Starting it up...

Hi. My name is Drew. You may know me from various places online.

I am an autograph collector in the Dallas-Fort Worth area-- hence the name DFWGrapher. I have spent 35 years as a card and autograph collector, along with 15 years on the industry side of sports card and collectibles production. I have been active in online trading for 25 years in cards, autographs, and videos.

I had a moderately-successful YouTube channel from 2020 through 2023 dealing with autographs-- whether in-person, through the mail (TTM), or items I traded for and bought.

I am a radio and podcast host, having been co-host of the TTMCast Podcast with Jeff Baker from May 2021 through November 2023, then taking over full hosting duties in January 2024 following Jeff's untimely death. I also have covered games for the International Floorball Federation, North American Hockey League, and Texas high school football.

I am a writer, penning a weekly column on Sports Collectors Daily, as well as occasional pieces for 9 Inning Know-It-All, Sports Card Forum, Tuff Stuff Magazine, USA Floorball, the North American Hockey League, and several other now-defunct sports media blogs and websites.

And now I come to you combining several of these together. I want to trade. But not just any trade: I want to do a series of One Red Paperclip style trades, gradually trading up over time and just seeing how far I can get. In ORP, Kyle MacDonald traded his one red paper clip up for a house in the span of a year.

I hold no delusions of my own skills in wheeling and dealing. I'm not expecting to get to Babe Ruth or Roberto Clemente, for example, in a year's span. Frankly, I'll be lucky if I don't end up trading the damn card for a bag of magic beans tomorrow. But I thought it might be fun to see how far I can get in the span of a year. Maybe I can work my way up to a Hall of Famer.

I am setting rules on this that I am only trading for cards. It will only be one-for-one deals-- though if we find we can help each other with set needs via other trades, I'm definitely down for working a second trade and just packaging it all together. I'm not traveling to deliver the way he did (we're doing bubble mailer with USPS tracking here, folks). And it will only be in baseball. Maybe if it goes well I'll try it with hockey or football, even basketball or soccer.

I want to start off in the same way MacDonald did: I want to use something that contains almost no value in the autograph hobby in the same way a single red paperclip contains almost no value to the average person.

And so, I have named Frank Tanana the namesake of this blog and project.

This Frank Tanana card could be yours!

Now, I'm not saying Tanana has no value: the guy won 240 games and he struck out over 2700 batters in a career that spanned parts of three decades. Three-time All-Star, twice top five in Cy Young voting. Had he not been stuck on some terrible Angels and Rangers teams, he might have had a shot at the Hall of Fame. He's a great TTM signer and from all accounts a genuinely good guy.

But as a player who was good but not great and has been a reliable autograph signer for decades, his autographs are super easy to acquire. SportsCollectors.net lists over 2500 successes dating back to 1999 with five where he signed at least eight cards for the person mailing. You could TTM him tomorrow and have your card back in under a month. Right now, I think I have 16 different cards signed by him. Due to the fact I have two copies of his 1993 Topps card signed, I plan to use that one to start this off.

Since pitchers and catchers start reporting this week (earliest date is today for the Dodgers, latest is the 15th for ten teams), I figure this is a perfect time to start this project.

So, with that being said... Who wants to start?