Tuesday, December 29, 2009

A Major Award

If you understand the title of this post, I am referring to a line from the classic holiday film "A Christmas Story" in which the family dad wins a newspaper contest's "major award" which turns out to be a risque leg lamp. Fra-gil-e. Must be Italian.

You're probably laughing if you know what I'm talking about. If not, I apologize, but it's a hilarious movie, please do yourself a favor and watch it.

Alex Cintron 2008

My major award to you today is Alex Cintron. You got all excited to win a prize and it just turned out to be Cintron, and you tried to love it and show it off anyway. But things didn't work out in the end.

Alex signed as a Minor League free agent with the O's on April 3, 2008 and started the season by playing 16 games for the Tides before being recalled to Baltimore by April 28th. He played in 61 games for the Orioles from then until the end of the season, mainly at shortstop, but was used as a super utility player and also appeared at 1B, 2B, 3B and as a pinch runner and hitter. He hit .286 in 133 ABs and had 10 RBI and 12 runs scored. Not too bad but nothing great.

I think that I have a little bit of a negative attitude towards Alex due to my numerous failures at obtaining his autograph on my own. I ended up buying this card off of eBay since it's the only signed Orioles card of his that I have ever seen.

I tried to get him to sign when he was on a rehab assignment in Frederick & Bowie, but couldn't make it to any of those games. I sent him a TTM when he was with the Syracuse Chiefs last season but he go promoted to the Nats before he would have received it. I tried to get him to sign at a Nats game but he never got close enough to yell out and he got cut before I made it to another game in DC. So it's been an Odyssey. But now I have my Alex Cintron autograph.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad you were (finally) able to get another Oriole for your collection. I sympathize with your struggles to get his autograph, though.

I remember trying several times to get one-game Met Joe Hietpas to sign a card for me. Luckily, I was eventually able to get his autograph at a minor league game -- but at the end of the day, I spent all that time trying to get an autograph from somebody that most baseball fans won't remember or care about.

Orioles Magic said...

Isn't it funny how sometimes the one game players are so much harder to get autographs from than the stars? At least the stars have autographs we can buy, they are just expensive but some of this short term players don't even have cards made!