Twas the season

Back in December I received an out of the blue email from Josh, he of Royals and Randoms fame (he's also become my own personal Ask Jeeves on Twitter), asking for my address. Usually this means that something my be heading my way, but one never knows, maybe Josh just needed an address to use for a humorous Craigslist ad, either way, I sent it along and hoped for the best :)

On Christmas eve a package arrived, from, you guessed it, Josh! This was fortuitous in more ways than one (you'll see why in a second). Since it was so close, I decided to just wait a day and open it on Christmas, which, given the color scheme of what was inside, worked out really well.

It doesn't get too much more Christmasy than that! I wonder how many people are able to tell what was in the package just from this image alone?

In case you're one of the one's who wasn't able to identify the contents, it was a bunch of much needed, and much appreciated, autos from 1997's Donruss Signature Series.

Before going any further, a quick apology to Josh is necessary for my taking so long to get to these. There's been a few reasons why, some were discussed in my previous post, but the primary reason for the delay was simply that I ended up trying to do a much more creative post, and got stuck. I then tried to go a different route, and got stuck on that as well. This has been happening a lot lately, hence my now over 30 unfinished drafts, many of which will likely never see the light of day.

But I'll consider this to be a lesson learned, especially when it's regarding something that someone else sent me, if cute isn't working, just do a more traditional post - anything is better than nothing, at least then you don't come off as an ungrateful jerk.

I don't remember Kevin Orie at all, so I tried to find something interesting to say about him, but I only found two articles, one good, and one sad. The good: While playing for the Cubs, Kevin was sent down to AAA for a rehab assignment. In an attempt to try and cheer him up, Ryne Sandberg secretly put wrist bands, baseball cards, and bubble gum into Kevin's cleats, which were found as Kevin was getting ready for his first rehab game - apparently this gesture was much appreciated. Now for the sad: Kevin's wife, Melissa, passed away back in 2013, cancer was the cause, she was only 40 years old.

This card officially almost broke my brain! When I first saw it, I thought "Oh wow, a Todd Helton autograph!", then after a brief pause, I realized that I had the wrong guy, which was then followed by "Oh wow, a Larry Walker autograph!". The sad thing is too, that I do remember Todd Walker, but I think that this was right around the time that folks were just starting up with their HOF ballots, and both Todd Helton and Larry Walker were being mentioned a lot.

Geronimo Berroa is one of the greatest names ever!

According to the Wikipedia, the first batter that Jason Dickson ever face was none other than Derek Jeter, who proceeded to hit a homer off of Jason's third major league pitch.

I don't know how anybody else feels about it, but I always get a kick out of certified autos that are signed somewhere other than where the company had intended them to be. Nobody puts Benes in the corner!

I have a partial memory regarding Joe Randa, it's not very interesting, but here it is anyway. Back around 2000-ish, there was game on Fox (I think), Pittsburgh against somebody. It was an early game, so it had to be on the weekend (I think). Anyway, I don't remember who was calling the game, but this was right around the time that Joe's nickname, The Joker, became publicly known - I know this because whoever was calling the game must've said it about a hundred times during the course of the telecast. It got old after about the second time, but that didn't stop guy from saying it another 98 times. Does anybody else remember this? It was very similar to when Daniel Gibson's nickname, Booby, became known, and Mike Tirico spent the rest of that year's NBA playoffs saying "Booby" like every 30 seconds - I'm pretty sure he was saying it even in non-Cavs games as well :(

It took awhile, but thank you for the cards, Josh! Hopefully if I'm ever fortunate enough to receive anything from you again, I won't take almost three months to acknowledge it publicly. And if by chance you saw my previous post about finding stuff at the card show for 1 1/2 of the five people that I owe return packages to, well, you were the 1/2, so you can expect to see something in your mailbox from me sometime in the next week or two.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.