One Player Changes Perspective

I recently had a conversation with a guy I know that pitches in the Big Leagues. I had seen and heard rumors that the MLBPA has been urging players not to sign index cards anymore because of the fear of fraud. As the pitcher told me, "they're worried about identity theft."

With that in mind, I explained to him my reasoning why I prefer index cards over anything else. My perspective is very simple... I work on projects where I pick a theme, generally involving older players from the early 20th Century. I will try and find those signatures (more times than not on a cut or index card) and mat them with a picture above their signatures and get it framed for the wall in my Yankees Den.

My example I gave this player was:

ME: "Let's say I want to do a Yankees Catchers piece to put on my wall... I have index cards from Pat Collins (1927 Yankees), Yogi Berra, and Thurman Munson... I obviously want to include Jorge Posada in that piece because of how great he was at that position for the Yankees for so long. But it's going to look funny if the previous three are matted with a picture and an index card below them, and Jorge Posada's is a baseball card. To me, I'd want a Jorge Posada index card to keep a consistent theme for the piece. Back then, that's all they pretty much signed."

The guy I know is a pretty smart young man that just happens to have a good enough arm to pay the bills. His response to me was a genius solution to the problem facing most index card collectors these days:

PITCHER: "I try to make (my autograph) look different from my signature that I sign checks, other important documents with."

Bingo! That is brilliant and simple! Why didn't I think of that? I feel like that is the position the MLBPA should take in terms of mitigating the risk involved with their players signing items, yet still being able to protect the player while fulfilling autograph requests.

Last thing for today, I got an email a couple hours ago from this pitcher, which I am very pleased to share:

PITCHER: "I recently visited X-Y-Z Gallery which has a ton of collection items and saw what you are talking about with the index cards. It actually makes a very nice way to display certain items, and I will probably sign those cards from now on and just take the risk!"

I'm very pleased to see one player listen to us collectors and be able to see it from our perspective! While it may be only one player out of 750+ Big Leaguers, I consider it one small battle won.

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Introducing... Graph Nation!

Everything is *Something* "Nation" these days.. Buckeye Nation, Flyer Nation, Raider Nation... You name it, something has a nation. Basically, what that means to me, is a collective group with one common interest. I wanted to start a blog because the two biggest hobbies I have are writing and autograph collecting. I wanted to bring together the group of autograph collectors that I've been dealing with since last June to talk about auto-Graphing, hence Graph Nation.

My name is Matt, and I go by mschwade on the net54baseball.com message boards. I have to be honest: I was once an avid autograph seeker, but that fell to the way-side as I began to hang out more with friends, played sports, went to college. I still collected some autographs in the mean time, albeit selective and mostly of Ohio State football players. It wasn't until watching my first couple episodes of Pawn Stars, did I fully get wrapped up in the hobby again. Now, my primary focus has been the New York Yankees. Stay tuned to some of the things I've learned and collected in my first year *really* back in the hobby! #GRAPHNATION