Today started my most favorite holiday of the season; Twinsfest weekend!\u00a0 I left work at 2pm in hopes of getting to the new location with enough time to get Jim Thome on the Sports Illustrated magazine he was on.\u00a0 I got to the National Sports Center around 2:30.\u00a0 The line was remarkably long.\u00a0 I heard the first person got there at 2AM and there were about 200 people in line around 8AM.\u00a0 They opened the doors at 4PM and the people in the front of the line entered and the line stopped.\u00a0 Turns out the room was at the maximum fire code number of people.\u00a0 They were going to allow one person to enter for each person that left.\u00a0 What they did not account for was that people who got Joe Mauer could get back in line for him and then get in the line for Jim Thome and never leave the building.\u00a0 I know two people who got through the Mauer line twice and Thome once and did not leave the building until after Thome.\u00a0 That left a HUGE number (800+?)\u00a0left outside in the cold in hopes of getting in the building.\u00a0 This was the only thing the Twins did wrong this weekend.\u00a0 They should have made each person leave the building after they got their first autograph.\u00a0 The Twins did a fantastic job for having to change the venue so late in the planning to accommodate the Metrodome roof failure.\u00a0 Sure, the lines were long and wrapped around and were unorganized but people dealt with it and it all went as well as it could have.\u00a0 That is the agony part of the weekend.<\/p>\n
I left the Mauer\/Thome line around 4:20 when I noticed I was not moving and was too far from the entrance to have a shot.\u00a0 I made a decision and boy did it pay off.\u00a0 I went to the other building where the rest of the events were and walked right up to the first table and got Anthony Swarzak on a ticket with “ML Debut” and Juan Berenguer on a card.\u00a0 I then went to another table and got Nick Blackburn on a card and Jason Kubel on two cards.\u00a0 I then headed to wait in another line that was going to have Rod Carew and Tony Oliva signing during the next shift.\u00a0 I got each on a card.\u00a0 After that, I headed to get Jack Morris on a card (he used an ink pen???), Dan Gladden and Terry Steinbach each on a card and Jerry White on the Jim Thome Sports Illustrated.\u00a0 After that I decided to look at what some dealers were selling.\u00a0 Within 10 minutes I found a dealer selling an almost complete run of signed Twins cards that he had recently purchased from a person who was in his early 70’s and went to Spring Training every year since the team started.\u00a0 This is where the Triumph part of the title comes in.\u00a0 He was selling most cards for $4!\u00a0 I got the following cards from him:
\n92 Paul Abbott
\n94 Rick Aguilera
\n95 Rick Aguilera
\n97 Rick Aguilera
\n94 Marc Barcelo
\n95 Marc Barcelo
\n91T Steve Bedrosian
\n01 Sean Bergman
\n84T John Butcher
\n96 John Butcher
\n06 Luis Castillo
\n97 Ron Coomer
\n00 Ron Coomer
\n09 Joe Crede
\n09 Michael Cuddyer
\n92 Chili Davis
\n82T Ron Davis
\n86 Ron Davis
\n90 Tim Drummond
\n81 Dave Edwards
\n10 Ron Gardenhire
\n08 Matt Garza
\n03 Chris Gomez
\n89 German Gonzalez
\n96 LaTroy Hawkins
\n98 LaTroy Hawkins
\n99 LaTroy Hawkins
\n01 LaTroy Hawkins
\n02 LaTroy Hawkins
\n03 LaTroy Hawkins
\n08 Livan Hernandez
\n94 Hocking\/Munoz
\n02 Torii Hunter
\n03 Torii Hunter
\n03 Torii Hunter Gold Glove
\n07 Torii Hunter
\n00 Butch Huskey
\n82T Randy Johnson
\n75 Tom Johnson
\n03 Beau Kemp
\n00 Bobby Kielty
\n01 Matt Lawton
\n85 Rick Lysander
\n04 Joe Mays
\n94 David McCarty
\n95 David McCarty
\n97 Pat Meares
\n02 Eric Milton
\n03 Eric Milton
\n97 Paul Molitor
\n98 Paul Molitor
\n08 Craig Monroe
\n91T Jack Morris
\n92 Jack Morris
\n03 David Ortiz
\n89 Mark Portugal
\n08 Nick Punto
\n99 Brad Radke
\n04T Jay Rainville
\n71 Paul Ratliff
\n01 Mark Redman
\n02 Rick Reed
\n96 Frank Rodriguez
\n97 Frank Rodriguez
\n03 JC Romero
\n03 Johan Santana
\n04 Johan Santana
\n05 Carlos Silva
\n07 Carlos Silva
\n91 Paul Sorrento
\n92 Paul Sorrento
\n93 John Smiley
\n06 Shannon Stewart
\n88 Les Straker
\n07 Jason Tyner
\n99 Todd Walker
\n00 Todd Walker
\n81 Al Williams
\n84 Al Williams
\n85 Al Williams
\n81 Dave Engle
\n80 Graham\/Sofield
\n70 Stan Williams
\n74 Joe Lis
\n93 Lenny Webster
\n92 David West
\n93 David West
\n06 Rondell White
\n81 Mickey Hatcher<\/p>\n
I dropped about $80 on them and then went to the ATM that was on site.\u00a0 I needed $300 and the limit was $100 so I had to do 3 transactions (of course they charged me $2.95 for each one!).\u00a0 I paid the man and was really happy.<\/p>\n
I ran into my friend Rob who works for the Twins and had him autograph a card for me.\u00a0 I will be putting that card on my website of signed Twins cards.\u00a0 I even have a “proof shot” of him signing it so if anyone is interested in buying it, I will offer it at a fair price.\u00a0 At this time it is a 1 of 1 limited edition! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
I then went over to see Joel Bradley about some of the stuff he got signed for me.\u00a0 He worked with the Bob Feller Museum to get a discount because he has to many items to get signed.\u00a0 I had him getting a couple Jeremy Hellickson ML Debut tickets signed and was very pleased with the job he did.\u00a0 He had not gone to the Fergie Jenkins booth to get those items signed so he asked if I would help him when he went there.\u00a0 I had no place to go so I did.\u00a0 He got my last Jim “Mudcat” Grant card I needed signed and I helped him with the other stuff.<\/p>\n
I then drove home thinking I should have bought more of the cards and hoped they would still be there tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today started my most favorite holiday of the season; Twinsfest weekend!\u00a0 I left work at 2pm in hopes of getting to the new location with enough time to get Jim Thome on the Sports Illustrated magazine he was on.\u00a0 I got to the National Sports Center around 2:30.\u00a0 The line was remarkably long.\u00a0 I heard … Continue reading “Twinsfest Day 1- Agony and Triumph”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kemmetmueller.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}