Gotta Go To Mo's

One of things I'm horrendous at is capitalizing on local signing events/meet-and-greets with athletes who play for NY-based teams.

To be fair they're not too common in my neck of the woods (which is a little outside New York City), but they're just common enough that I feel bad when I learn about them after the fact.

But this time I had a chance to know about one before it happened.

More accurately I found out a day before the event lol.

That tweet you see there was promoting a special meet-and-greet that my local-ish Modell's was doing where Austin Romine was going to participate in an in-store appearance.

I'll be the first to admit that I've said things about Romine the player before (mainly on Twitter), but I still like the dude as a person and an IP/TTM autograph of his has eluded me forever. So I wasn't going to pass this up.

I just needed to make sure to get to Mo's around 5:30 to get a wristband in order to get an autograph. Turns out that not a lot of people came (at least not at the start when I was in line) so they just scrapped the wristband idea and just said "f' it, let's see what happens if/when the line actually does get huge". Apparently having a meet-and-greet in a suburb on a Monday night (which was also Tax Day) does not immediately lead to a high turnout. Although I'm sure a fair number of people did go though, the line was at least 50 people long when I was in it.

Romine will forever be special to me now because he's the first guest athlete I've ever seen arrive early to an event. Usually everyone is a good 15+ minutes late. In Romine's case he was five minutes early and was signing well before 6 PM. Kudos to him.

The event made a note that only items purchased in the store would be eligible for signing. A lot of people bought balls on the spot, and I thought about that. But instead I decided to risk it all on a hangar pack of 2019 Topps Heritage and hope that I'd pull a Romine that way.

By some "miracle" now I had a purple refractor from 2012 Topps Chrome. Yes it's weird how Romine's not even in the checklist but don't question it, the receipt still shows I clearly bought baseball cards.

In all seriousness I'm glad I managed to get this signed because this is (in terms of overall appearance), the nicest Romine card I have. These purple refractors are a beaut. Even Romine himself was impressed with how nice the card was.

In addition to that they gave away these signed 8x10 photographs of Romine. Everybody in line got one and I was stocked because I got two autographs of Romine in one night.

After that I got a picture taken with him. I gave him a card of his own (another weird pull from the set he wasn't in) as a present, he appreciated it.

And that's the story of my first in-person Austin Romine autograph, as well as my first IP auto here in 2019 (that's actually for me).

It's also the first time I've been able to go to a special event that wasn't at a card show or a ballpark, and just a regular old retail sport I've been to dozens of times before. This is right up there with the time I went to a J.T. Miller signing at a bar.

So big thanks to Romine and Modell's for the awesome occasion.

And as always thank you (the readers) for stopping by :). Take care.

2019 IP Auto Count: 2