Chasing Canseco - Best Day Ever.

[mouschi]

You may or may not remember buried in this post that I had created a Jose Canseco Simpsons card from the episode "Homer at the Bat". I had to re-draw the entire thing to make sure it was nice and clear.



I just had to get this autographed, after I thought up an epic inscription, but I wanted to give a bit of back story on it all.

Remember this lovely lady?



The one and only Mrs. Krabappel.

In the episode "Homer at the Bat", starring Jose Canseco, Don Mattingly, Darryl Strawberry and tons of other players, the script called for Jose and Mrs. Krabappel to have a torrid love affair. Jose's wife Esther at the time did not like this one bit, and insisted it be pulled. This put the writers of the Simpsons in a scramble to come up with something else last minute. They instead had Jose go into a woman's house that was on fire to save various objects from the fire.

The whole thing gave me the idea ... what if I had Jose inscribe it "To: Mrs. Krabappel" ???
I would absolutely love that, and think Simpsons / Canseco fans would go nuts over that, given the back story.

So, I handed him the card to sign:


He said "Mrs. Krabappel...that is a strange name." I said "that is the name of the teach..." and he finished my sentence "OH OH OH yeah ... the teacher on the Simpsons, ok!"

Here it is!

To Mrs. Krabappel, Jose Canseco


Step aside, Madonna! It looks like Mrs. Krabappel had his heart back then.

After it was done, I wished it had been signed perfectly in the white area, but what can I say? The man signed 170 or so items ... some are bound to not be perfect.

But then I started to think about it.

What if I redrew Steve Sax's face behind the Isotopes logo (shown at the top of this post), invert it all, erase 80% of the card and print on acetate, then overlay it on the card?

It is worth a try, right?


Here is the final product ... and might I say BAM!!!



It looks just slightly faded in the middle on purpose to have him sign there. I"m really happy how well it turned out. As a matter of fact, it is one of my three favorite inscriptions from that day, next to "Faster than Rickey" and his inscription personalized to me.

[D. Bergin]

Fantastic read as usual!

[almostdone]

Crazy and unforgettable story. I'm a huge Griffey fan and couldn't even dream of an encounter like this one. I must admit, a small part of me was waiting for the "gotcha" like in some of your past stories.
Great story and congratulations on a small dream come true.
Drew

[CW]

Great story! Congrats! Jose looks like a genuinely nice guy, which is even better when it's your childhood hero. The cupcake eating picture is perfect.

[mouschi]

I just posted this thread to the guys at Intentional Talk using the url /tinyurl.com/qjlp75n with the hash tag #ITFanShow - I suggested they do a segment about interactions between fans and their heroes. I hope this gets traction - please feel free to tweet @intentionaltalk with the the same! My handle is @tanmanbbfan . Thanks! I am in love with that show.

[mouschi]

So, it looks like my story was picked up by Beckett! I hope to be in the hard copy magazine as well.

Since they posted a few pics of some customs I had signed, I guess I'll continue on with telling about them!

In typical unorthodox mouschi form, I destroyed $20 worth of Canseco rookies to make a booklet.

At long last, here it is ... autographed! If you don't read the above link, it probably won't make sense, but for cliff's notes, a few people were nice enough to send me some of their beat up Canseco rookies for free so I could hack them up, and make a booklet which included a piece of each major rookie card from Canseco.

Hmmmm, I seem to recall Topps cutting up some weird things too for their latest minor league release.

Anyway, here she is!



Next up, is a card I took cuts from Canseco's 2 books. Here is what it looked like:



When I was done, my wife said "that looks great, but you named it ATHLETES to authors ... where is the baseball stuff?"

DANG IT.

So I re-did it and came up with this.



What I used is ALL legit Canseco stuff ... except for the ball. I got that from the game my family and I went to for my birthday. The memories were great enough that I decided to forego using a game used ball I picked up from a game Canseco was in.

So, here it is signed!



It is one of my wife's favorites. It is inscribed 6x All-Star and 2x Author. When he was done with that, he asked "Do you want me to write in Juiced and Vindicated also?"

HECK YES I DO!!!!

So he did

Oh, and for those of you interested in checking out the beckett writeup, here you go.

[mouschi]

Sooooo ... I just got an email from Chris Olds, the editor of Beckett. "Check out the front page."

BAM!!!!



The stache doing the bash w/Jose smack dab, front and center of Beckett Online. #tryingtostaycoolaboutit #nochanceofthathappening