Recent Royals: 2003 Topps Finest Byron Gettis

I have very few card collections given my limited resources and space, but I did decide some time ago to begin collecting on-card Royals autographs. It’s been a blast so far trying to track these things down and this is the latest addition to my collection. To view the cards currently in the collection, take a look at the Gallery or the other posts in this series. I’m working on getting a legit want list together on my trade page but, in the meantime, if you have any on-card Royals autos that it looks like I don’t have, don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

I cropped it out, but the price says $10. No one paid that ever.

Sometimes you get lucky. And no, that has nothing to do with scoring this card for One eBay ($.99 + s/h… I’m still trying to get that term in the baseball card lexicon).

It also has nothing to do with Byron Gettis’ career. His MLB career line has a 179 in it and it’s not one of the positive stats.

No, this is about… serendipity? That may be going too far, but it turns out that Mr. Gettis here, after being release by the Tigers in 2005, enrolled at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where he was a Saluki tight end. As you may or may not know, Jon and I both attended SIUC. Byron Gettis was busy getting signed as an amateur free agent by the Royals and working his way up the minor league ladder while Jon and I were making movies together in the early 2000s, but he grew up in Centereville (which is near Carbondale). I’m glad to see a Little Egypt native son return to his homeland after a great adventure. In a way, modern athletes are like the great warriors of old, traveling near and… ugh I’m making myself sick just typing such nonsense.

Anyway, here’s to you, fellow Saluki!

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>