#141 Dave Fleming
Here is another up-and-comer that I went after, through the mail, in the early nineties. And just like yesterday's, he ended up a bust after a great rookie season. Dave finished the 1992 season with a 17-10 record with a 3.39 ERA. He came in third in the Rookie of the Year voting behind Pat Listach and Kenny Lofton. His stats diminished for the next couple years while he experienced arm troubles and by the end of the '98 season, he was out of baseball. I never knew that he appeared in nine games for the Royals in 1997.
I only have five cards signed from the '93 Upper Deck set and all five of them were signed around '93 or '94, through the mail. Also, all five of them had some type of problem as a result of them being so glossy. But, this is by far the worst. Dave seems to have signed his card pretty quickly because there is hardly much left to show for it.
I'm pretty sure that I bought a box of this stuff at a card show after it came out. So, I should have a fair amount of it. But for some reason, I haven't bothered to dig out any cards from it to get signed in the past year. I'm sure that I was scared off by the way these ended up looking. But after some recent successes, I am positive that they will look much better signed 16 years later. So, my goal is to get a few more of these signed this year.
3 comments:
I hated the glossy anti-UV coating that started showing up on cards in the mid-90s.
I pretty much stopped collecting autographs for about 10 years after I tried to get Howard Cross to sign an early Stadium Club card at a charity basketball game at my high school. (It came out worse than your Dave Flemming card.)
Prepping these cards before hand is pretty much a must in order to have them turn out good. Here is a Fleming I got ttm a couple years ago: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v438/DKelly28/Autograph%20Cards%201/DaveFleming-1.jpg
Nice! That one looks so much better than mine.
It has been my expeirence in the last couple of years or so that the once glossy cards do not need any prepping any more. They just lose their gloss over the years.
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