TTMCast This Week
Troy Rutter returns as co-host as he and Drew cover all the week’s collectibles news and a solid group of TTM returns. Plus Dan Ogilvy joins us to talk about his family’s Cleveland Guardians collection and specifically their appreciation for Jose Ramirez.
Don’t forget: if you want to have Les Wolff take a look at your items for appraisal or authentication, send them to us at [email protected]
You can listen to this week’s show here.
TTM Successes
Ron Francis
This is one of the few times where I mailed to a Hall of Famer and didn’t get his rookie card signed. Francis was a need for my 1988-89 Topps set, so I got that signed along with two others.
Francis spent 21 years as a player before becoming a team executive. In 2017, he was named one of the NHL’s all-time top 100 players.
Sent to the Seattle Kraken where he serves at general manager, these came back to me in about two months.
Bud Selig
Aside from Ford Frick’s appearance in 1959 Topps, no active Commissioner was ever featured on a major, licensed, nationally-released card until Selig was put in the 2013 Allen & Ginter set. I’m counting it for my Hall of Famer rookie card collection.
Selig turned 90 years old last month.
The return took two weeks via his Wisconsin home.
Alain Chevrier
“Obscure Penguins goalies who share my birthday” could make for an interesting though limited collection, starting and ending with Alain Chevrier. Despite playing only three games with the Pens, he appeared on two cards with them– the same number he got in 140 games with New Jersey.
He signed these for me in a couple months via his Florida home.
Joe Schmidt
A 1973 Hall of Famer, ten-time Pro Bowler, eight-time All-Pro, and winner of the Detroit Lions’ last two NFL championships, the 92-year-old Schmidt is one of the best living players that you probably haven’t heard of. The linebacker picked off 24 passes in his career, and recovered eight fumbles in the 1955 season– a mark surpassed by only one defensive player.
He signed his rookie card for me in two weeks for $5 via his Florida home.
Joe DeLamielleure
The lone Hall of Famer of the 1970’s Bills “Electric Company” offensive line, Joe later played for the Cleveland Browns. Post-playing career he has been active in fighting for assistance to former players and in raising money for an orphanage in Mexico.
He signed his rookie card for me in two weeks for $10 to his home in South Carolina.
The Art and Science of The Graphing Road Trip
I challenge readers to name me something more American than a summer road trip to watch baseball. Anyone tuning into recent episodes of the TTMCast podcast have gotten to hear from Arron Littleton, occasional guest co-host and road tripper extraordinaire. Longtime listeners may recall my calls in from the road to Jeff Baker as Arron and I made our way around the country in 2022, graphing games around our trip to the National.
It has become a yearly tradition for Arron to hit the road for baseball. Trips with his mom to visit his brother took them to games in Michigan in 2017 and 2019, New England in 2022, and the Pacific Northwest in 2023. Other random trips took him across the Southeast in 2019 and California this year. And our quadrennial trips to games to and from the National took us to Cleveland in 2018 and Atlantic City in 2022. We’ve each done our own Spring Training trips a decade apart. And he has me beat by a score of 80 different ballparks to 40. It’s a little early to truly begin planning it, but we’ll be hitting the Chicago show in 2026 as well.
So if you want to go on your own graphing-centric trip, here’s some advice on how to do it most effectively.
1. Have both goals and flexibility
It’s easiest to plan a trip if you have one central goal to start around. For Arron, visiting family was an easy central target for several trips, and for our mutual trips it was all about the National. With his California trip this year, seeing a game in Oakland in their final season was the centerpiece. Once you have that main goal, you can start planning around it.
But you’ll also need flexibility on anything else surrounding it. You may want to hit two different places on the same trip but scheduling sometimes makes that impossible. Arron and I had talked about trying to do a square of Amarillo, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Midland in a four-day span. We had it planned out in 2020 before everything was canceled, and ever since then the four teams haven’t all played at home in a four-day span. So your ideas, goals, and plans may not work out in full: keep some flexibility and you can still maximize your games.
2. Know your limits
Everyone’s limits are different. You may not mind an eight-hour drive while others don’t want any more than two or three. Your car may hold less than others. Some of us can deal with multiple games in different cities in a single day.
Don’t push yourself unreasonably. When I’m in charge of planning I don’t mind two games in a day as long as it’s less than a two-hour drive in between them: we’ve done pairs of Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Worcester and New Hampshire, and Greensboro and Winston-Salem in single days when they had a noon game at one and a 7 pm game at another. I also don’t want to drive more than 300 miles in a day– though I can and will do it on the very first and last days if I have to. So it’s good to know what teams are within whatever your acceptable radius is from one team to another.
Don’t overstuff your car: limit to the essentials, like your graphing items and clothes. Almost every MLB and MiLB team has Mondays off so use a Monday for laundry. Snacks and drinks can be grabbed on the road, so having a cooler in the car can be a major waste of space.
3. Be thorough in your preparation
The tough part about minor league graphing is that rosters are constantly in flux. Players can get moved up, sent down, traded, released, and signed. If you order from sites like SportLots, CardBarrel, or BuySportsCards, you’ll have to do so weeks ahead of time, and a lot of movement can happen.
“I try to have at least one card of all the prospects that could get called up before I’m there, and one card for as many major leaguers as possible that could be rehabbing,” says Arron. “At best, you could get something really cool and unexpected. At worst, you just carry a few extra cards.”
Look for each team’s parent organization’s roving instructors as well. We used to see Trevor Hoffman, Steve Finley, and Mark Loretta come through with San Antonio, Jamey Wright with Tulsa, and once in a while we’ve seen Darren Oliver, Geno Petralli, and Keith Comstock as substitute coaches for Frisco.
It’s better to have something and not need it than to need it and not have it (within reason of course).
4. Get help from everywhere you can
Find out as much as you can before you go into a new ballpark. There’s not much worse than scheduling a game and finding out upon arrival that graphing inside is almost impossible. Scout things out through photos and videos of games, Google Maps Street View, and seating charts so that you know which side teams sit on, where the bullpens are, and where the teams enter the field.
There are also many Facebook groups dedicated to trading info about how to graph various parks. Groups like Ballpark Graphers can be excellent spots to find info and meet graphers who might be willing to help you out in whatever city you’re visiting.
5. Embrace the chaos
“You can be resourceful and great at graphing and recognizing players, but a good deal of it is just blind luck,” Arron said. “Who is and isn’t playing, fireworks displays or Little League parades, even whether a team has front numbers on jerseys–” all can affect what you do and where and when.
“You’re in a new city every night. It’s like being in one of those chambers where money is blowing around and you have to just try to grab whatever you can,” Arron concluded.
Things can change quickly and you’ll need to adjust. Surprises will happen– both pleasant and unpleasant. So just enjoy it: if the graphing doesn’t go well, find some good food. Check out some things around town before or after the game or on your way out of town the next morning.
Hopefully this will help you to plan your own trips around the country for autographs. I was asked this week by a podcast listener about advice on graphing Spring Training: I’ll have more about this when we get to being a month or two out from its start for 2025.
If you have any graphing questions, you can reach Drew via email at [email protected]
Related Stories:
TTM This Week: National Talk, Two Sports of Success, and In-Person Outings
TTM This Week: Three Sports in the Mailbox and Dodgers’ Prospects
TTM This Week: The Show Returns; Reliable Football Signers
TTM This Week: The Mailbox Provides and International Mailing Info
TTM This Week: Collector’s Corner; Weekly Returns; One Frank Tanana
TTM This Week: Returns, In Person Sigs, and Your TTM Origin Story
TTM This Week: More Hall of Famer RCs and an Appeal to the NHL
TTM This Week: Some HOFer RCs, and Talking Small Sets
