GARY’S GLIMPSES: OK, I’m a knucklehead who collects bobble-heads By GARY’S GLIMPSES

What do you think of my partial collection of little friends?
Yup, those are bobbleheads, and collecting them is something else I do. My oldest one is more than 50 years old; it’s a generic Detroit Tigers bobblehead, made of paper mache, I believe, and very fragile — and protected from more dust and sunlight in a plastic case.
These here in my office are mainly doubles; I probably have at least 50 bobbleheads at home. If I had more room, I’d keep all my New Mexico-related bobbleheads — Cody Ross, Al Unser, Michael Cooper, Michael Gaffney, Blake Swihart, Alex Bregman, Bob Davie, Brian Urlacher, Holly Holm, Mark Ronchetti (I’m not kidding) — together. But I don’t have that much room, I’m sorry to say.

Also, if I hadn’t been so busy, it would have been neat to head to Akron, Ohio, last weekend for the inaugural “Bobblecon.”
If you visit the Bobblehead Addicts site on Facebook, you’ll see comments from serious collectors. (I am not that serious.) There are some comments from those who visited Bobblecon, and some photos of items these guys bought there.
From the Akron Beacon Journal last week: “To keep trading his California collection, (Pedro) Avalos founded Bobblehead Addicts in Akron, which now has more than 6,100 members around the world. In 2016 it became the official online community of the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee.
“On Saturday afternoon, about 150 bobblehead collectors mingled at the Hibernian club looking to trade. Many knew each other from standing in line at Akron RubberDucks, Cleveland Indians and Cleveland Cavaliers games on bobblehead nights.”
Fun, eh? I would’ve loved it, in that I have always enjoyed going to card shows, although it’s been a long time since there was a decent one in Albuquerque. (That may have been back in 1990, when I got my only limo ride, along with Cincinnati Reds first baseman Hal Morris, the guest signer at a show at what is now the MCM Elegante.)
A recent search on eBay — namely plugging in “bobblehead” — showed more than 59,000 items. Many of them cost in the thousands of dollars, including one “very extremely rare authentic bobblehead from the 1800s,”a fragile-looking jockey listed at $18,999.99 or best offer. I’d pay maybe $10.
As a serious baseball hobbyist, I confess I’ve spent way too much for my collection, with in excess of 100,000 baseball cards, game-worn jerseys of every team, autographed baseballs and bats, more than 1,600 books on baseball, autographs of more than 1,000 MLB players, and postcards, mainly of ballparks.
I have found quite a few of my bobbleheads on eBay — including my newest, Alex Bregman. Also, the flea market is a great place to find them, as not everybody is a collecting fanatic, like I seemingly have turned out to be.
Over their 15-year history, the Albuquerque Isotopes have cranked out quite a few bobbleheads — Holm and Ronchetti, Dean Treanor, Jason Wood, Myron Noodlehead, Orbit, green chile, and a generic Isotope, to name a few.
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