Roberto Alomar, 2002 Topps Gold Label Awards Ceremony #ACR-RA

Disclaimer: This Roberto Alomar card, as busy and golden and full of wood as it is, will not be mentioned further in this post. I just needed a game-used Topps card to pull it all together.

I haven’t been doing a lot of trading lately, but there was still plenty of good stuff in the mail for me yesterday.

As I prepared to leave for work in the morning, I spotted a box on the kitchen table that my father had brought in from the porch the night before. It had come from Topps, by way of Twitgift. During the previous week, I had started following the Last Baseball Card Company Standing on Twitter (@ToppsCards). Once per day, they post a link to a nifty autographed or game-used card giveaway. All you have to do to be eligible to win the card is to retweet the link. As luck would have it, my name was picked just a few days later! It was too late for me to win the Jim Palmer card that they’d recently dished out, but I did get a replica 1952 Topps card of Billy Martin with an authentic Yankee Stadium seat relic. It looks great, and I’m more than happy to have it in my collection…unless any Yankee fan wants to talk trade.
When I got home yesterday evening, there was a big manila envelope from the Baltimore Orioles waiting for me. I’d actually been expecting this package, as MASN’s Kristen Hudak had emailed myself and the other Blogger Day attendees to get our mailing addresses. But she never told us what would be sent. Don’t you love surprises? I tore open the envelope and pulled out a bright orange shirt with Baltimore in script on the front and Matt Wieters’ name and number 32 on the back. You'd better believe that one is going into my regular rotation.

Now if only the Orioles could deliver another win before May...