GraphLife.com

The Braves have recently been doing a promotional/community event called “Shopping With the Braves” with one of their corporate sponsors – Publix.  About once a month, they send a couple of players out to one of the Atlanta area Publix and have them bag groceries and sign autographs.  Being that the opportunity to get Braves autographs out in the community has decreased over the years, this was a welcomed event.  The lineup for this event included Jair Jurrjens, Martin Prado, and Omar Infante.  Unfortunately Prado was not able to make it over because he was suffering from some health problems incurred earlier in the week.  Truth be told it was probably a blessing because had he not cancelled I wouldn’t have been able to make it through Jurrjens’ line and get my items signed.  Jurrjens is, in my opinion, one of the most unheralded pitchers in baseball.  He eats innings, has a miniscule ERA, and most importantly is 23 years old.  I’ve become a big fan of his not only because of his success on the field, but also because he has come over to the fence several times at the Braves parking lot and signed for everybody.  Good guy, great player.

One of the reasons I decided to head on down to the ATL for the “Shopping with the Braves” event was because Yunel Escobar was also going to be doing a paid, public signing at a small memorabilia show nearby.  If you have read through GraphLife before, you have probably noticed that I have gotten Yunel several times before without having to pay anything; however, I thought the autograph fee was pretty low considering he has become one of the best shortstops in baseball and I had a bat I wanted him to sign.  (I want to send a special thanks to the folks over at Autographhelper.com for their help with this event.  If you haven’t been over to their site, please be sure to check it out. ).  Anyway, the signed bat turned out real well and I even picked up several other items that were being sold at the show.  All-in-all it was a pretty good day.

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.

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