Horrible autographs!

One tournament endeth. Another begins. Thus is the circle of bloggery.

Drew's Cards was inspired by Stale Gum's (not mine) Tournament of Gimmickry and decided to do their own tournament, Derek Jeter won the gimmick contest so now it's time to crown an awful autograph champ. Drew is taking nominations now on the worst signatures ever to grace a hit. Instead of just posting a few suggestions in a comment, I decided to go through my autos and find some worthy contestants. I found quite a few, ten are listed here. I thought it would be fun to make you all guess what these scribbly messes are instead of just blurting them out though.

Here are ten autographs. You may have seen some of them before on Auto-Matic for the People (now under new, brilliant management). Guess in the comments who scribbled out these travesties. You won't win anything for guessing right, but you will have a bucket of pride and I may even create a MSPaint masterpiece commemorating your victory. They are not all baseball autos. At least one sig is from someone who never played in the bigs. See what you can figure out, it'll be fun! I'll announce the answers later this week.

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10

Happy guessing!!!

Blaster Box Fantasy Team

I'm pretty old school when it comes to cards. One of the things I used to do with the very first 1981 Topps cards I had as a kid was to rip open the packs I got on a trip to Matthew's Super Market with my grandparents and to sort out the cards into teams. One player at each position. If I didn't have a second baseman, then one of the 7 outfielders I pulled would end up becoming one with the aid of a well placed scribble over the OF and 2B written beside it. Don't give me that look, I was nine and 1981 Topps looks better with some slight embellishments. 

I still do this. I am not ashamed to admit this. Part of the reason I head up the BRING BACK TOPPS TOTAL!!!!1 movement is because I used to buy $10 blasters of that stuff frequently so I could build teams out of the packs on those long boring nights at work. Hey, there was a baseball game on the back, you were supposed to make teams out of them. I'll still do it with normal packs too. Topps and Upper deck aren't great for this anymore since they are broken up into series, but it's doable. For optimal team building pleasure, you need a fairly large set all in one series. Right now, Heritage is one of the better sets for this although 2010 Upper Deck is pretty good too. I've picked up a few Heritage packs here and there and I went through them this morning seeing if I could build a good team out of them. Out of 9 packs, I put together a pretty formidable fantasy lineup:

C Jorge Posada
1B Ryan Howard
2B Brandon Phillips
SS Miguel Tejada
3B Evan Longoria
OF Ryan Braun
OF Adam Lind
OF Andre Ethier
DH Prince Fielder
RHP Justin Verlander
LHP Cole Hamels
Manager Ozzie Guillen

Now that's a nifty little lineup right there with a feisty skipper to lead them to the promised land. The only way you could get that lineup in a fantasy league is if over half the owners in the league slept through the draft. I've got fantasy baseball on the brain right now because I'm in the middle of an e-mail draft that's been dragging out for a while. So far I have Braun, Tulowitzki, McCann, Sizemore and Zobrist in that draft which ain't too bad. Too bad there isn't a way to combine a fantasy league with ripping packs... Or is there?

Presenting Dayf's Most Recent Ridiculous Excuse To Rip Packs

What if we could combine a fantasy draft with ripping a blaster? We could open that puppy up and build a team to compete with other weirdos who like to do this sort of thing. You got your blaster in my fantasy draft! You got your fantasy draft in my blaster! Let's do this! 

If you are interested in

1. buying a blaster of 2010 Heritage
2. ripping it open with no hesitation or remorse
3. sorting out the cards by players and building a fantasy lineup
4. competing against a few other whacko people doing this
5. anteing up a few cards to use as prizes

Then leave me a comment expressing your interest.
Full details tonight if people actually want to do this.

Indians Opening Day Game

I'm not going to be posting much this week, but in the meantime you can play this highly realistic Cleveland Indians Opening Day game, courtesy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.