Oriole #1013- Brian Duensing

In my last post about Oriole #1014, Odrisamer Despaigne, I mentioned that I was skipping Oriole #1013 since I didn't have an autograph of his yet. Oh what a difference a few days makes; within a span of about 24 hours, I got Brian Duensing to sign two cards for me at an O's game as well as receiving a third autograph of his via a trade. So now, I'm officially ready for my post about Oriole #1013, Brian Duensing.

I really got lucky to have Brian sign two cards for me at Saturday's game. We arrived at the game early as the gates opened and I headed directly to the field. I noticed that a lot of the pitchers were spread out in the outfield shagging fly balls as they do sometimes, and I started scanning for Brian. Luckily, he was in the right field corner, relatively close to where I was, and nearly as I got down to the field, Orioles BP ended and everyone started running off of the field. I called out his name and within about 4 minutes of being inside the stadium, I had the autographs I had come for, and my autograph experience was surprisingly easy for once. A lot of times over the years, I have spent hours chasing down autographs to get the same 2-3 players who have graciously signed for me many times over the years, so it was nice to have such a quick and productive effort.

Brian joined the Orioles organization in late May as a minor league free agent. He had been in the Royals system but had signed a deal with an opt-out date if he was not called up to the big league club. I'm quite sure that I read somewhere that his deal with the Orioles was a similar type of contract, but the Orioles obviously decided to bring him up to the big league squad instead of losing him. So on June 2nd, the O's selected his contract from AAA Norfolk.

Duensing has a lot of MLB experience, all of which came with the Twins from 2009-15. He pitched in 354 games for them, with a 41-37 record and a 4.13 ERA over that time and worked largely as a reliever, but did make 61 starts early in his career.

To date for the Orioles, he has pitched in seven games, and is more or less the lefty matchup reliever in the bullpen. Over 6.2 innings, he has a 5.40 ERA with three strikeouts while giving up nine hits and 2 walks. Hopefully that line will improve.

Since the vast majority of my autographing these days occurs during my trip to Spring Training, it's always mildly frustrating as players enter the Orioles organization after the start of the season. It happens every year and is a part of how rosters are constantly evolving, but I'm left scrambling as a player enters the Orioles system and is making their debut with the team in a matter of weeks. Thankfully, I was able to get a few of Duensing's autographs quickly, but it doesn't always work that way. Some players who have entered the organization mid-season (a-hem, Francisco Rodriguez), have been begrudgingly added to my need list and stayed there for years. Happily, I have a signed and personalized Old Man Card of Brian's to head right into my collection. As always, thanks for your help old man!

Good luck in Baltimore, Brian, And thanks for signing for me!

Oriole # 1009- Vance Worley

After the initial rush of four Orioles debuts over the first two games of the season, it took a few more games for the last two new guys on the roster to make their debut on the field. Vance Worley and Hyun Soo Kim both debuted simultaneously in the field this past Sunday, April 10th, in the Orioles fifth game of the season. So I had to go back to my positional tie-breaker system to determine that Worley being the pitcher (position 1) slotted ahead of Kim who started in left field (7), so that officially locked Vance in as the 1009th player in Orioles history.

(Sorry for the crappy scans of these two cards, but my scanner started playing hardball with me)

The Vanimal (his nickname since his college days for his hardcore workouts) was the only one of the six new Orioles to debut in 2016 who was a member of the team and attended Orioles Fanfest back in December. So, thanks to my dad's Old Man Orioles custom cards, I had been prepared for his Orioles debut for about five months by the time it actually came around. I wasn't actually sure that he was going to break camp with the team, as it came down to the final day of Spring Training before it was officially announced that he heading to Baltimore. 

Interestingly enough, he started the season as the team's fifth starter, but it's possible that Tyler Wilson will move into that role in the future, but only time will tell. Vance hadn't pitched in something like ten days before making his start, so it would make sense if he was a little bit rusty. He pitched reasonably well, and gave up just two earned runs over 4.2 innings, while he struck out five Rays. If he had been able to get one more out, he would have been in line for the win, but the wheels had started to come off. All told, it was a solid performance for his debut, especially after the long layover. 

In addition to getting Vance's autograph at Fanfest, he was one of the better signers I came across during my Spring Training trip too. I came across him with just one other fan nearby and he signed these cards for me, as well as the OMC at the top of the post. Prior to Vance's signing for us, the other autograph seeker saw my Twins card and mentioned that Vance likely wouldn't sign it. I had never heard anything about this, so I put the Twins card on the bottom, and figured it didn't hurt to ask.

Which leads to one of my funnier autograph stories in recent memory. Before signing the card, he thoroughly crossed out both the Twins lettering and logo. I wasn't sure he was going to still sign the card, but he did. And I didn't get the whole story behind this, but suffice it to say that he clearly doesn't have good memories about his time in Minnesota.

Thanks for signing for me Vance and welcome to the club!

Oriole #998- Chris Parmelee

Did you all happen to catch the O's game last night? It was a slobber-knocker as the Orioles demolished the Phillies 19-3. They hit 8 home runs in the game, which is an all-time team record, and my dad and I had actually talked about going to the game before deciding against it. Oh well, at least it was fun to watch on TV. And Chris Parmelee contributed to the win with one of the best ever offensive debuts by going 4-6 with two home runs.

Apparently, Chris was only the second Orioles player ever to hit two homers in his debut, following Sam Horn on April 9, 1990, and just the third with four hits in his debut following Horn and Ronny Paulino on April 7, 2012. Let's just hope that Parmelee's time in Baltimore ends better than Paulino's did, as he ended up with just twelve additional hits over nineteen games following that four hit debut.

Parmelee has a decent track record, as he was the Twins first round selection (20th overall) in the 2006 draft. He played for the Twins from 2011-14, but never appeared in more than 101 games in a season, and finished his time in Minnesota with a .249 average, and 24 home runs over 273 games. 

The Orioles signed him as a free agent this past January and he had been tearing up the AAA International League all season long and was hitting .312 with 6 homers and and on-base percentage near .400 over 61 games. However, he wasn't on the Orioles forty man roster, and is pretty much a 1B/corner OF of which the O's already have too many guys taking up spots on the roster. But they had to give him a shot or risk losing him to a competitor as he had a June 15th opt-out date. And I know that it's a very small sample size, but the move is already seeming to pay dividends. Now if he can only continue to produce, he should settle in nicely on the team. 

As I so often write, thanks goes once again to my dad for his helping making this Old Man Card as well as getting it signed for me on his Spring Training trip. Thanks to him, this will slide very nicely into a permanent spot in the collection. 

Since Parmelee is now officially Oriole #998, we are really knocking on the door of the 1000th debut in team history. I'm pretty sure that very few people are as excited for it as I am, but it's a cool milestone and I can't wait to see who it will be; I think I should do an update post about the remaining candidates for #1000. Hopefully I will get that up in the next few days. 

Finally...Mark Brown

Sometimes, I seem to be missing a signed Orioles card that all the other fellow O's autograph collectors already have, and that seemed to be the case with today's player, Mark Brown. I know that there are a limited number of some of these signed cards out there, so it's possible that all the others were already in a fellow collectors collection, but I was hoping that my day would come with him one day.

And finally, it has...

Not only signed, but personalized too! And a unique inscription of "Blessings". A fellow collector on SCN runs into Mark a few times a year and offered to help me out. Of course, I contacted him near the end of the baseball season last year, and he didn't see Mark again until this April, so my long wait for this signed card was made just a little bit longer. But not only did he get this card signed and personalized, he actually snapped a shot of Mark holding this card that he had just signed for me. That's about as good as it gets!

Now that I finally have a signed copy of Mark's Orioles Crown card, my other two autographs of his are available for trade if anyone is interested.

Orioles team issued postcard

'86 Topps Twins card

Taking Care of J.C.

When I wrote about J.C.'s Orioles debut back in mid-August, I had hoped to get him to sign his 2012 Norfolk Tides card in person at an Orioles game, but that never happened. His tenure with the Orioles lasted just about two weeks, from August 13th-27th (the O's were out of town for about half of that time), and was cut short due to his relatively ineffective work out of the Orioles bullpen as their situational lefty, or LOOGY if you prefer. He appeared in five games, totaling four innings and pitched to the tune of a 6.75 ERA. He gave up seven hits including one home-run, walked one and struck out one.

Since I wasn't able to get J.C.'s signature during his time in town and he didn't latch on with another team at the end of the season, I was resigned to buy his autograph online. He has a number of certified autographs, which really helps out a collector like me, but none of them are particularly attractive, and pretty much all of them are plastered with a sticker signature. This Upper Deck ProSigs Diamond Collection certified autograph was one of the better looking of the bunch, mainly because the grey sticker kind of blends in with the grey background, although my scanner makes the sticker stand out much more than it does in person. Anyway, his name is now knocked off my need list and I'm back down to needing a single autograph for my collection to, once again, sit at 100% complete. Anyone have an extra Dick Luebke autograph sitting around?

My National Experience

I attended the National Card Show at the Baltimore Convention Center on Saturday and pretty much spent the entire day at the show. I easily could have spent at least another half day at the show, but I had other things to do since I recently got back from my trip. I was able to cover the entire show, but not as well as I would have liked. I also ran into fellow Orioles collector and blogger Ryan, and got a preview of his haul from the show.

For someone like myself who has such a limited collection focus, I knew going in that it would be pretty unlikely for me to find any autographs I need for my Orioles collection, but a show like this at least gave me some hope. I went in to the show with the realistic goal of knocking out the three recently-debuted Orioles that I needed; Jim Thome, Omar Quintanilla, and Lew Ford.

After looking through a few certified autograph boxes in search of the trio, I came across an in-person autograph dealer about halfway through the show. Visually, his autographs meshed well with other examples I have seen of the autographs I needed, so I pulled the trigger. It also helped that he happened to have all three of the players I needed.

Of course, as I mentioned in Monday's post, I later came across this signed Ford Tides card at one of the last booths I stopped at, so that Twins card is now available for trade.

In addition to those three guys, I came across this autograph of short-time Orioles infielder Eider Torres. The price was next to nothing and I like it much better than the autograph that was in my collection, so I made the upgrade.

So this SP certified autograph of Torres is now up for trade. 

I also found a large number of cards that I needed for my various Topps, Topps Heritage, and subset collections, but I was unable to scratch off any of the other Orioles autographs needs on my list. While I wasn't really surprised, I was still somewhat disappointed. I guess my collection is at the point where, even at a show the size of the National, no one has what I'm looking for. However, one of the dealers mentioned that he had sold a signed 1964 Lou Jackson Orioles on Thursday, so I guess that I know there is at least one out there!