Other Archives - Tan Man Baseball Fan

In Memory of Our Precious Baby Boy Phoenix

This has probably been the longest layoff I've had between writing. A lot has happened, and if you follow me on social media, you know why. I haven't publicly gone into much detail, so for the purpose of telling our story, and for my own therapy, I'm going to keep tapping away here at my keyboard until I can tap away no more. Perhaps most importantly, it is my hope that telling our story in its rawest form will help someone out there who has gone through something similar or who will go through something similar. Before starting, I would

My Comic Book Collection

Selling out of a collection is a crazy thing. You hate to see things that you did battle for walk out the door, but when the dust settles, you may find yourself in a position considering do things with the money that are outside of your comfort zone. That's where I found myself in early 2019, after I sold the vast majority of my Jose Canseco baseball card collection. Here is a taste of what was outside my comfort zone that I have fallen madly in love with and have invested in: (links to more in depth articles on each

Showing off my Custom Transformers Collection

I'm known for TL;DR articles, so I have posted the pics of my collection first, and posted the article below them. If you love reading back stories and such, I hope you enjoy it. If you just love eye candy, no hard feelings :) Note the tag "Tanner Toys Collection" is to pay homage to an idea my parents had decades ago - they always thought it would be cool to start a toy store called Tanner Toys. It never happened, so this is my tribute to them. If you collect anything, you are pretty much going to be labeled

Check Out this Website I Built!

If you don't know this already, I've been a website developer for nearly 20 years. I started off by going door to door handing out flyers on my lunch break when I was in a job I HATED. Eventually, I made a go of it on my own, and haven't looked back. Somewhere along the way, I got excruciatingly bored with building websites. Then, it clicked. My passion wasn't to build websites (though I was really good at it.) My passion was to help others (in both business and ministry) - I could use my skills as a web developer

My Journey in … Comic Book Collecting?

If you have read my book Confessions of a Baseball Card Addict, you know that I have also bought and sold perhaps 40,000 or so comic books. I never knew much about them, though. I just bought several collections at good prices and flipped them. I really did love them, though - I've flipped collections of paintings, rings, shirts, etc. Comics were on a different level for me. I love the art on the front, and superheroes. Who doesn't love superheroes, right? Here is my garage once upon a time with about 20,000 comics. It took a guy hiring an

The $107,868 Lesson, My Book, and Starting Over

If you haven't noticed, I haven't been very active anywhere online for a while. In fact, November marks the first month in SEVEN YEARS that I didn't write at least one article. There is a reason for that. In October, my family suffered a terrible loss by losing my father. Life tends to stand still when something like this happens - especially when you are as close to someone like we all were to him. While things are getting better a little day by day, dad passing away left a huge hole in all of our hearts. We are very

Worthless, Yet Priceless

I think we all have a tendency to get caught up in searching out the knobs, barrels, patches, etc. and forget to look back at why most of us are in this hobby to begin with: To relive the memories of our childhood. In looking at some auctions, I found a nice pairing that was absolutely dripping with nostalgia for me: These two were singled out of my beloved 1989 Donruss set for having the cool cursive font on the front. On one side of the spectrum, it shows baseball's bad boy who, at the time, was the best player

1987 Topps and the Hospital

If you are a child of the 80's, you know what 1987 Topps is. It was absolutely loaded with key rookies, but it was produced in such high numbers, I probably don't have enough space here to write out all of the zeroes. You may have heard that my dad has been in and out of the hospital for the past half year. It has been very tough on us all, but no one can really understand what he has been through except for him. Last night, I decided to take the family to visit him and have a little family fun: