 1998 reprint of the 1973 Schmidt rookie card in a dirty toploader.