2005 BBM 1st Version Luis Lopez

Who is this? Bridgeport Bluefish third baseman Luis Lopez

What is this? An autographed card from the 2005 BBM 1st Version set

Where'd I get it? Lopez signed it for me before a game between the Bluefish and Bears in Newark earlier this year.

How much did it cost? Around $3.

Why is this so special? Luis Lopez had a brief major league career, playing 41 games for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2001 and 11 games for the Montreal Expos in 2004. For the past three seasons, he's played for the Bridgeport Bluefish, which is where I've seen him play.

Lopez also played in Mexico and spent the 2005 season playing for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in the Japanese Pacific League. The Golden Eagles joined the league to fill the void left when the Orix Blue Wave and Kintetsu Buffaloes merged after the 2004 season.

I'd love to tell you how Lopez did for the Golden Eagles in 2005, but Baseball Reference doesn't have them and the stats pages at JapaneseBaseball.com have been undergoing renovation forever.

Yesterday, I posted my 2nd Version Luis Lopez card. I'm not quite sure why I'm posting them backwards, but then again I'm a bit confused by the whole 1st and 2nd version concept. I'm used to players only getting a second card in a later series if they were traded early during the year (or late during the offseason).

Lopez's autograph didn't come out quite as nicely on this card, but it's still better looking than some I've gotten this year.

2005 BBM 2nd Version Luis Lopez

Who is this? Bridgeport Bluefish third baseman Luis Lopez

What is this? An autographed card from the 2005 BBM 2nd Version set

Where'd I get it? Lopez signed it for me before a game between the Bluefish and Bears in Newark earlier this year.

How much did it cost? Around $3.

Why is this so special? Luis Lopez had a brief major league career, playing 41 games for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2001 and 11 games for the Montreal Expos in 2004. For the past three seasons, he's played for the Bridgeport Bluefish, which is where I've seen him play.

Lopez also played in Mexico and spent the 2005 season playing for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in the Japanese Pacific League. The Golden Eagles joined the league to fill the void left when the Orix Blue Wave and Kintetsu Buffaloes merged after the 2004 season.

This spring, I spent a little time looking for interesting items for some of the Atlantic League veterans to add to my collection, so I bought a pair of Lopez's Japanese baseball cards with the idea that I could get them autographed. Lopez, ever the gentleman, signed both of them for me earlier this year.

A few minutes later, he came back over and asked where I had gotten them. He never received copies of his cards - I'm not sure if he'd even gotten to see those particular cards before. I promised that I'd try locate them for him -- if he'd said something before signing the cards, I would have given him the ones I had.

Fortunately, the eBay seller I had purchased them from had a couple more. I bought them, and gave them to Lopez last week when the Bluefish were back in Newark. In appreciation, he gave me an autographed bat.

Lopez has a fairly stylized autograph, but it's one of the nicer ones I've gotten recently.