GraphLife.com

When I started Graphlife in January of 2008, my desire was to simply begin with that year’s successes, thinking that it would be pretty tough to go back and chronicle some of the autographs that had come my way in prior years.  As I have moved forward with my collecting  I have often wanted to go back and share a few of the pre-Graphlife autographs I was lucky enough to come across.

That having been said, this is the first of a few new posts I will be doing in the coming weeks entitled Graphlife Retro, in which I look back and detail how I came across some of the autographs in my collection.

The first in this series is Andruw Jones.  Back in April of 2007 we had decided to head down to Atlanta for the weekend to make the most of one of John Smoltz’s Food Bank autograph sessions.  That Thursday I had luckily come across a web advertisement for a grand opening for a small business center in a strip mall.  To promote the event they were having Andruw Jones come out and sign autographs.  So, we headed down to the ATL on Saturday morning and got in line a couple hours before the event was scheduled to start.  As it turned out, it wasn’t entirely necessary to get there so soon because they had done a poor job advertising the event and there were only about 50 or so people there.  They were charging $5 an autograph while also selling bats, balls and 8×10’s at cost.  It was completely awesome.  I think I spent about $40 dollars and walked away with a signed magazine, (2) jersey numbers, a ball, and (2) 8×10’s.  Ah….the good ole’ days, when the economy wasn’t in the tank and players would sign at grand openings!  Anyway, here’s the stash, and a link about the event.

Press Release

As I have written several times before, Smokies Park has been very good to me.  The Tennessee Smokies are the AA Affiliate for the Chicago Cubs and their stadium is only about 20 minutes from my house.  In recent years I have been fortunate to get autographs of Ryne Sandberg, Clayton Kershaw, Jeff Francoeur, Gordon Beckham, and a rehabbing John Smoltz just to name a few.  Now I need to add another name to the list – Dale Murphy.

Dale Murphy has been making appearances at various Southern League parks this summer in order to promote the Braves and his I Won’t Cheat Foundation.  He made his appearance at Smokies Park on July 23.  It consisted of a luncheon that we were able to attend and an autograph session at the game that night.  The luncheon was awesome!  We got to hear Dale tell some great stories and were able to get some autographs after he was finished speaking. 

We returned later that night for the game at 5:30 pm.  The gates didn’t open until 6:00, but there were already 100’s of Braves fans waiting in line when we got there.   I was fortunate to have some box tickets for the game, so we were allowed to enter early with the season ticket holders, as long as we didn’t go the “meet and greet” as we were told.  None of us realized that there was going to be a “meet and greet” but we knew now.  He was seated down in the cafe and was signing autographs for a dozen or so season ticket holders.  Naturally we crashed it and were able to get a few more things signed.  All in all I ended up with 2 signed Sports Illustrateds and 2 mini-helmets.  And I did it all without having to stand in line at the game that night. 

It was a cool day for sure.  It’s simply not every day that Dale Murphy is signing free autographs 20 minutes from my home in East Tennessee.  Thanks Dale and Go Braves!