Tagged: Jack

October 24, 2009

Card Show

Sorry I have not posted in a while. Today I attended a card show. I usually went to these a lot when I was a little younger. This was the first time I’ve been to a card show in years. My father and I got there at about 12:30 pm and we immediately went to the back of the gym where former Mets Jack Fisher, Davey Johnson, Bruce Berenyi, Ron Darling, George Foster, Keith Hernandez and Kevin Elster were signing autographs. They all, cost a certain amount of money, except for Jack Fischer who was free with your paid admission. I bought 8×10 photographs of Foster and Fischer. How it worked was you would buy a card that entitles you to get 1 autograph from that player. You would give it to a person sitting next to the player then get the autograph. They gave you a card of Fischer with your admission. How the signing worked was there was 1 large table where all the players were sitting and signing. I went to George Foster first, but the line for him was so short and I thought he wasn’t there yet. It turns out that the line for a former MVP, World Series Champion, and All-Star, was well, no one. I just walked straight up to him and got him to personalize the photo I had just bought and I got a (slightly blurry) picture with him.

It was surprising to see him decked out in Reds gear at a New York card show.

Then we waited on line to get Jack Fisher. Thanks to a quick read on wikipedia earlier in the day, I found out that he was the Mets pitcher in the first ever game at old Shea Stadium, so I brought a Shea Stadium commemorative baseball with me and got him to sign it and an 8×10 with some inscriptions that I asked him to do. My father took a video of him signing, and you can check it out HERE. That is a good trivia question to stump your friend. Who threw the first pitch ever at Shea? Jack Fisher

After that, we browsed the rows and rows of dealers. Recently, I was denied in the mail by Jeff Reardon, he returned my cards back unsigned, so when I saw a signed 8×10 of him as a Met for only $1, there was no way I could refuse, so I grabbed a dollar from my pocket, handed it to the dealer, said thanks, and walked away with this Jeff Reardon autograph:

So, we looked around at the many dealers, saw some interesting stuff. Didn’t buy anything though except for a box of Topps Ticket To Stardom Baseball which contained 20 packs of 12 cards each and in one of the first packs my dad opened up, he saw this:

Pretty nice. On the back it was numbered 338/489. Now here is the reason why the box is called Ticket to Stardom.

If you can’t tell, those are actual tickets from games in 2008. After that, we noticed the line for Davey Johnson, manager of the 1986 Mets, was small. So we bought a picture and a card needed for an autograph, and got on line. There was only one problem, we were on the line for Bruce Berenyi, and we didn’t realize that until we saw Davey Johnson get up to leave, so we ran over to him right before he was going to walk out the door, and got him to personalize an 8×10 for me. Here is a proof shot taken by my dad along with the photo itself.

That was it for the card show. Very successful.