Tuesday, December 1, 2009

1997 Best Lancaster Jethawks, Jim Slaton



#2 Jim Slaton

Believe it or not, this is actually the third Jim Slaton card that I have posted on here. I got all three cards signed at an Oklahoma Redhawks game in '08 while Jim was the pitching coach for the Las Vegas 51s. The first two cards were posted in this blog's infancy over a year ago. The first one was posted in August of '08 and the second one was done in October of '08. So far, that is the biggest gap between cards that were signed together.

I didn't say much about Jim in the first two Jim Slaton posts, so I will take care of that now. Jim had a 16-year career with the Brewers, Tigers, and Angels. He made one All Star team as a Brewer in 1977 as he went on to record a career high 17 wins. After the season, the Brew Crew shipped him to Detroit for Ben Oglivie and then was able to sign as a free agent the following season. He had a career 4.03 ERA and he is the Brewers all-time leader in wins, innings, starts, and shutouts. He started coaching after his playing days and he was still the Dodgers AAA pitching coach this past season.

As for this card, I got the team set for cheap at a Lancaster JetHawks game last year. The 'Hawks revamped their logo prior to last season and they were trying to get rid of anything with an old logo on it in their gift shop. So I was able to pick up two or three old JetHawk team sets and a California/Carolina League All Star set for a buck or two each. It is hard for me to believe that it takes a logo change to drop the prices of old team sets. It amazes me that some teams keep trying to sell five to ten year old team sets for the usual eight or nine dollars. You would think that they would drop the price after a year or two.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some of the indy league teams around here will start to discount the card sets at the end of the season. If they've got any left the next year, they'll all mark them down.

I can't imagine it taking a logo change to get a markdown.

zman40 said...

I was at a couple of AAA parks this year that had older sets for the same price as the current ones (or a dollar cheaper). That was in Des Moines and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Des Moines was probably the worse of the two since they had some that were over five years old and not discounted.