Back in the game a decade later
Last month, I shared my story of my trip to the 2014 Queens Baseball Convention. After 7 hours at the event and another 4 hours spent in transit, that should have been enough for any weekend, especially when you consider that it included appearances (with autographs) from Ron Darling and Ed Kranepool plus a surprise appearance by Art Shamsky. At least, that was the plan.
Backing up to Friday, January 17, a tweet from Matt den Dekker announced that he would be at the White Plains Card Show on January 18, the same day as the Queens Baseball Convention.
Be at the Westchester Con Ctr in White Plains tomorrow. Mets fans come check it out!!
— Matt den Dekker (@UpperDekker) January 17, 2014
The timing was unfortunate, to say the least. Former Mets Rusty Staub and Jason Isringhausen were among that day’s other guests, with autograph prices starting at $20 for den Dekker and going up from there (the full list of signers is unfortunately lost to history because the event promoter took all show information offline immediately following the event and nobody seems to have copied it down anywhere). The show, however would go on. For one more day at least. It had been a decade since I had been to a card show, I was within driving distance, and there were two Mets on the autograph list for the final day. Might as well stop by.
Sunday, January 19. The day before, I saw the Bear Mountain Bridge through snow from the train to Grand Central. This time, I saw it in bright sunlight while driving over it. I arrived at Westchester County Center just after noon and went right into the first line of the day, the one for admission tickets. The $8 fee included one autograph each from Dave Kingman and Denny McLain. This line fed directly into the next line for additional autographs or various items that could be purchased to be autographed. Of the rest of the day’s signers, only Mookie Wilson spent any time with the Mets. With most autographs priced at $25 or more, I was glad there was only one. As much as I would love to get more Mets autographs, most of these guys have certified autograph cards available for $5 or less. There’s no reason to pay this kind of money for autographs except to meet specific players or get a specific item signed.
With two lines down, it was on to the show floor. Inside the inner doors, hundreds of tables were set up on a gymnasium floor, packed together so tightly that there was barely enough room to pass someone between them. As for the autograph signings, there was no clear indication of where to go. I made my way across the sea of tables and found Kingman signing autographs at a table at the far side with a line stretching along the side wall and back down again almost all the way back to the table. Kingman started signing at 12 while McLain would start at an adjacent table at 1. At around 12:30, the line of people waiting for Kingman had backed up all the way to the end of the line for McLain that was just starting to form. It was going to be a long afternoon.
As with any group of people confined in a small space for an extended period of time, the Kingman autograph line formed a small community. Behind me, a man with his son planned their strategy for the remainder of the day’s autographs. From the sound of it, they hit a lot of signing events and sent out lots of items to be signed through the mail (TTM), enough that they only got small items like cards signed instead of bulkier items like balls or helmets. The father couldn’t understand why people would pay $25 for a Steve Garvey autograph when he would sign TTM for free.
Vendors set up at the edge of the arena adjacent to the autograph line took full advantage of their captive audience with tables offering, well, junk cards, old magazines, random photographs, and not really much of anything worth paying money for. This was as much of the merchandise as I had seen so far, so I was hoping that the rest of the show had more to offer. More relevant was the table selling generic baseball cards for autographs, but the prices were so high that it probably costs less to have your own custom printed. But really, if you didn’t come to the show with something to have signed, you deserve to be ripped off.
As the line reached the opposite wall and turned back toward our objective, I noticed a few people behind me comparing this line to the autograph lines the day before at the Queens Baseball Convention. I was wearing the t-shirt from that event at the time, so I added my own comments and explained the event to someone in front of me who would have been interested in it but hadn’t heard about it. I passed along some Twitter accounts to follow to stay in the loop for future events as we entered the home stretch.
By the time the autograph table came into view, we had been standing in line for over an hour. Event staff sent people over to Kingman in small groups to keep from interfering with the McLain line, which we had to cross in the process. Kingman was shaking hands and posing for photographs, which certainly added to the wait time but made the experience more memorable. I was alone and left the camera behind, so I got my autograph and went in search of my next target: Mookie Wilson.
Mookie Wilson was only signing from 1-2:30, while Denny McLain was scheduled for 1-3. That made it easy to figure out where to go next. But just where was that? The right side of the arena held the lines for Kingman and McLain. That left the stage area in the back and the left side of the arena floor. I spotted Mookie at the end of the tables set up on the left side and followed that line back about three quarters of the way to the opposite side. While there were fewer people waiting for his autograph because of the added cost, that line was also for Bill Buckner and two Yankees prospects. Many of the people waiting bought combo tickets for both Buckner and Wilson, but the Yankees prospects had no visitors, instead forced to watch every person on the line cross in front of them on their way to the 1986 World Series opponents. With an asking price of $20 each, it was no surprise that there were no takers for autographs from a couple of random prospects. Think about it – you could get a couple of prospect autographs for $40 or, for just a few dollars more, you could get autographs from the central figures in one of the greatest moments in World Series history.
As with the right side line, the left side line ran past a few tables of assorted junk. One had a variety of gas station toy trucks that looked like they had been making trips to this card show for several decades. While Hess trucks achieved collectible status and all that comes with that, these others were little more than also-rans and copycats with no real market. It was another ominous sign at the fringe of the show floor.
Finally, after about a 45 minute wait, it was my turn to walk past the unattended Yankees prospects and present a baseball to Mookie Wilson for an autograph. Mookie seemed vaguely disinterested, but a signing session can be draining. He took the ball I handed him and scrawled his name across the sweet spot quite a bit off center. I then managed to get a handshake and made a comment about seeing Ron Darling the day before. Mookie acknowledged that he had heard something about the event as I left to cross the show floor once more.
Lines, lines, everywhere a line. Denny McLain’s autograph line would be the fifth and final one of the afternoon. Now that it was after 2pm, there was less than an hour left in McLain’s scheduled signing session. The line extended the full length of the show floor, stopping at a table with a stack of autographed baseballs for sale. One look at the prices made the prices for the show’s signers seem cheap. Would anyone really pay $60 for a baseball signed by some minor star or other lesser player? Like the toy trucks in the opposite corner, these would probably make appearances at shows for many years to come.
About a third of the way down the show floor, the line for on-site certification of items autographed at the show crossed the McLain autograph line in what can only be explained as a case of poor planning by the event organizers. As people came from one direction in search of autographs, people came from the opposite direction to have those autographs authenticated. The two streams collided in a mass of confusion.
Partway through the wait for McLain, Mookie Wilson passed by on his way to the exit. This left some of us wondering if we would be standing there watching McLain make the same walk before we reached the table at the end. A few minutes later, event staffers came down the line assuring everyone that McLain would stay until the line came to an end. McLain had nowhere else he needed to be and was therefore taking his time and chatting with everyone who stopped by to see him. Just before 3pm, I made my way to McLain’s table for my final autograph of the weekend.
Ahead of me, a man handed Denny McLain a small custom-printed index card to be signed. McLain pointed at the name printed on the card and asked “Who’s this?” The man was confused at first, insisting that the name on the card belonged to the man pointing at it. Unfortunately for him, he was wrong; the card held the name of Denny McClain. McLain signed the card and handed it back to the man, who was clearly embarrassed to have misspelled the name on the card. No such errors would be found on the baseball I handed McLain next for an autograph. With that, I was free to roam the show floor, though there was only about an hour left before the show came to an end. But first, it was time for lunch.
The arena had a Nathan’s hot dog concession stand providing food. For a mere $9, one could get a hardy meal of two hot dogs, french fries, and a soda. Compared to the $12 I spent the day before on two hot dogs and a bottle of water, it was a bargain. But I had little time to enjoy this meal. Even at just after 3pm, vendors were beginning to pack up. I had only a few minutes to cover the show’s 300 tables. Based on what I had seen so far, I might not need that long.
Close to the Nathan’s stand, I found a vendor selling recent commons. After sifting through the stacks of cards that had once been in order but had become flipped and shuffled after a weekend of browsing customers, I found fills for a 2013 Topps Heritage base set and a 2012 Topps Update set. The 12 commons ended up costing me $4, an obscene sum for an essentially worthless bunch of cards, but not enough for me to make a fuss over. The vendor offered to show me some of the SPs from Heritage, but there was no way I was giving him any more money. I had spent enough already.
The rest of the tables held little else of interest to me. Some offered sealed packs and boxes of recent products at fairly reasonable prices, others displayed vintage cards or recent high-end inserts. Very few had what I was most interested in: commons and lesser inserts from recent products. These used to be the bread and butter of card shows. Boxes full of commons, stars, or just players from teams of local interest. Instead, these tables held items with very limited interest. One had a display case filled with 1/1 Futures Game logo patch booklets, including Zack Wheeler’s from 2012. Such items weren’t there to be sold so much as they were presented to be displayed as trophies. The asking prices were sure to be much higher than the cards would fetch at open auction. I didn’t even bother asking about the price of the Wheeler and considered myself lucky just to have been able to bear witness to it.
On my way out, I had to wonder just what the point of it all was. Do these vendors really sell enough of this to justify loading it all into a car and setting it out on tables time and time again? I passed a vendor who, while packing up his unsold wares, dropped a box and spilled a bunch of likely junk cards out onto the floor. I joked that he should just leave them and put a sign saying “FREE” pointing to them, but either he didn’t hear me or he wasn’t amused. Were those cards even worth the trouble of retrieving them? Or was it worth more to have their weight removed from the bulk to be transported back and forth for the next few years?
I grew up on card shows big and small from the big events of the late ’80s to the ever-present small town shows in the early ’90s to the regular series of mall shows that gradually faded out a decade later. I filled sets, built collections of star players, and forged relationships with vendors who were happy to be able to share their love of the hobby with local collectors. I could spend hours at a show not even buying anything, just enjoying the experience.
But as I walked out the doors of the Westchester County Center, I felt like I had been there for far too long. As an autograph show, it was well worth the time and money. $8 for two autographs was on par with the small town shows of decades past, like the one where I had first met Ed Kranepool. The total of $33 for all three autographs was comparable to the $35 admission price for the Queens Baseball Convention and its two autographs, though the travel cost for the latter was much higher (and that event was much more interesting). But as a card show, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It just wasn’t relevant to my collecting.
So there you have it, a story of endless lines and disappointing sales offerings. Is this what card shows have become? Is there a place for actual collecting in the hobby anymore? If there is, it sure isn’t at these shows. Still, it was a good weekend between the two events. Three more autographed baseballs for my Mets shelf, one more for my non-Mets shelf, and an Ed Kranepool autograph on a hat. Not a bad way to close out the offseason and use up the baseballs I had left over from last year. Next stop: New Hampshire Fisher Cats Opening Day vs. the Binghamton Mets.
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