Ramblin Rockie

I try to pick up cards of different minor league and college players who pass through town who are not necessarily apart of a local team.  Players catch your eyes in different ways, but find their cards is not always the easiest task in the world.  One of the coolest college baseball games I ever attended living in North Carolina was a double header between UNC and Georgia Tech.  The Tar Heels were remodeling their stadium and were playing their home games at the USA Baseball Complex which is about 10 minutes away from my house.

There were at least seven UNC players on that team who are now Major Leaguers: Ackley, Kyle Seager, Tim Federowicz, Rob Wooten, Alex White, Adam Warren, and Matt Harvey.  I am still not sure how they walked away without a National Championship that season.  Georgia Tech had a great offense led by Derek Dietrich and Charlie Blackmon.  

As impressive as the UNC players were, I really liked Dietrich and Blackmon.  Dietrich seemed like he had a great bat for a middle infielder.  Lots of pop.  Blackmon seemed like a toolsy player.  He could run, hit, play a little defense.  Definitely good Major League prospects.  I put both of their names on my mental checklist of players to collect.  I actually have been able to find autographs of both players in Major League uniforms, but both players also have autographs in the Donruss Elite set in a Georgia Tech uni.  I tracked down Dietrich this spring.

Which left Charlie Blackmon.  He has been really difficult, but I finally found a copy of this great looking card for a reasonable price.  Yes, there is a non-logo patch autograph of Blackmon in that set, but why would you want to pass up one of these cool cards?

There have actually been several of these up over the years, but they were always for way too much money.  In other words, over $20 dollars.  His non-patch autograph in a Georgia Tech uni is listed for over $30 right now on COMC.  I like the Donruss Elite patch cards and think I now have one from almost all of the ACC schools save for Maryland (I am going to still count them) and Boston College.    I have a few others from other schools connected to Cardinals or Rays players, but always a really good find.  Kind of wish Topps would put something like this into one of their sets.  Hmmmm.

and now that you've read my post on a Georgia Tech baseball player, I give you the Georgia Tech fight song.  This is the best fight song, outside of NC State, in the ACC.

Raleigh's Old Baseball Stadium: Devereux Meadow

I dropped my son off for preschool this morning and took another trip to see another Carolina League ballpark.  This stadium was a little bit different than my trip to the Durham Athletic Park last weekend.  Devereux Meadows was home to the Raleigh Capitals and a few other teams between 1945 and 1971.  The stadium was abandoned and was demolished by the city of Raleigh in 1979.  The area was turned into a parking lot, but different people have told me that bits and pieces of the stadium still exist in between a few buildings and a parking lot that the city of Raleigh uses for their service vehicles.

I used Google Maps and Google Earth for a little bit of help with this post.  The stadium is not far from the intersection of Peace and West just west of downtown.  If you have hung around Raleigh for anytime it's about a block down from the Mellow Mushroom off of Glenwood Avenue.  From the street the old stadium site is accessible by walking in between these two buildings

The Anderson Sanitary Maintenance Building and.....

this building which is owned by the city of Raleigh and blocked by the trees in this street view picture from Google Maps......

Sorry the tree is there.  If you notice in the bottom picture there is a creek that runs in between the two building.  In order to get to the ballpark site you have to walk along with creek since the city of Raleigh has placed a barbed wire fence around their building and service vehicle parking lot.  The ballpark site is about 100 yards back from the street following the Pigeon House Branch Creek.  If you are into urban waterways, the article is a great read, but the third picture on the page shows this same area in between these buildings that was formerly part of the stadium.

The area looks like this from above.  The original grandstand area of Devereux Meadows is marked by the red circle on Google Earth picture below.

The majority of the playing surface is now taken up by the parking lot for the service vehicles and the fence was somewhere out near the road on the lefthand side of the Google Earth picture.  I found the picture below on several different sites around the internet, but it shows the view of Devereux Meadows facing the outfield from the press box.

There are no markers indicating that the area used to be a baseball stadium.  In fact, on my way back a few city workers asked me why I was walking around in the ally.  Apparently the area is a hang out for people other than baseball fans. We talked for a minute or two and sadly, the workers I talked to, did not know that this site had originally been a baseball stadium.  

This is what the area with the red circle on the Google Earth map looks like from street level.  I should say lot level.  I am sure that this hill is covered in kudzu or ivy or something that is dormant for the winter.  The bottom of the hill is lined with a small brown wall the majority of the way through the lot except for one small stretch which can be seen in towards the right side of the picture above or in the close up pictures below.

The whitish/grey wall here is about a twenty foot section of the retaining wall and is rumored to be the only piece of Devereux Meadow still standing.  The mortar in between the bricks is definitely worn and there are plumping pipes and the what not hanging out of the wall leading many, including myself, to believe that this was apart of a building.  The left side of this structure is wearing badly and looks like it could fall with a little help.  The bricks are weathered and are turning brown, especially in the middle.  There are several industrial businesses at the top of the hill, in particular a paving place and the sanitary maintenance company, which could also be lending in some chemicals to help with the wear on the wall.  

Turning around and looking out on to what would be the playing surface this is the view....

 A little disappointing I know.  The concrete in front of me is a walkway, but also houses the creek discussed in the pictures above.  It sad that a stadium that was once home to players like Enos Slaughter and Carl Yastrzemski met this fate, but there is a plan to turn this back into a green space again in the near future.  Personally, I would love to see the city of Raleigh put up a marker or plaque to mark the space as the former Devereux Meadows.

Wallet Card

I saw a really cool idea a few days ago over at the Baseball Card Breakdown that I thought would be a cool experiment for the new year.  The rules for the wallet card were simple:

1.  The card must make you smile when you see it


Not too difficult.  So, after much thinking I decided to pick a card from earlier in my collection and went with the 1991 Topps Geronimo Pena.  Love that set and really enjoy looking at all of the cool Cardinals rookie cards in that set.  Ray Lankford, a young Felix Jose, Bernard Gilkey, second year Todd Zeile, and this guy.   I know you're probably asking who is Geronimo Pena?  Why him?  Why not one of those other people who are actually somewhat recognizable.

I love Ray Lankford, but I wanted to do someone different.  I always pick Ray Lankford.  Todd Zeile reminds me of people taking the first pitch of every at-bat of their career.....  Geronimo Pena was a prime prospect for the Cardinals back in the early nineties and was supposed to push Jose Oquendo for the starting second base job.  He broke in with the Cardinals at the end of 1990 after posting two consecutive seasons with an OBP of almost .400 in the Triple A and Double A.  Geronimo could also run, had some pop in his bad, and was a capable fielder.  He was also hurt all of the time.  One season he missed time because he separated his shoulder after he stepped on his own glove.

His best season took place in 1992 when he hit .305/.386/.478 with 7 home runs, 12 doubles, and 13 steals in just 62 games.  I'd like to have seen him play a whole healthy season.  It could have been great.  He flamed out with the Cardinals in 1995 and the team actually pursued Craig Biggio to replace him at 2B.  He spent one season in the bigs with the Indians before calling it a career.

I love cards of guys like this:  Brien Taylor, Kevin Maas, Todd Van Poppel.  They may not have panned out, but there are still lots of great memories and feelings attached to those cards for many collectors.  For me, Geronimo is in that group.  This is my wallet card.  I will let you know how he is doing on my Twitter account.

Big Hurt and Sweet Baby Ray

I have settled back into being in North Carolina and finally have a little bit of time to write about a few of the items I picked up over break.  While I traveled back to Missouri I did not have a chance to go to any card shops while I was there.  There was a plan to go to a card shop, but...well.  Anyway, I picked up two really nice items during my travels.  

Let's start with the first item which came from my brother in-law who gave me a sweet Ray Lankford Starting Lineup.  I actually have a bunch of these hanging out in my man room, but cannot remember the last time I got a new one.  At some point in the late 90s/early 2000s they were basically run over by MacFarlane figurines.  

I have one Ray Lankford Starting Lineup from 1993 where he is sliding head first into a base, but did not realize that they actually put out three different figurines for my favorite Cardinals outfielder.  He also had a figurine made in 1998 too.  The 1995 figurine shows Lankford wearing a home Cardinals uniform and batting left-handed, but there is one curiosity with this piece.

Despite wearing a home uniform Lankford is wearing a blue road batting helmet on the figurine.  I know that MacFarlane Figurines have different variations, but I do not remember Starting Lineups ever having any variations.  I did a little bit of looking into the figurine, and SLUs in general, but cannot find any mention of variations with the different player figurines.  

In this case, it seems like it was just an oversight on the part of SLU.  There are a few other figurines where the company missed a little bit on the uniform or some particular aspect of the figurine.  I actually like the change on this figurine.  While the Cardinals traditionally wear their blue hats on the road, with the exception of the blue Bird on the Bat hat on home Sunday games starting in 1998, they used to wear blue hats all of the time before 1964 when the team introduced their home red hats.  They looked something like this:

  

The backs of the Starting Lineup boxes were always really cool too.  They always showed some of the other figurines in the set for the year, but never all of them.  I searched around and found some cool names in the 1995 set like Andujar Cedeno and Dave Nilson.  There is also a Darren Daulton, but he's not being trucked over by Ray.

Next up is a cool Frank Thomas bobblehead my brother sent me for Christmas.  This was a stadium giveaway that the White Sox did in conjunction with his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I like that they put him in the home white uniform and love the look on the face of the bobble.  The bottom picture shows the backside of the Big Hurt bobblehead.  Overall, the White Sox did a good job job with this bobblehead.  Pretty accurate look for Frank Thomas from the facial expressions to the uniform to the batting stance.

#MyCardMonday

A little bit of a bittersweet post this Monday.  I spent last week traveling back to my home state of Missouri to spend the holidays with my parents.  They have retired and moved out of St. Louis and now live in Columbia, Missouri.  For those unfamiliar with the state, Columbia is smack dab in the middle of the state about half way in between St. Louis and Kansas City.  I usually still spend a little bit of time in St. Louis on each trip.  While I do not have any family in St. Louis, I spent a lot of my life there and have all of the usual trappings of friends and favorite places that are still there.

On this trip I drove through St. Louis on my last day in Missouri.  I spent a little bit of team eating lunch with some good friends I had not seen in a long time, took my son zoo, and ate some St. Louis style pizza.  All good things.

On the way to the pizza place I passed by one of my favorite old card stores in St. Louis.  Sadly the space it occupied for the past few decades was empty.  Southtown Sluggers like all stores had it's own flavor.  Dave, the store owner, was a low key guy.  It's a hard place to describe and I kind of wish I had a picture.  The store had the usual arrangement of display cases you would expect to find in a card store, but the rest of the place was truly unique.  Lots of boxes of singles, bobbleheads, stadium giveaways from the Cardinals, Blues, and Rams.  Just about anything.

I first went into the store at some point in the mid 90s.  I was a college student home for the summer and had called about finding a card.  I do not even remember what card I was after, but I do remember him telling me that he likely had the card and I was welcome to come in, sit down, and we will see if we can find it.  He was serious.  Over the next decade I cannot tell you how many afternoons I spent sitting in that store flipping through boxes trying to pick out cards for my collection.

One of my most memorable days in the store took place on a day I had off of school for a snow day.  We sat in the store for hours looking specifically for cool Ray Lankford cards.  Found lots of singles of sets that I had not worked on putting together, but I also found a few really cool inserts.  My favorite thing I found that day was a Ray Lankford Stadium Club One of Kind Parallel.

This was one of the first really cool parallels that I added to my collection of Ray Lankford cards.  I loved the look of the card, the low serial number, and the fact that Dave sold it to me on the cheap.  Even after leaving St. Louis I would always stop at Southtown Sluggers and spend a little bit of time finding cards.  Dave helped me find cool cards and joked with my wife about reading magazines in the shop.

I am glad that I had the opportunity to shop at Southtown Sluggers and get to know the shop owner.  I will truly miss spending time in the store and am not quite sure how I am going to get my baseball card fix when I go back to St. Louis.  Sure, there are still a few other card shops in town, but Southtown Sluggers was a unique find in the world of sports cards.  I am not quite sure if anyone could quite duplicate the shopping experience at the shop.

Farewell Mr. Scott

Stuart Scott started his career at ESPN in 1993.  I was a sophomore in high school and I watched SportsCenter.  I do not like to think about the fact that was more than 20 years ago, but I have spent most of my life watching sports with Stuart Scott.  Stuart Scott delivered highlights, lowlights, and information in away that could not be found anywhere else on television.  During an hour of SportsCenter there were plenty of highlights and cool plays to keep a fanatically sports fan like myself engaged, but Stuart Scott made the highlights a little bit better by shining some personality into main stream media coverage of sporting events.  

In my late twenties I packed my belongings and moved to North Carolina.  Scott is a favorite in these parts.  He graduated from the University of North Carolina and worked for a few years at WRAL in Raleigh.  There are some cool videos of Scott standing on bridges and overpasses during snowstorms if you look around on YouTube.  Scott loved area and loved UNC.  Not just the sports teams either, but the actual school.

As a card blogger I ran into Stuart Scott during the spring of 2005.  Upper Deck put out a product that spring that was ESPN themed.  I picked up a box of the product from Sports Card Dugout in Webster Groves and found that the set was generally a complete disappointment.  The set was 90 cards of blah with a few equally boring relics.  There were some decent autographs in the product however.  The autograph I pulled was:

In fact, as I recall, I had a really strong run of non-baseball player autographs that summer.  Kerri Strug, that kid from Goonies who played Rudy, and Jesse Ventura.  I sold all of those autographs in a heartbeat, but kept the Stuart Scott.  I am not even sure if the card is really all that valuable, or if I could have gotten much for it back in 2005, but selling a Stuart Scott just seemed wrong.   The Stuart Scott autographed seemed like one of those cards that, no matter who or what you collect, could fit and have a happy home just about anywhere.  

For almost the past decade this card has been living in an oddball box at the bottom of my card closet.  You know, cards that you like that just do not quite fit into any other box.  After I saw the news of Stuart Scott's passing this morning I went and dug this card out of my oddball box and put it in with the rest of my baseball autographs.  

A card cooler than the other side of the pillow.  (Fist bump).  

A New Years Resolution

We are four days into the New Year, so it seems like a good time to roll out this post:

I am not a huge resolution guy, but I try to keep them simple when I make them.  Last year I pledged to spend more time talking about cards that were already in my set.  The first half of the year I struggled with the goal a little bit.  Honestly, I just completely forgot about it for awhile.  At some point I really started getting into the Monday posts showing off a cool card from my collection.  The posts worked even better later into the year when I started adding stories to the cards.  Go figure.  

So, I am still a relative newbie to the blogging world.  I have done this for two years and still feel like I am learning a lot about the card world and blogging world each and every week I sit down and type up a series of posts.  I spent the past few weeks looking through a few of the blogs that I like to frequent and tried to pick out something about the blog that made it a good read.  

I made a list of different ideas I could I adopt as my improve, or resolution, for this year and ultimately decided to add a want list to my blog.  If you stop by and read about the cards I post here on a somewhat regular basis it's probably pretty clear what I collect, but why not just put it out there.  I am hoping the list will have two desired effects:

1. Make me retain some semblance of focus

2. Facilitate a few more trades 

Here's the initial list which will soon have it's own box over there ------> somewhere.  

I have had a want list for a long time, but it mainly exsisted in the form of little sticky notes attached to the shelves of my baseball card closet, or sitting on the desk in my study.  My four year olds interpretation of the sticky notes.......

Seriously.  Over the past couple of years I have had numerous successes in finding cards on my want list, but since it's not published perhaps the accomplishments are understated.  For example, I spent years working on the 2001 Pacific Private Stock relics set with the full realization that I would likely never finish the set.  That Sosa bat card will never be for sale, nor ever in my price range.  At some point I decided to finish out as much as I could, but in particular, finish the Cardinals relic set.  I was down to needing a Garrett Stephenson patch card for several years.  

I had it written down in two or three notebooks.  It appeared on numerous checklists.  It appeared on sticky notes both in my house and in a card shop in suburban St. Louis.  Nothing.  

I finally added the card a few years back, almost a decade after the set came out, and it was a huge deal for me as a collector.  

  

I understand that some of the cards on my list are things that do not pop up often, but I am willing to have things sit on this list for awhile if it eventually helps me track down a few of the cards I have been looking for the past few years.  Other cards on the list are here just because I have been too lazy to go out and trade or buy them.  

In no particular order....

The Snorting Bull's Void List 

Always looking for:

Low Numbered Ray Lankford Cards including printing plates 

2012 Bowman Platinum Tim Beckham Autograph/Patch 

2014 Topps Acetate Justin Ruggiano 

2002 Topps Heritage Jim Edmonds Real One Autograph 

2011 Durham Bulls SGA Bobblehead Charlie Montoyo/Dan Johnson/Jeremy Hellickson 

2012 Panini USA Baseball Johnny Field Patch/Autograph

2014 Topps Update David Eckstein 2006 World Series Patch 

2002 Stadium Club George Hendrick World Champions Bat Relic 

2014 Panini National Treasures Kevin Kiermaier Autograph 

2009 Topps Unique Anthony Reyes Jumbo Patch 

2003 Topps Gallery Stan Musial Penny Card