Morning Mail

The Nats have quickly become one of my favorite teams in baseball, and you have to love their uniform combos.  I haven't sent out many requests to current players thus far this year, so it was a nice surprise to get this one back.

Morning Mail

It can be easy to take reliable signers for granted.  After all, how many cards do I really need of Fernando Vina or Frank Tanana?  But it's always fun to find those interesting, unique cards that you just know will look great signed.  And when that card is of a guy who you know is a reliable signer?  Even better.

 Pat Neshek is one of the best guys in the hobby, and type of player you can't help rooting for.  I already have some signed Twins cards in my collection, but when I found this Cognac parallel in a quarter box, it seemed worthy of another mailing.  The card looks amazing in person

And this one comes from the Wisconsin Woodchucks, a wood bat summer league.  It looks like they were doing some kind of anniversary set.  Kind of interesting to see Neshek pictured in what appears to be a more traditional pitching motion.

Mail Call

 Some more mail, including my first return of the seaon from an active player.  Lowrie has shown nice pop for a shortstop, and has been signing pretty consistently this season.  Definitely a nice signature to add.

I loved Don Baylor's Rockie teams in the mid 90's So of course Topps decided to stop making making manager cards those seasons.  But the 87T is a nice consolation prize.

 Brooks Kieschnick was a top prospect, who went the anti-Ankiel route, converting from position player to pitcher.  He played a dual role as pitcher/pinch hitter for the Brewers for a couple seasons.  I'm hoping I can tack down one of his Brewers cards featuring him on the mound at some point. 

I forgot how much I liked the 97 Stadium Club set as a kid.  I may have to take a crack at putting it together one of these days.

Now Pitching...

 It's always interesting to see who signs TTM and who doesn't.  Whether it's the guy that was impossible to get during his playing days who suddenly decides to start his stacks of mail once his schedule frees up, or vice versa. 

One thing I've noticed in my years of ttm mailings is that it seems like pitchers and catchers are often pretty good signers.  Or at least it sure seems that way.  This can be a blessing or a curse.  If it's a former starter, that probably means there are a bunch of cards out there to be signed, even for the most middling pitcher.  For a reliver, the prospects are less optimistic.  Especially in recent years, it seems like the middle innings guys are very hit or miss as to whether they'll make their way into a card set during a given year.

So enjoy some of my recent returns from the guys on the mount.

 The 1991 and 1987 sets are two of my favorite designs, and have a special place in my collection.  87 is my birth year, while '91 marked my first pack of cards, which my dad picked up for me during a trip to the gas station.

 I've been told that these strange markings somehow resemble letters.  I'm picking up an H, but that's about it.

 The spaceman finally did away with the "Earth" insciption he has added to all other autos I've sent to him.  I do love signed vintage.

And finally, a swift return from a very good signer who surprisingly I had never sent to before.  I may be strange, but part of me misses the early 90's Mariners logo, though it looked more like a gas station logo than a baseball team.

Morning Mail, On Ice

 I don't collect much hockey.  My Pens collection is the smallest of my Pittsburgh collections, at just a little over 200 cards.  It's not that I don't have an interest in them; hockey cards just seem to be nearly impossible to find at decent prices in Ohio/Pennsylvania. 

Beyond my Pens cards, the entirety of my hockey collection comes from a huge box of commons I (my parents) bought when I was 9 or 10 at a garage sale - 20,000 cards for $20.  It was a goldmine for a kid.  Probably 7k of those cards were hockey, which are still sitting in a big box in my parent's house.  There is probably some TTM fodder in there, but I am so backlogged with requests I rarely look.

Except when something catches my eye.

I've said it a million times, but I love cool jerseys.  And by extension, I suppose I love goalies.  So when a name caught my eye while skimming successes on SCN, I knew I had to dig out a few cards from the mysterious hockey box.

 As much as I loathe the smug Caps these days, I love the old jerseys, and these are two great action shots.

The Lindsay was a little less romantic.  I knew he's  good signer, and dug through the rare hockey dime box at card shows until I finally found a card to get out to him.  It's not my favorite card, but I can't complain about adding a very gracious TTM signer to my collection.

The Other Colts

Now that I finally had some time to scan some non-Pirate cards, I'm on a bit of a posting frenzy here.  Should anyone actually be reading these, I apologize. 

Dave Giusti was a relief ace for the Pirates, and an overall good guy.  But he also happens to be featured with the Colt .45's on two awesome vintage pieces.  I had a couple Pirates cards I didn't have signed by Giusti, so it seemed like a great excuse to send these in the mail as well.

Being a jersey nerd, I really like the fact that his compact signature doesn't obscure the jersey in either of these photos.  It's certainly for the best that the team in Houston switched to a less...deadly...name, but like the Seattle Pilots, these cards are among my favorite oddball teams to get signatures of.

Morning Mail

 I've been collecting TTM autographs for almost a decade now.  My first requests were sent out during spring training of 2004. 

Yet almost unfailingly, I continue to discover fairly significant players who are great signers...who have never found their way into my collection.

It's not oversight, per se.  My card collection spans from the late 80's forward, as does my baseball fandom.  I consider myself a student of the history of the game, but certain aspects just get lost.  So I was shocked to see both how good Ken Singleton was, and that I had never even thought to write for his autograph.

A few vintage dime cards and a surprise find of a 2012 Archives card later, and these beauties were back in my mailbox.

I love the vintage (and once again current) Orioles logo and helmet design, and these cards look great signed.  Another easy signer down, who knows how many more to do.

Seeing Red

My non-baseball ttm collections are weak at best.  The vast majority of my non-baseball cards are from the 90's, and there simply aren't a ton of players from that period who sign ttm.

But occasionally I run across some cards that allow me to expand my collection a bit.

I actually pulled the ATFF card on the right from a blaster box in 05 or 06 (which also contained a Fridge Perry certified auto.  Woo!).  A few years later, I looked up the common players in the blaster to see who signed TTM.  Foley is a great signer, but I didn't want to use two stamps for a single card of a player who I knew almost nothing about.

Fast forward a couple years, and last month I was able to find not one but two different vintage football cards (at two different shows!) after a few years of looking through vintage fb dime boxes.  Off to the mailbox they went, and I must say it was worth the wait.  The cards look great in red sharpie.

Marino Monday

Dan Marino was my first true player collection.  Or focused collection of any kind.  By age 10 or 11, my dad started taking me to a few Pitt games each season at the now destroyed Pitt Stadium.  I instantly became a big fan, and was amazed by the fact that perhaps the greatest quarterback in the game, Dan Marino, had not just gone to Pitt, but was from the Pittsburgh area.

And so started my fleeting childhood obsession.  Marino instantly became my favorite player, and the Dolphins my favorite team.  Soon my bedroom was decked out in teal and orange, from the bedsheets to the garbage can.  And so started my humble Marino collection, since around that I also discovered the amazing world of local card shops.

My collection never grew to anything resembling epic proportions.  A couple hundred base cards, the odd insert or two, and the crown jewel: a serial numbered card!  At that age, and for the late 90's, it seemed like an amazing collection to me.

I haven't really given much thought or effort to the collection since then - the occasional Marino pickup at card shows if I find something in a dime box, but that's about it.

But I'll make an effort to show off both old and new pickups.  Both these beauties came from a dime box.  Edge was probably my favorite card company growing up.  I know a lot of collectors take issue with their cards, but they were shiny, affordable, and had some nice designs.  What more could a pre-teen want?

At this point my hobby funds are going in too many different directions, and the sheer number of Marino cards out there too overwhelming to seriously restart the collection.  The natural completest in makes my collecting endeavors all of nothing pursuits.  But it's definitely fun to revisit my collection, and hopefully some luck (or great trading partners) will allow me to add a few new pages to my Marino binder.

A Man of Many Hats

 Some players just get around.

There are the guys who are perhaps as noteworthy for their mobility as for their production on the field - Matt Stairs and Octavio Dotel have suited up for quite a few teams, particularly during their latter career.

But some guys just kind of fly under the radar.  Or all over the radar, depending on how you look at it.

Jose Hernandez certainly found quite a few different cities to strike out in, including some time with the Pirates.  I already had a few of his Pirate autos in my collection, so when I noticed he had started signing TTM as a minor league coach, I decided to see what else I could get signed.

Apparently Jose wore many a hat during his Topps photoshoots over the years.  And there are still a couple teams unrepresented, so I may have to track down some more cards to finish off the "set."



He sent back this beautiful stack of autographs in under two weeks.  I knew about his time with the Bucs and Brewers, and knew of his time with the Dodgers because he was a favorite with then-Pirates manager Jim Tracy, who had brought him over after being fired by the Dodgers.  But the Rockies?  Not a clue.  Indians?  Like any good Pittsburgher, I make it a point to ignore most things going on in Cleveland.  Though from what I've been told most Clevelanders follow a pretty similar rule.  It looks like I have the Rangers and Cubs left (he ended his career with the Phillies after a midseason release from the Pirates in 06, but I doubt he was set-worthy at that point). 

USA, USA

One of my friends in grad school once told me, "There's nothing I love more than a good USA chant."

The Olympics may have canned baseball, but Team USA has produced some of the top players of the past few decades.  The card front, for me at least, has been less appealing.  I've always sort of viewed them as a ship with no port.  I'm a team collector first, and my player collections are more often than not just extensions of those collections.  I collect some guys who have played on Team USA (Warren Morris, Andrew McCutchen, Charles Johnson), but I've never actively chased their Team USA cards.

But when Upper Deck acquired the Team USA license in the early 00's, the excitement of some big name autos con(vinced) me to pick up a couple of the USA boxed sets.  My hits were pathetic, and the base sets sat in a box for the next decade.

But I recently came across them, and realized that though the boxes themselves yielded some less than exciting autos, the set offered some great cards of some reliable signers.

 Better yet, the cards are perfect for autographs.  With a large space to the left of the player photo and nice, big headshots (in some awesomely bad trucker hats), the card offers enough space for the player to sign without really interfering with the photo.

There are a lot of bigger names (and some flamed out prospects) in the set that I'll never be able to get signed.  But I have about a dozen or so cards queued up to be sent with my next round of mailings.  They're some fun cards, and a nice unique side collection for what had been a sunk cost for the past decade.

I love the 90's

Even for a side blog, Returned to Sender has been woefully neglected recently.  It's not for a lack of interest in the cards posted here.  And it certainly isn't for a lack of returns filling up my mailbox.  In fact, the last month or two have yielded a steady stream of TTM returns and some great dimebox finds at recent shows.

The problem, more simply, is one of time and space. All my TTM returns get sent to my parent's address, since I worry that one of those mysterious thousand day returns would get lost in the address shuffle I've been doing far too frequently over the last few years.  On top of that, wedding planning, work, and research have eaten up much of my time.

But I'm hoping to start posting more regularly here, and the current batch of TTM returns certainly give me enough reason.

Growing up during the 90's was a great time to be a sports fan.  I don't have much memory of Bo Jackson or Barry Bonds as a Pirate, but everything after that made for a glorious sports childhood.  There are some great looking cards from those years to boot. 

The downside is that far fewer players from the 90's/00's seem to sign than previous decades, particularly among the bigger names.  But I was thrilled to see decent success rates for two of my favorite 90's players.

 Simply put, Ed McCaffrey just seemed like a total badass.  I loved the Broncos growing up, led by Elways and TD.  McCaffrey seemed like that steady, but not flashy, player who was tough as nails and got the job done.  And though I've tired of the Broncos strange striping over the years, in the late 90's it was awesome.

If that wasn't enough, my mailbox also yielded a couple autos of recent HoF'er Willie Roaf.  Roaf was one of my favorite linemen, probably because the sports media told me he was good.  And he was one of the few o'linemen to be immortalized in plastic by Kenner's Starting Lineup figures (and later McFarlane).  I can't imagine I watched a lot of Saints games on tv in Western PA as a kid, but I do remember him being the top rated lineman on Quarterback Club 97.

Ah, to have your entire frame of reference for something be toys, video games, and Sportscenter.