The past couple weeks have been very good to me and my collection as I was able to add not one but two new autographs from my long-time need list. I wrote about my Freddy Garcia autograph earlier this week, and now I happily will also get to write about Jaret Wright.
I covered Jaret's career in a post that I wrote way back in December 2011, and nothing has changed, baseball-wise for him since that time. The three games he pitched for the Orioles at the beginning of the 2007 season were the end of his MLB career. He pitched in four minor league games at hi A Frederick and AA Bowie towards the end of the 2007 season, and spent Spring Training 2008 with the Pirates but wasn't able to pitch well enough to get back to the show.
Jaret was featured in three major release sets as an Oriole in 2007, this Topps base set card, Topps Heritage, and Upper Deck Series 2. I know that a lot of other collectors work on Heritage sets, so I figured I had a much better shot at coming across a signed copy of the Topps or Upper Deck card. It just took over eight years for it to work out. I saw one signed copy of his Orioles Topps Heritage card on ebay maybe two years ago but someone else had bought it before I had the chance to do so, but this time around I quickly grabbed this signed card as soon as I saw it for sale.
I didn't really get back into collecting autographs hard-core until sometime in 2008, otherwise I would have almost certainly attended the Keys or Baysox games that Jaret was scheduled to pitch at to try to get one of his Orioles cards signed then as minor league rehab games are always a pretty good shot to get rehabbing Major Leaguers to sign, but I happily am adding this autograph to my collection now, better late than never!
