A day/night trip to Akron with Mike Oravec was different than planned, but different isn't always bad and this day was a great time!
The Akron Rubber Ducks had originally scheduled Brian Baumgartner "Kevin Malone" from "The Office" fame for a bobblehead/meet and greet event back in the off-season.
As a huge "Office" fan, I immediately wanted to do it and Mike, who never watched the show, was happy getting to graph, travel and look around for items in his collection and we scheduled this and the event ASAP.
The problem arrived a few days before the event when Baumgartner was forced to cancel due to an acting role.
This is not uncommon in these situations and in contracts for appearances, there almost always is a clause that allows the actor to back out of the obligation if they are offered an acting role.
Akron kept hustling and landed what would have been a more than acceptable replacement in Leslie David Baker "Stanley Hudson" from the Office.
However, Baker had just appeared in Frederick two weeks before and Baker had already signed the picture that we (Cherie and Rachel's) are working on (sometime I'll write about that) and I didn't need him.
I try to think ahead though and asked the Ducks, if we could work on the visiting Richmond Flying Squirrels and the Giants top two prospects in Joey Bart and Heliot Ramos.
The team was very gracious in allowing us to do that and Mike and I had over an hour of being alone in the ballpark to get whatever we could get signed.
Mike and I were able to knock a sizable amount of the Squirrels team out (I think I now have gotten every team set card signed that I actually saw the player at) before the crowd even stepped into the place.
However, the crowd did enter eventually and neither Bart or Ramos had hit the field as it was mostly pitchers that were out earlier.
That changed our plans on the fly as we had originally planned to end our graphing day when people arrived and instead decided to stick it out.
I didn't get Heliot Ramos, who was the last player out to the field and the last to the dugout and said after the game ( with a five-hour drive ahead, that wasn't happening ).
That's too bad because I have three really cool cards of Ramos to have signed, but I'll have other chances I hope.
I was able to add Joey Bart on his Top 100, so that was a great grab for my set with the highlight being Bart telling a kid "why do you have three of these? Are you selling them?"
Bart said it with a smile and in a teasing manner, so it wasn't being nasty at all, but it shows you how the players of today have people selling their autographs on their mind.
It doesn't happen nearly as much as they think it does, but I can't blame them for thinking that way.
The general rule of thumb, if a person has five cards and four of the five are different, it's a collector.
Mike and I then ate at the paid-for buffet before we left, which was quite good and then a stop at the team store as we wound our way through the tight concourse, which is always tight at Canal Park.
Akron is a single deck downtown stadium and those stadiums have usually one concourse for the entire crowd, which makes it very tight and with no room for expansion or renovation, it will just have to be something that you deal with when you go to Akron.
I know many folks like the urban ballparks, but give me the wide-open suburban stadiums anytime.
The game and autographs were nice, but the highlight was the stop on the trip to Akron.
There is a massive antique market that would take hours to get through to do it right, but Mike and I try to stop whenever we are in the area to look around and see what we find.
On this day, we would both get lucky and find some things for our respective collections.
Mike ran through one end of the football field-sized store, while I did the other.
As I moved through, I was taking pictures of anything that I thought Mike would be interested in, mainly because doing this in the past I could not remember all of the locations that items were located in and we would waste time finding them.
I found it to be very helpful and I'll be doing it again in future visits.
I took a picture of one booth in particular with old collectibles and figured Mike would be interested in at least taking a look.
Mike was thrilled to find something that he had never seen before and bought a program from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which of course was made famous from the film "A League Of Their Own".
It wasn't cheap, but Mike did take advantage of it being reduced from its starting point and you could see how happy it made him as he found this rare program.
I did pretty well with a bobblehead and two programs as well.
I'm not sure if I had ever written about the 1970's era Cavaliers bobbleheads (Austin Carr, Bingo Smith, and Campy Russell) that were only given to season ticket holders for the Cavaliers, but I always wanted to add the next generation of the series as well.I didn't find all of them, but I did find the Larry Nance third for twenty bucks, which was rare enough, but an equal find was two wrestling programs from Canton from 1960 at twelve dollars apiece.
I'm not a huge wrestling collector, but at this stage and similar to Mike, when you see something that you've never seen before and have the money to buy it- you should!
As for Nance, he was a player that I watched in college (Clemson), spent his entire career playing for the two teams that I rooted for (Cavaliers and Suns) during his era and if I had to pick one of the three pieces of the set (also Mark Price and Brad Daugherty) to find, I'd select Larry Nance.
All and all, a very successful trip and a fun one as well.
I always enjoy graphing trips and I love hitting places in Ohio, where I have a better chance of finding things that I really want for my collection.
Mike and I have a great time together and the time truly does fly by when we go on these ventures.
The season is nearing its end, but the fun of hanging out with your friends never goes away.
I haven't forgotten about the longest trip yet, but that might wait until September with the frenetic pace of the final week of the season!
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