SoCal Autograph Odysses

 A hockey through the mail success came back earlier this week on the same day as another one, but this post specifically is about the card I got signed by Mark Howe, hockey hall of famer and Gordies' son. Mark was a Hall of Fame defenseman who played for the Flyers, Whalers, and Red Wings throughout his career. This request took about a month to come back to me and as a reminder, you can check the TTM tracker on this blog for any and all information on requests I send. Thanks for reading.

 One of the best hockey players of all time, former Edmonton Oilers and New York Rangers center Mark Messier recently had a signing. I saw this one advertised months ago and decided to participate and send a rookie card to get signed. I think the result was really solid, and I'm always glad to add a huge name on a rookie card.

 We're going on a bit of a throwback journey with this post in the fact that this autograph harkens back to the earlier era of this blog when a lot of the additions to my collection were acquired via the through the mail part of the hobby. As I've added most of the active Hall of Famers that sign through the mail to my collection already, I've had fewer opportunities to send to athletes that I don't have in my collection yet. The athlete I'm about to discuss here isn't a Hall of Famer but does play goalkeeper for the US Women's National Team as well as her club team, the Chicago Red Stars. Alyssa Naeher, one of the better keepers in women's US soccer history was kind enough to send an autograph back on a Pitch Queens card I got out of a pack. This card will go straight to my daughter's collection of soccer autographs, and I appreciate Alyssa taking the time to respond to fan mail. 

 I recently talked about Topps not having the license for the NFL, and the same holds true for the NBA as well. That didn't stop people from buying up products and trying to hit a Victor Wembanyama rookie auto since Topps is the only company that had his autos in it. I'm not much of a basketball fan so don't buy a whole lot of the product but on a recent trip to Target I did see they had a mega box, which is rare to find locally. I tried my luck and ended up pulling a rookie auto of Brooklyn Nets forward Jalen Wilson. I heard it's hard to pull autos from this product, so I am happy to have had luck this time around. I don't know much about the player, so here's hoping he has a good career.

 Some more soccer autographs came through the pipeline recently, all colored autos, two of which also happen to be numbered. The first is another legend auto from the really nice Copa America set. It is another Green Wave auto. This is Javier Mascherano, Argentine midfielder who spent a good amount of time playing for Liverpool and Barcelona. The second auto is /199 from the new Topps Chrome set of former Liverpool forward Michael Owen. He was considered among the very elite goal scorers for a short period of time and still talked about often by Liverpool supporters. Lastly, I made a trip down to my local card store over the weekend and tried my hand at a hobby box of Topps Chrome. It was a dud of a box overall and my auto wasn't a huge hit, though Jarrod Bowen is someone I'm very familiar with in that he plays for West Ham in the Premier League and is actually a good player. This auto is numbered /199 as well, same as the Owen above. 

 Collectors of sports cards tend to have arguments over whether or not they think unlicensed products are worthy of purchasing or adding to collections. Some say yes and don't care that there are no team logos or names, others are steadfast in their belief that you need both team logos and team names on the cards to make them worthy of collecting. For me, I don't lean too hard one way or the other as long as I think the card looks good and I personally think this new set by Topps called Topps Composite looks great and has an insane hit rate in retail products.  Some background first; Topps is now owned by Fanatics. Fanatics has the contract for a lot of the huge athletes in terms of autographs, however Panini has the NFL license. Using 2023 as an example, the rookie QB class of CJ Stroud, Anthony Richardson, Bryce Young, etc only had Richrdson signing Panini products. That means if you bought Panini Prizm or Mosiac or anything under Panini's umbrella at all, you would not b