Alumni on Cardboard

My most personal collection is my player collection of Buck Farmer. As I've mentioned before, he was my student when I was teaching in the States, and I was an assistant coach for the baseball team while he was there. Buck now has over 300 unique cards, including parallels, and I'm missing only five non 1/1s: Panini issues #/10 or #/5 that I've never seen.

Buck Farmer is the only baseball player to come from the school I worked at. And after doing some digging about the schools I attended as a student, I've found a few more baseball players to look into:

I grew up in Silicon Valley, an area not exactly known for sports. But the 49ers now play just down the street from where I used to live, and the San Jose Giants weren't too far away. Santa Clara is the birthplace of Troy Tulowitzki, Happy Hogan, Kyle Barraclaugh, Charlie Graham, Mitch Haniger, Adam Melhuse, umpire Gabe Morales, Greg Gohr, Ryan Hancock, Bret Hemphill, and Eric Thames, among other non-baseball notable names.

My high school has one baseball player in its list of alumni: Drew Waters. Drew is a prospect in the Braves organization. Buster Skrine, quarterback for the Chicago Bears, PGA golfer Chris Kirk, and Chandler Riggs, an actor in The Walking Dead, also went to my high school. They're all younger than I am, and unless they walked into Blockbuster Video while I was working there in college, I've never met them.

However, my high school split into two just after I graduated, and Nick Markakis went to the new school just down the street. Also from the same town is Lew Carpenter, a Senators player in the 1940s, and Matt Skole. Markakis is already in my player collection for his connection to one of my hometowns.

Moving on to college, I actually attended three. My first one has no notable athletes, as it didn't have a big sports program, though the founder of the Varsity restaurant chain attended that school. I love their onion rings!

I got my Bachelor's degree from the same school that Ty Pennington, Larry Nelson, James Wade, and a handful of senators and congressmen attended. And several baseball players, too: Willie Harris on the Nationals, Max Pentecost from the Blue Jays, and Richard Lovelady.

Rounding out my education, the university from which I obtained my Master's degree has a Hall of Famer in its alumni. Umpire Marvin Hudson went to that school, as did former Yankee Johnny Mize. The school's athletic center is named for him, and the campus also has a museum devoted to his career.

Going back to Buck Farmer's high school career, as a coach we played another local high school which spouted out another major leaguer: Tyler Austin. I always wondered why that name always sounded familiar to me when Zippy Zappy talked about him, and now I know. I saw him play in high school. (Side note: his team was quite dirty on the field. But I remember him as a beast at and behind the plate.) And here's another "small world" moment: Austin signed with the Yokohama DeNA BayStars last month to play baseball here in Japan in 2020.

Buck Farmer and Nick Markakis are already player collections, but as for the other players, I'll probably look into getting a single card from each of them, or possibly a small handful. Some players most likely have no cards at all. I think it'd be great to have an "alumni/hometown" mini-collection!

This post, like all of my posts this week, were inspired by Corky's question posts over at Pack War.