Sunday, November 25
TOPPS CERTIFIED AUTO CARDS
It's a done deal, two weeks ago I finished my first Certified Autograph signing for Topps and I'm here to fill you in on all the details. This was actually a pretty cool process and it all started by signing a contract with Topps. If some of you have been active readers on here you remember back in July when I said I signed a contract with Topps to sign 500 cards for $5 a card. Well I was really excited just to get a certified card that will be in packs of cards. So two weeks ago I attended a MLBPA retail summit in Denver and was ready to start signing my cards. This is when I found out that Topps upped the # of cards I would sign to 1000...not a problem with me! When any player signs for Topps it needs to be watched by a Topps official or someone that can certify that I actually signed the cards and no one else like my wife or brother jumped in and signed a couple (this has happened in the past with players). In my case the person in charge of watching me was Evan Kaplan, director of trading cards for the MLBPA. Evan had to sign an affidavit swearing that he would watch me sign every card. Most of the times the watcher gets paid for taking time out to watch every card get signed...I think it's around $75 but I'm not sure so don't quote me. It's a really boring job, could you imagine sitting around for 3-4 hours watching a guy sign 1000 cards.... not fun. To start Evan opened up a sealed manila envelope that contains instructions on signing, 3 Blue Staedtler pens and 1025 stickers. I think the extra 25 were there for accidents or screwups...I had a couple and just peeled off the sticker and threw it away. I also got bored with one and put one on my 2007 Topps card making it look like the real deal...this was something I always wanted to do. Well from there it was signing, signing and more signing. It took me around 3 hours to sign 1000 cards and for those of you wondering I did use a different autograph so I could get them done quicker...just kidding, I will never change my auto contrary to some of the veteran graphers out there saying I would change once I got to the bigs. Well signing 1000 cards was pretty boring but I had to make it a little fun and hopefully add some spice to finding one of my cards in future Topps products. On every so many pages (25 stickers per page) I would put different inscriptions on them. For the first 5 auto I wrote, 1st certified autograph ever with the date and the next one I wrote 2nd cert auto ever with the date. After I did that I wrote 10 that contained www.patneshek.com. You guys get the point. Here's all the inscriptions I wrote. 10 that said www.neshek.com, 10 that said sidearmer, 10 that had 7/7/06 MLB Debut and #72, 10 that had 2007 MLB ALL STAR FINAL VOTE, 10 that said Go Twins, 10 that said STRK 3 and finished up the day signing my last cert entitled "my last cert auto!" Hopefully you guys will get a kick out of finding these and seeing them pop up next year in different Topps products. Topps does not tell me where they will appear so be prepared to find these next year! Be sure to check out all the pics here.
More pics on Pat's site!
