Ed Loyd

We start our occasional notebook of notable people that have recently passed away and this time we may have a first - someone that I knew personally.

Ed Loyd was a regular in Richmond through the years attending the AAA Braves games at the Diamond and later the AA Flying Squirrels when baseball returned after a one-year hiatus without baseball.
I read an article on Ed by Ben Hill of Ben's Baseball Biz (Hill travels around minor league parks writing about the quirky people, places and things that you find in the minors) over the summer and I didn't know that he was known for ChapStick or that he worked for the company that made it for years.
I was introduced to Ed by a mutual friend as Ed was one of the larger dealers of minor league team sets and I was fairly new to the hobby and was looking to buy from someone reasonable in price and someone that would understand that in this hobby time-sensitive purchases are pretty common.
Ed was very understanding and we hit it off immediately.
I'm not sure how long I dealt with Ed, but it had to be around ten years or so and if I needed a set on a few days notice, Ed would pack it as soon as he heard from me and within an hour or two, I'd get an email that would say "Ed Loyd Here, package sent".

I never had a cross word in my dealings with Ed, who from day one never demanded payment upfront because that would slow things up as far as getting cards to me when I needed things.
I would receive these little white handwritten invoices from him in each package and then I'd send him a check.
Almost always a check, because Ed didn't believe in Paypal and their extra charges.
Cherie used to always joke about certain times of the year being "Ed Loyd" season because, in the digital age, Ed Loyd was the only person that I ever wrote checks to.
I say almost always because the last transaction that I made with Ed this year, he wrote saying "I can take Paypal now, the times are always changing."

Over the last few years, I didn't buy as much from Ed and he understood.
As fast as Ed was, he couldn't compete with the person that I was buying from locally that I could get them even faster at the ballpark and not have the worries with the postal service getting them lost.
I still bought a few things from him though and we wrote back and forth fairly frequently.

Ed always thought of me as a Giants fan and two acts of kindness always stick out to me.
The first was Ed, who knew I was always looking for 1988 and 90 Score cards to be signed, writing to me and asking if I needed Will Clark for those sets.
Clark had just one card in 1988 Score, but three in 1990, as the Giants won the NLCS in 1989 and Clark, was on cards commemorating that series.
Ed wrote and told me to "watch my mailbox" shortly and within a week or so, Ed had sent me all four Will Clark cards signed.

The other was only a year or so ago, early in the season, Ed had a customer that needed three Hagerstown Suns sets ASAP as the Suns were coming to this gentleman's town very soon and Ed asked if I would grab these sets for him and send them straight to the customer with him paying me for them.
I was happy to do so and I wasn't worried about the money as I figured it would even out eventually.
Ed would write to me and end our notes with "I still owe you a big one".
Ed's Flying Squirrels never seem to be early in getting their sets out and when the team set was released, Richmond was finished for the year in Altoona and Harrisburg.
It looked unlikely that I was going to get the set signed for the 2018 season, but Ed remembered my constant asking when that set was coming out and when it did, he asked if I still wanted it.
I replied Yes as a Giants fan, but I wasn't going to have an opportunity to get them signed.
Ed said he would have someone do it for me and what I didn't find out until later was that Ed, who wasn't a grapher, did that set himself for me.

I actually met Ed in person only three times, once at the Chantilly VA. card show (the only time that I have ever attended that show), one at the Diamond in Richmond ( My only visit there thus far) and once in Harrisburg, when Ed traveled there to see the Squirrels on the road.
Harrisburg was the last time that I saw him in that 2018 season and we talked for most of the game about baseball, the minors, and minor league baseball cards as he was getting tired of dealing with more and more teams that were so difficult to work with.

Ed used to always push me to come down to the Richmond Hot Stove dinner as one of his guests and he used to tell me how badly he wanted to introduce me to the Squirrels owner Lou DiBella.
DiBella promotes several champions in boxing and promoted one of my favorites in retired middleweight champion Sergio Martinez, so Ed would tell me that "you gotta come down here and meet Lou, you guys will spend all night talking boxing".
I was never able to make that trip and now I wish I had made the time to do that.

I started this post as a "passings" tribute as usual and now I see I've written so much about Ed Loyd that I think I'm going to leave this as a stand-alone article.
I'm sure others have stories about Ed as well and from people that knew him far better than I, but he'll be missed by me and so many others.
I'm positive that baseball at Richmond's Diamond won't be the same without Ed holding court there and I'm also sure that the Squirrels will come up with something to honor Ed next season.
A bobblehead of Ed with either ChapStick or a pack of baseball cards in his hands would be so fitting to honor his memory at the place that he loved so much.
Rest well, Ed- you'll be greatly missed.