Adventures in Autograph Collecting
Today I received a pair of items. The first was a Time Magazine signed by Keith Foulke that I sent into a signing with Doug Keating of CardboardPromotions.com. He had Keith sign it perfectly.
My other item was a 2015 Topps Chris Parmelee card signed perfectly in blue. I got this card from Kevin H (justcrazy on SCN).
All in all a real nice day of mail!
Today was a fun mail day! I received three packages today of a couple items I bought and a nice surprise from a Twin!
The first package was the ticket from Luis Severino that I bought from Dustin K (bigvig56 on SCN) from the same event he got my baseball signed. This is a ticket from Luis’ ML Debut and has the inscription. It has a Steiner hologram on the back and a plastic card.
The next package I opened was from Kevin M (mrmain18 on SCN) and had two cards he got signed by John Smiley at an event in Pittsburgh. Kevin got my only two cards I needed signed by John after multiple attempts to get them signed or buy them from others. John has a ghost signer at the address he is widely known to have. I even purchased a couple from reputable sellers in the past which ended up being ghost signed as well. I am happy to FINALLY be able to mark Smiley’s cards off my need list!
My final envelope I hoped was an SASE I sent to Terry Ryan at Target Field. He graciously signed the 2015 Topps Twins team card I sent and included a pair of his signed business cards that I also requested. These items reminded me about the time I chatted with Mr Ryan at a Twinsfest event. It was a highlight of that Twinsfest for me and these items made me think of that time.
Thanks Dustin, Kevin, and Mr Ryan for making my mail day extra fun today!
Today I received a package from my friend Jon S who lives in Rochester, NY. Jon has hooked me up big time over the years as he has season tickets to the Red Wings and sees a lot of the Twins players come through there. Today’s package has one of my most favorite things in it… a Byron Buxton ML debut ticket with inscription! I had sent this ticket to him a while ago because, like me, he collects Brian Dozier home run tickets and Buxton just happened to make his ML debut in the game when Dozier went yard. Turns out he was able to get it signed and I replaced his ticket. Jon treats me really well. I continually owe him and this time is no different. It was like Christmas opening the package today! In it was:
Byron Buxton ticket with “Major League Debut”
Alex Meyer ticket with “MLB Debut”
2015 Bowman Chrome Jose Berrios
2015 Topps Danny Santana
2015 Topps Oswaldo Arcia
2015 Topps Josmil Pinto
2015 Topps Heritage Oswaldo Arcia
2015 Kennys Vargas Gypsy Queen.
Thanks a ton for all you do for me Jon!
Tonight was an awesome night! I picked up 30 tickets for Caden’s baseball team to go to the St Paul Saints game for a fun team outing. I left work a little early to make sure I could get the tickets and still get home and get back to the ballpark before the gates opened.
Last season I sent a Pedro Hernandez 2013 Topps Heritage Update card to a person to get signed while Pedro was playing for the Rockies AAA team in Colorado Springs. It did not work out for him to get it signed for me so I hoped he would surface somewhere instead of going back to Valenzuela where he was born. As luck would have it, he signed with the St Paul Saints this off season. When he signed with the Saints, my friend Mark C (clubnuts on SCN) emailed me and asked if I could get his card signed for him. I told him I would get to a few games but made no promises.
I got tickets earlier this season to a game and brought the tickets hoping to get them signed but it rained like crazy and the players did not even come out to warm up so things did not work out. My luck changed tonight!
I dropped Caden and the tickets off with the coach and Cami and I headed down to CHS Field. We got there about 15 minutes before the gates opened and waited anxiously. Once they opened we headed right down to the end of the Saints dugout and waited. None of the players had their uniforms on (it was throw back jersey night to honor Larry Doby) so looking for number 19 was useless. While waiting, the Winnipeg second baseman tried to pretend to turn a double play but threw the ball on the ground like there was a first baseman there. There wasn’t! It rolled right in front of us but kicked off the corner of a fence and rolled just out of our reach. A grounds crew member was walking by and gave Cami the ball. She was pretty pumped. Cami had some generic baseball signature cards and was asking the Saints players to sign one for her. She ended up getting five signed! While the first guy signed for her, I asked him if Pedro was around. He told me he was and would be coming out later. A little while later I looked inside the dugout and saw a person sitting in there checking out something on his phone and talking with a couple players. I thought it looked like Pedro but was not sure so I was checking the photo roster on my phone and did not see anyone that looked closer to the person other than Pedro. I asked one of the other guys who signed for Cami if that was Pedro Hernandez on the bench and he said it was. I had locked in on my target! About five minutes later he got up to head to the locker room. I yelled for him and asked him if he would sign and he came over and signed for me. While signing, it was just him and Cami and I so we started talking. We chatted for about 10 minutes. He was an awesome guy! We chatted about the first time I tried to get him (the rainy day) and he remembered that game. He said the field was so wet they were trying to tell management they should not play because someone could get injured. I asked him how CHS Field compared to other fields. He commented that his least favorite was in Amarillo, Texas. I asked him if it was because they had 500 fans to a game (picking the number at random) and he laughed and said they would be lucky to have 500. It was more like 100! We chatted about a couple other things too. When I mentioned we have season tickets to the Twins his eyes lit up. I could tell he still is hoping to get to the Major League level again. Tonight, he hit a home run for me!
After that everything else was icing on the cake. Everyone had a blast at the game. The Saints killed the Goldeyes and at one point later in the game, Cami was in the grass berm above the bullpens and asked a player on the Winnipeg team if she could have a ball. Of course he tossed her one so she was really pumped to have two baseballs!
The only bummer of the whole night was that Amy had to go to Des Moines for work and missed out on all the fun.
Thanks Pedro for signing my cards and the awesome memory of chatting with you!