Completed page of Sign Here cards

Yep, I've accomplished my silly goal of acquiring nine "sign here" cards. 

Here's the latest page added to the binder that houses fun stuff such as my old wallet cards and the Vagabond Binder pages. A full page of cards each used as a guide to let the subject pictured know exactly where the card manufacturer wants their autograph. Tino Martinez is probably the most recognizable name of the bunch. The lone football card is the only one that also includes a real signature. The Gavin Lux that originally started this side quest was in a magnetic one-touch for years, but I think his hobby standing has fallen off enough to let it roam in less-rigid situations now. Still, he gets the honor of holding down the center pocket, flanked by a couple bikini girls.

The page-completing pickup was this Chris Baker 2002 Bowman Chrome X-fractor. Baker pitched professionally for the entirety of the aughts, including over 100 games in AAA, but never made the show, so this didn't set me back much. It's not serial-numbered, but TCDb says it's got a print run of 250. I assume the other 249 have his real signature. Like with the Lux, it would have made more sense for the Topps employee to sacrifice a base auto to use as the example, rather than ruining a "nicer" refractor parallel. But hey, I shouldn't complain; cool for me to land an especially shiny card to finish the project.. or the page, at least.

As I've mentioned in the past, I've been planning to wrap up this minicollection with the completion of a page. And hey, to my credit, I did delete my old saved search... for a few days.. but then set new, narrower search as I was drafting up this post. Guess I just can't completely turn my back on these dumb pseudo signatures that were never meant for circulation. So perhaps I'll throw in a low bid when another one pops up cheap, but don't plan to chase them as hard going forward, and instead be happy with this one crazy page I've put together.

women and children

I haven't really gotten into the blog-posting groove yet here in the first half of 2026, but hey, just finally got the "we're packing your order" email from COMC, so I should have plenty of blog fodder on the way soon.

But for today, here are 3 various eBay pickups to show off.

I've probably got a couple thousand cards in my Guys From Granite minicollection, but this is my first Gal from Granite card. Also pretty sure it's my first MMA autograph. Juliana "Killer" Miller blipped on my radar earlier this year as a pro athlete who attended the same high school as me, and I was happy to discover she had some Leaf cards out there.

This one is #'d 4/6, but of course Leaf does the shtick where they put out a ton of parallels, most of which are low-numbered, so not even a 1/1 is all that big of a deal considering there are a bunch of 1/1s. But yeah, I'm happy with this purple refractor I ended up landing for a good price. Looks like Juliana's record is currently 4-4-0. Wishing her the best of luck with her career of hitting and kicking.

Ladies Night continues with the lovely Ms. Sign Here. Whoops, no, that's model/actress/artist Wrenna Monet and this card was sacrificed as an example to show her where to sign her stack of cards, and somehow it didn't end up in the trash, but rather in my card collection.

And the backside. From a quick googling, she's got a lot more tattoos now. I'm still tentatively planning to build my "Sign Here" minicollection to 9 cards, then I'll stick a fork in it and call it good at a page's worth. This is my 8th such card, so the hunt continues, but the conclusion could come any day now.

Speaking of penultimate cards...

Baby Bo here nearly finishes off my 2005 Topps Pristine Legends frankenset. Funny that Bo originally suited up as catcher in his youth. The Yankees drafted him in the second round of the 1982 draft before he accepted a football scholarship to Auburn instead. Think about that alternate reality where Bo Jackson skipped college football and instead became famous as the Yankees backstop. LOL

I'm building the 140-card set in non-base form.. which means the bulk of my set is refractors, plus several Gold refractors, which are all /65 with a "die cut" deckle edge. Reminiscent of vintage OPC, I could do without the rough edges of the Golds, but whatever. This one has some extra wear at the top, but I'm just happy to be done chasing this card. (The regular refractors of The Early Years subset are numbered to a scant /25, so the Golds are nearly three times as obtainable there, whereas for the rest of the set, the Golds are the tougher parallel.) Now I'm down to one pricey hurdle at the finish line, another Early Years card. That last need also happens to be the last card in the set's checklist, so maybe I'll start a blog series where I slowly feature my Pristine Legends frankenset a few cards at a time, and hopefully I'll have landed that final card by the time I get to the end.

Thanks for stopping by.

Where do I sign?!

I'm now up to 7 "sign here" cards.

Tino in center is my latest pickup. (Jealous, Lost Collector? lol) The seller first put it up at a hefty Buy-It-Now, but as the weeks went by he dropped the asking price and eventually I got it off him for a fair best offer.

I'm thinking I'll try to add a couple more, then call this quirky collection good at an "even" 9 cards.

Well, this is a short post, so here's some bonus content I may have posted on Twitter already.

Check out this tree in my neighborhood with an attitude problem.

Ruby had a great time out with the family at my wife's birthday lunch this past weekend. She's a cutie but a hellraiser.

Transferring the contents of the old car's glove compartment to the new car is kinda like opening up a time capsule. Found some goodies such as a vintage Kentucky Fried Chicken towelette I've had on hand since the 90s. I've also had that Gwynn since the 90s; Back in the early days of this blog I posted about The Worst-Condition Card I Own. I had forgotten that Tony was even still in the car, honestly! Looks like it lost a chunk at some point in the past decade. I think I'll "retire" the card to my Gwynn PC now before it disintegrates further.

Whoever ends up with my collection after I die is going to have a lot of "WTF?!" moments when they go through it all. LOL

Sign Here (and here and also here)

Despite being a double bullseye for my collection, here's one "Gavin Christmas Card" I will never own. Geez, that's a lot of cash! I was watching the auction for a while, but it quickly jumped up to too rich for my blood territory, before ultimately ending up in are you fucking kidding me?! territory. Gavin Lux has been bumped up to #2 overall on some recent MLB Prospect lists (behind Wander Franco), and he's been holding his own in his September call-up with LA as a 21-year old, so his cards are trending steeply upwards. At this point I've probably been priced out of adding any more nice Lux cards to my collection any time soon.

But at least I can feel smug in the knowing that while there are 25 copies of that above orange card, there's only one "sign here" variation of his 1st Bowman:

I showed off this oddity in the Gavin Lux PC retrospective post earlier this month the day he got called up. And it got me curious about other "sign here" cards for sale on eBay, and well, I ended up snagging a couple more for a few bucks each.

Ben Grieve 1999 Bowman's Best - Rookie of the Year "Sign Here" non-auto

Eric Chavez 1999 Bowman's Best - Rookie Locker Room "Sign Here" non-auto

Not sure what happened to the "S" on the Chavez, but perhaps there was a piece of paper or sticker partially covering the card.

These two were won from different sellers, but funny how they're both A's autos from 1999 Bowman's Best, and they seem to be "signed" by the same Topps representative. Perhaps this guy has sticky fingers and played a part in backdooring these cards onto the secondary market, while Topps' Quality Control protocol would surely call for them to be destroyed. But whatever.. I'm happy to have them, and may occasionally do a search to see if any other reasonably priced "sign here" cards pop up that I can add to this quirky little minicollection.