A Blast From the Past TTM Success
February 11th, 2010 by slangon

One of the first through the mail requests I had sent out, way back when I first started doing through the mail requests, was Mike Mussina. Like some of the other early requests that started to filter back in recently, I had really kind of forgotten about / given up on Mike Mussina. I know that a couple of months is really nothing when it comes to TTM, but since so many of my successes have been very quick returns, I just sort of gave up on some of these longer ones, only to be pleasantly surprised.

Honestly, I’ve always been sort of ambivalent about Mike Mussina. I was never a really big fan of his, nor did I especially dislike him. I kind of remember having him on different fantasy baseball teams over the years and he did fine. He was never outstanding for me, nor was he especially terrible. In fact, probably the only reason that I sent this card out in the first place was because I had heard/read that he was really good signer and your chances of getting the card back signed were pretty good. After having said all that, I must say that my estimation of Mike Mussina grew quite a bit after he retired. I have to respect a guy who had a 20-9 season and then decided to shut it down so that he could go out on a positive note. Apparently, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, Moose is just the 5th pitcher since 1900 to win 20 games or more in the final season of his career, and the first to do it since Sandy Koufax. I can’t imagine too many other guys not opting to go after the potential payday they could get after a season like that.

I like the signature itself as well. It’s loose enough to look interesting, but not so loose that you can read it. It always sort of bugs me when an autograph ends up just looking like my 1-year-old son got his hands on a marker and a baseball card. I just wish the sharpie ink didn’t do that weird pooling that it seems to do so often on those UV coated cards (I believe that’s the term for the process of making a card glossy, as most cards today seem to be).

By the way, if anyone was wondering, that tape is on the outside of the top loader. I have a very lazy habit of not taking cards out of sleeves when I scan them.

One Response to “A Blast From the Past TTM Success”

  1. it’s funny you wrote this because when I was a kid, I sent out a buncha TTM’s (before I had the internet to tell me which ones had a good chance of being successful) to a bunch of players in both basketball and baseball. The only ones I got cards back signed were Mussina and Kenny Lofton. I’ve been fans of theirs ever since.

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