Rafael Palmeiro - 1987 Donruss #43

If Palmeiro can continue to suit up to play independent baseball for at least the next few years - it can show he's still plugging away with his timeless swing and isn't completely removed from professional baseball, even though a failed steroid test derailed his induction into the Hall of Fame.

Right now, he gets to be a teammate of his son Patrick and while his stint with a team called the Cleburn Railroaders probably doesn't lead anywhere - maybe the occasional highlight helps him get back in the news where the 53-year old gets a second look, even if it's for cheap thrills, a novelty.

TTM autographs received: Devon Whyte

The former Angels outfielder signed my cards in black Sharpie in about three weeks c/o Buffalo Bisons - where he is the hitting coach for the Toronto Blue Jays AAA team.

I think he has intermittently coached with various MLB organizations over the years, but I haven't gotten the opportunity to actually see him in-person - on Instagram, I saw at least one TTM success posted this year and figured I might as well send off a letter to see if I could get ink on three of my random junk wax era cards.

As a player, I remember Whyte mostly as an all-world center fielder with the Toronto Blue Jays - in his prime, no one matched his prowess as a defender for the two World Series Championship Blue Jays teams in 1992 and 1993.

I really wanted to send him some Blue Jays cards, but he spent the first six years of his big league career with the Angels - looking back at his stats after his fine 1987 rookie season, I saw a star crossed player who bottomed out in 1990 and needed a change of scenery.

I wrote out his last name as 'Whyte' as that is how his last name is actually spelled - even though 'White' is the more common spelling of his last name.

COMC - 1987 Donruss Will Clark #66

Decades after the fact, prominent rookie cards from the 1980s have been exposed as worthless - featuring more than a few players who just didn't make the leap from superstars to Hall of Famers.

Under inauspicious circumstances, I owned this rookie card for about two weeks, when Clark was among the hot players of his era - things caught up with me soon enough and ever since, the closest I ever got to a Clark rookie was his 1987 Topps.

To square things away, I finally picked up a copy this card - since it represents one of the cards from my early years of collecting, even if that first copy of the card I had in-hand wasn't actually mine.