2010 Twins Autograph Party

Today was the annual Twins Autograph Party.  I was curious to see how it would turn out with it being held at Target Field for the first time.  When tickets first went on sale, I asked Amy if she wanted to go with me and she said she would.  That was well before her back and hip surgeries.  Thankfully, my buddy Shane was available and volunteered to go with me and help me out.  Shane has done a lot of autographing with me.  We go back to the fraternity days and both have been to a whole lot of different ballparks together.
I woke up with the plan on heading down at 7am.  When I woke up I had a bad sinus headache so I took a couple Tylenol and went back to bed for a little bit.  I ended up getting up and heading down to the ballpark and got there around 8:30 or so.  They were not going to announce which players were at what station until 9am so it really did not matter what time I got there before that.
When they announced who was signing at what station, men, women, boys and girls all took off running to station 1 where Mauer was.  Since I was in the middle, and refused to run like that, I ended up waiting in line for Jim Thome.  While in line, I met Tom W and enjoyed chatting with him.  Shane showed up and we went through the line.
The weather was real sucky for an event like this.  Since it was raining you could not get your stuff out until you got inside the tent which slowed things down tremendously.
After Thome, we headed to the Delmon Young line.  From there we decided to check out a couple lines and they were all longer than time would allow so we headed to Killebrew’s line.  We got through that and headed inside to eat at Hrbek’s.  The food was awesome and exceeded our expectations.  After that we walked around the ballpark and I headed home.
Here is a wrap up of my autograph results:
Jim Thome:  Sweetspot OMLB blue ink/Target Field team ball under logo
Brian Duensing:  2010 Topps Heritage team card
Kevin Slowey:  2 baseball cards
Delmon Young:  4 baseball cards (cool guy to sign two for each of us)
Trevor Plouffe:  2010 Topps Heritage team card
Harmon Killebrew:  2 baseball card
John Castino:  baseball card/Sweetspot OMLB blue ink with 79 AL ROY
At one point I looked at Shane and said “This sucks.  I am not even having fun (because of the cold rainy crappy weather).” He just smiled.  For someone to give up a whole day and spend it with a friend in crappy weather and not ask for anything in return shows what kind of guy he is.  I cannot express my appreciation in words on a silly webpage.  Thanks a ton Shane!