The Slam that Sucker Down Tour 2019 begins

Apologies to the late "American Dream" Dusty Rhodes, who had the annoying habit (at least to me) of naming every small "tour" with some sort of slogan, for the title of this post.

Rhodes named one of these events the "Slam that Sucker Down" tour and I thought of that recently as I prepared for the season when a memory of a player crossed my mind that didn't enjoy signing very much would take the marker of choice and slam the marker down hard on the books that some collectors use to hold their cards in.
I've never used the book and managed to fight the trend of people moving in that direction (which was not difficult to do, considering the fiasco that occurred on a trip when I tried it on a test run) ,but this particular player seemed to enjoy doing that to see if he could knock the book out of their hands.

So, even though that never happened to me, the 2019 season will unofficially be named as above and I'll try to do a better job documenting the season in graphing as I did in the past.
I've done a decent job in keeping the trips noted here, but the everyday stories along the circuit have been lost along the way, much as I haven't put the last two seasons cards in binders, as usual, instead of having all of them in a 5,000 count box!

This was going to be our fourth visit to Altoona Pa (Again, for some stupid reason hear the Michael Hayes song "Badstreet USA" in my head, when I think Altoona PA) for the Meet the Curve night.


Mike Oravec and I had gone the previous three times with Kendall Morris, but Kendall couldn't make it this time, so Mike's son John and the always chipper Fred Landucci jumped in and passed on his hometown Harrisburg Senators in order to try the Altoona version.
Brett Shaw always takes care of us with tickets to the event and the team and the event host- the Casino at Lakemont does such an excellent job with the food and especially the production of the event.
Everything that is held during this event is coordinated and the first event was almost exactly the same as the last one.
We sat for a few minutes, were welcomed to the casino, told that it was time to eat, moved to the buffet and enjoyed dinner.
After dinner, the 2019 Curve was introduced to the fans and manager Michael Ryan spoke for a few minutes before a door prize drawing for a handful of various Curve items.
John was lucky enough to win one and I believe I remember him choosing a Tony Beasley (Former Curve manager) nesting doll as his prize.
Nesting dolls are basically multiple pieces hollowed out tubes that are painted with a subject and each of the dolls are smaller than the others so that all can fit inside the largest of these.
I have a Hawk Harrelson version that was a White Sox giveaway and they are kind of neat, although I doubt that I would collect them on a large scale.

We usually leave a bit earlier before the other proceedings in order to get a good place in line.
When all of those events are over, the team moves to a second-floor banquet room that they have arranged in order to sign autographs.
This year's Curve isn't loaded with prospects like last year's team that starred Mitch Keller and KeBryan Hayes among a few others, but when teams don't have prospects like last year's team, the crowd is smaller and the players are more likely to sign more items.
I didn't have a lot, most of the players from last season's Bradenton team set with a few hangers on from other team sets.
What was a little different was that I was mildly surprised by the number of players that asked why I didn't have anything for them to sign.
More often than not, the answer to that is that I have gotten their cards signed earlier from that player or that the player in question was not in a team set for a particular year.

We buzzed through the line in about 25 minutes and every card that arrived with me returned signed, so it was a good night all around that was only ruined by a work snafu that saw me arrive at work only to be sent home on a scheduling error, that was discovered to be not mine and was apologized for by my boss, which was nice enough although it didn't put the money back in my pocket, haha!

I always enjoy Altoona and their event as it's a great start to the season, but it also means the end of a long winter with lots of baseball ahead.
Thanks again to Brett Shaw for taking care of us!

If time permits, back later with the Browns addressing the safety position and even a trip to Frederick to try once again add Luis Robert for my top 100 set.