Thanks Brian for the compliments and the great story!
A little background on collecting JD. As a young kid in the early 80's (maybe 82?) I remember scouting through a box of randoms at a show at the local mall and running across a 1960 Topps Jim Davenport. I was amazed at this card as this player had the exact same name as my dad and looked a lot like him. I had to spend part of my hard earned allowance to take this home and ask dad about it.
Well I turned out that, if Jimmy is related to us we don't know about it, but my dad got a chuckle out of it as he was a big Jimmy D fan as a kid. He explained how he loved that this player had the same name as him and it gave him a sense of pride.
After that day I slowly collected all the Jim Davenport cards, and then all of them Auto'ed. I still enjoy running across an oddball here and there as they usually are in photo form or during his managerial runs as they always make me think fondly of my dad.
All my player collections come from fond events in my life -
John Norlander actually is my Stepfather's dad and I love finding a fun press photo or oddball thing to see the gleam in his eye when I show it to him and my son proudly displays them all in his room.
Lance Parrish was larger than life growing up in Michigan. A monster of a man with a huge heart. I remember going to a Dodgertown game in Florida during spring training in 83' to see the Tigers play. A huge Tigers fan (and still am!) as a kid this was awesome getting to see them so close in a training setting. After the game my little brother and I saw Lance in the parking lot and I wanted an auto. We both walked up and before I could ask for an auto, my brother (who was about 5 or 6 at the time) instead asked him to play catch.
Lance smiled and said sure, then looked around and saw Steve Sax walking by. He called him over and asked Steve to help play catch with these kids. Steve Sax, Lance Parrish my brother and I tossed around a ball for about 10 minutes and I was a fan forever. I didn't get my auto that day, but I have a few hundred now...lol.
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- Justin D.
Player collecting - Lance Parrish, Jim Davenport, John Norlander.
Successful B/S/T with - Highstep74, Northviewcats, pencil1974, T2069bk, tjenkins, wilkiebaby11, baez578, Bocabirdman, maddux31, Leon, Just-Collect, bigfish, quinnsryche...and a whole bunch more, I stopped keeping track, lol.
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