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You are here: Home / Sports / MLB’s Authenticators

MLB’s Authenticators

by John Cole|  April 21, 20097:55 am| 48 Comments

This post is in: Sports

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I thought this was an interesting piece:

Nearly a decade ago, embarrassed about reports of widespread fraud in the $1-billion-per-year sports memorabilia industry — dominated by baseball and filled mostly with fakes and forgeries, according to an F.B.I. investigation — Major League Baseball did something about it.

Now every game has at least one authenticator, watching from a dugout or near one. The authenticators are part of a team of 120 active and retired law-enforcement officials sharing the duties for the 30 franchises. Several worked the home openers for the Yankees and the Mets, helping track firsts at the new stadiums. They verified balls, bases, jerseys, the pitchers’ rosin bag, even the pitching rubber and the home plate that were removed after the first game at Yankee Stadium.

I had no idea this was happening.

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Reader Interactions

48Comments

  1. 1.

    Maxwel

    April 21, 2009 at 8:02 am

    I wonder how much I would have to pay for a ball used in the first Wang Bang in the new park?

  2. 2.

    bago

    April 21, 2009 at 8:11 am

    They verified balls. That is all.

  3. 3.

    David

    April 21, 2009 at 8:28 am

    NBA stars sell their shoes after EACH game. I worked in the home of a multi-billionaire who had collected hundreds of pairs of these giant plastic, smelly monstrosities.

  4. 4.

    mapaghimagsik

    April 21, 2009 at 8:31 am

    Now if they had just done that with shards of the True Cross…well, that wouldn’t have happened, because then the Church wouldn’t have made so much money.

    Baseball has more integrity than the various flavors of the Catholic Church.

  5. 5.

    RememberNovember

    April 21, 2009 at 8:34 am

    hey stay on topic, at least reference Babe Ruth bat splinters for a segue!

  6. 6.

    r€nato

    April 21, 2009 at 8:34 am

    @bago:

    I’m going to avoid the all-too-obvious teabag joke.

  7. 7.

    ed

    April 21, 2009 at 8:41 am

    How much time and money could be saved if the FBI just didn’t bother. Someone sold a bat with a phony signature on it? Who gives a fuck? It’s a fucking bat with fucking ink on it.

  8. 8.

    Punchy

    April 21, 2009 at 8:46 am

    I’m just stunned that the very day I yank Pedroia from my fantasy lineup due to general suckiness, he essplodez for a 4-fer-6 day and a gagillion TBs and ribbies.
    /pounds salt

  9. 9.

    Gus

    April 21, 2009 at 8:53 am

    I wonder how much I would have to pay for a ball used in the first Wang Bang in the new park?

    Probably not too much. They aren’t exactly rare.

  10. 10.

    Zoogz

    April 21, 2009 at 9:03 am

    Oh, yeah? Well, who authenticates the authenticators?

  11. 11.

    Dork

    April 21, 2009 at 9:04 am

    @Maxwel: Huh?

  12. 12.

    Tokyokie

    April 21, 2009 at 9:11 am

    In the sports-collecting world, this has generally been seen as a move by MLB to muscle in on the memorabilia industry. What’s the difference between an authenticated Bob Feller autographed baseball and one a fan got signed at spring training? Probably about 50 bucks, most of which won’t go to Feller. (But hey, you get an MLB hologram.) Personally, I like the approach that Catfish Hunter took with the problem. He sold his autographs exclusively through a hardware store in his hometown of Hertford, N.C. (if you wanted a particular item signed or a personalized signature, you left it with the store, and Hunter would accommodate you within a few days), with all the proceeds going to the local Lions Club’s efforts to combat blindness.

  13. 13.

    Phoenix Woman

    April 21, 2009 at 9:11 am

    My spouse has a baseball autographed by Johnny Mize. He watched Mize sign the ball. It was rejected as fake by a sports-memorabilia guy because the signature was shaky. Well, DUH — Johnny Mize was in his sixties, and not in the best of health, when he signed it.

  14. 14.

    MR Bill

    April 21, 2009 at 9:13 am

    One of Phillip K. Dick’s best novels The Man In the High Castle has as a subplot the stories of an California memorabilia seller who is busily counterfeiting such items as “Buffalo Bill’s Gun” for the Japanese conquerors who won WWII in his alternate universe. The man who tries to do something original is the one who is suspect… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle
    Along with the collapse of the Stock and Real estate markets we also see a collapse in the antiques market, which has been flooded with bogus items. We can expect an authenticator’s scandal soon. My late wife was in the antiques trade, and it mostly exists because of the credulity of the victim, I mean, buyer. I imagine sports is pretty much the same.

    Once, back years ago, I saw a lady bring an “antique Chinese Ivory vase” to the Antiques Roadshow on PBS. The expert gently explained that the mold marks and sticker ‘Make in Taiwan meant it was not ivory and worth about $10 bucks, rather than the $200 she had paid..

  15. 15.

    wilfred

    April 21, 2009 at 9:16 am

    See Underworld, by Don Delillo.

  16. 16.

    Jason

    April 21, 2009 at 9:22 am

    Active law-enforcement officials. Seriously. I thought there were professional organizations that did this sort of thing, y’know, professionally. They can’t pull a notary out of the crowd? All “Baby Elephant Walk” on the PA as some bank manager inspects balls.

  17. 17.

    Balconesfault

    April 21, 2009 at 9:25 am

    @mapaghimagsik:

    Now if they had just done that with shards of the True Cross…

    Damn – someone beat me to the “shards of the Cross” snark!

  18. 18.

    joe from Lowell

    April 21, 2009 at 9:28 am

    But as Plato asked, who authenticates the authenticators?

    Who indeed?

  19. 19.

    redbeardjim

    April 21, 2009 at 9:29 am

    @joe from Lowell:

    “Oh, that’s easy, sir. We authenticate each other.”

  20. 20.

    joe from Lowell

    April 21, 2009 at 9:31 am

    Punchy:

    Not as smart as Terry Francona.

    You should have heard Sports Tahk Radio up here in April 2007. “That kid can’t hit major league pitching. Look at his swing!”

  21. 21.

    joeyess

    April 21, 2009 at 9:38 am

    This has been another addition to the mounting evidence of our modern surveillance state that doesn’t exist.

    America. Land of the free you can drive from state to state without papers and home of the brave
    Jonah Goldberg.

  22. 22.

    Dork

    April 21, 2009 at 9:43 am

    All “Baby Elephant Walk” on the PA as some bank manager inspects balls.

    This is funny on many levels, including a veiled reference to a classic Simpsons episode where Homer dances to this tune as the Isotope mascot.

  23. 23.

    Roger Moore

    April 21, 2009 at 9:48 am

    @Tokyokie:

    What’s the difference between an authenticated Bob Feller autographed baseball and one a fan got signed at spring training?

    The one the fan got signed actually exists. Feller is notable for hating the memorabilia market. He apparently hates the idea of people making money from his signature. His solution is to flood the market with autographs to drive down the price. If you stand close to Bob Feller with a baseball, piece of paper, or anything else that looks like he could autograph it, he will sign it without bothering to ask.

  24. 24.

    Tokyokie

    April 21, 2009 at 9:49 am

    Along with the collapse of the Stock and Real estate markets we also see a collapse in the antiques market, which has been flooded with bogus items. We can expect an authenticator’s scandal soon. My late wife was in the antiques trade, and it mostly exists because of the credulity of the victim, I mean, buyer. I imagine sports is pretty much the same.

    The sports-memorabilia trade is probably worse. It doesn’t take a whole lot of knowledge to be able to inspect an item and determine whether it’s an antique. (Are the drawers dovetailed? Are the embellishments carved into the wood or applique? Does the hardware appear old?) But if a dealer claims the item was signed by Satchel Paige, you pretty much have to take his word for it, unless you know what his signature looked like, whether he signed with his nickname or his given name and whether his autograph deteriorated with age (Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, at the request of their heirs, were signing hundreds of baseballs in their sickbeds pretty much as long as they were able to), you pretty much have to take his word for it. My Great-Great-Uncle Hap gave me a baseball he said he’d caught as a foul ball at the 1966 All-Star Game in St. Louis. I have no proof it’s genuine (nowadays, they use special baseballs for the All-Star Game and World Series), I just have his word, and although I have no plans of ever selling the ball, I’ll take Hap’s word over a sports-memorabilia dealer. And Hap was a renowned bullshitter.

  25. 25.

    Tokyokie

    April 21, 2009 at 9:53 am

    Roger Moore, I used Feller as an example because I was aware that his autograph is probably the easiest to obtain of Hall-of-Famers. Several years ago, I went to spring training in Florida, and I got him to sign a couple of postcards of the stadium. When he saw that I was an adult and was handing him two items, he said he’d only sign one, but then when he saw that I’d already filled in the names and addresses of the folks I was going to send them to, he shrugged and signed both of them anyway.

  26. 26.

    Tokyokie

    April 21, 2009 at 9:53 am

    But the point is, that MLB, not the ballplayers, gets most of the dough from the run-up in price.

  27. 27.

    Violet

    April 21, 2009 at 10:04 am

    Now if they’ll only turn their attention to performance-enhancing-substance use. Or decide they don’t care and let the players use any substance they want. Either way, I wish Congress would stop holding hearings about baseball. It’s a game, where grown men hit balls with sticks and run around in circles. Let the baseball people run it how they want. What the heck is Congress doing wasting their time and our money holding hearings about it? I figure the Congresspeople are fans and using their positions as an excuse to get close to greatness. Since they’re mostly not great.

  28. 28.

    Dork

    April 21, 2009 at 10:06 am

    But the point is, that MLB, not the ballplayers, gets most of the dough from the run-up in price.

    Please explain. How does me obtaining, say, Santana’s sig standing by the dugout, then selling it on Ebay, enrich MLB?

  29. 29.

    Dennis-SGMM

    April 21, 2009 at 10:08 am

    @Tokyokie:
    Maybe MLB is saving up for a real drug abuse prevention program.

  30. 30.

    peach flavored shampoo

    April 21, 2009 at 10:13 am

    Let the baseball people run it how they want.

    That’s a bit niave. In recent years, nearly every single baseball stadium has been financed thru government-imposed taxes on hotels, rental cars, etc. It ceases to just be a “game” when those of us not playing and maybe not even interested are directly paying for their billion-dollar playgrounds, and some would argue, quite indirectly, their salaries.

    If they built their own shit with their own monies, I would agree to leave them alone and let them do what they want. But that’s not the case anymore. And the taxes they’ve imposed (at least on hotel rooms) are certainly not trivial. Outrageous is more like it.

  31. 31.

    Violet

    April 21, 2009 at 10:27 am

    @peach flavored shampoo:

    That’s a bit niave. In recent years, nearly every single baseball stadium has been financed thru government-imposed taxes on hotels, rental cars, etc. It ceases to just be a “game” when those of us not playing and maybe not even interested are directly paying for their billion-dollar playgrounds, and some would argue, quite indirectly, their salaries.

    If they built their own shit with their own monies, I would agree to leave them alone and let them do what they want. But that’s not the case anymore. And the taxes they’ve imposed (at least on hotel rooms) are certainly not trivial. Outrageous is more like it.

    No disagreement here on all that. I think they should have to spend their own money. Although in a lot of cases, the stadiums get used for other events, some of which I might attend, so I suppose I could benefit. Slightly.

    I was speaking more to the drug issues that Congress seems to feel the need to get involved in. I don’t see Congress holding hearings on the highway robbery involved in building sports stadiums, taxing rental cars, etc. Perhaps they should, as those things affect more people than if some ballplayer injects steroids.

  32. 32.

    srv

    April 21, 2009 at 10:38 am

    They verified balls, bases, jerseys, the pitchers’ rosin bag, even the pitching rubber and the home plate that were removed after the first game at Yankee Stadium.

    This has all the ingredients of a Will Farrell movie.

  33. 33.

    srv

    April 21, 2009 at 10:43 am

    Let the baseball people run it how they want.

    Let Wall Street people run it how they want.

    The Commerce Clause covers everything now. Now for someone more reputable than baseball people… I hear Elliot Spitzer is available.

  34. 34.

    flounder

    April 21, 2009 at 10:47 am

    I am always late to the good rackets.

  35. 35.

    MattR

    April 21, 2009 at 11:02 am

    Interesting stuff. I agree that for autographed items this is largely an attempt by MLB to get a piece of the pie. But for game used memorabilia it is nice to actually have something to “prove” that it is authentic.

  36. 36.

    Tlauf

    April 21, 2009 at 11:04 am

    I remember an auditing company I worked for several years ago had a contract to do this memorabilia authentication for MLB. There was a big contest in the San Francisco office to see which person there would be the official authenticator for Barry Bonds’ single season record breaking home run in 2001.

    Funny enough, the company I worked for was Arthur Andersen, which within a few months of that home run, was nearly completely dissolved because of their role in “authenticating” Enron’s fraudulent balance sheet.

    Who authenticates the authenticators, indeed!

  37. 37.

    Keith G

    April 21, 2009 at 11:17 am

    @Violet: Violet (27) beat me to it. A decade of surpervising the S.M. biz when they should have been supervising athltes for substance abuse.

    Some day, I’l be able to care about ML baseball again, but not now.

  38. 38.

    Ryan Cunningham

    April 21, 2009 at 11:20 am

    Maybe I’m just crabby after all the news about not prosecuting anyone involved in torture, but I find it deeply disturbing that our culture seems to be more vigilant about securing the authenticity of sports memorabilia than it is about securing basic human rights.

  39. 39.

    DanSmoot'sGhost

    April 21, 2009 at 11:21 am

    So, in the middle of an impending depression, we have people with jobs who have nothing better to do than put marks on things to prop up baseball memorabilia prices?

    That’s ….. just fucking wonderful. Really, it warms my heart that this is happening, and that we can know about it and feel good about it.

  40. 40.

    DanSmoot'sGhost

    April 21, 2009 at 11:27 am

    @Ryan Cunningham:

    I think we had the same thought at the same moment.

    Which, for you, is rather scary. Funny, but scary.

  41. 41.

    MattR

    April 21, 2009 at 11:27 am

    @Ryan Cunningham: Nobody has figured out how to make money from securing basic human rights.

  42. 42.

    canuckistani

    April 21, 2009 at 11:36 am

    So, in the middle of an impending depression, we have people with jobs who have nothing better to do than put marks on things to prop up baseball memorabilia prices?

    It tells me that there’s loose money floating around, and good for those people for finding an ecological niche where they will flourish at the expense of people stupid enough to pay good money for an authenticated resin bag.

  43. 43.

    Roger Moore

    April 21, 2009 at 11:50 am

    @Violet:

    Now if they’ll only turn their attention to performance-enhancing-substance use.

    In case you hadn’t noticed, they have. Baseball has a decent PED testing program, probably the best of the 4 big American sports. There are still some obvious holes- they don’t do good off-season testing, and they allow a ridiculous number of therapeutic exemptions for Ritalin- but it’s now much better than the NFL. I don’t understand why the NFL’s system gets such an easy ride. There’s obviously cheating on a massive scale in the NFL, but nobody ever calls them on it.

  44. 44.

    DanSmoot'sGhost

    April 21, 2009 at 11:50 am

    and good for those people for finding an ecological niche where they will flourish

    Well that’s just it. The people putting the marks on the bases aren’t the ones getting the loose money. They are just propping up the people who are getting the loose money, probably for very little wages.

    If useless jobs are that easily creatable, why don’t we create jobs for people to scrape gum off the sidewalks, or invent blog mod filters that don’t work?

  45. 45.

    jerry 101

    April 21, 2009 at 3:54 pm

    a friend of mine used to work for one of the big audit firms, and MLB was a client for a small (but fun) little practice – the group was responsible for slapping a little sticker on the authenticated items.

    A little MLB hologram sticker, each one with a serial number. He had to record what the serial number of the sticker was, what it was stuck on, why the item was important, and identifying information about the item. The items were often boxed up and sent to Cooperstown afterwards, though some items had other things happen. For a charitable fundraiser, he once had to watch the entire Cubs and Cardinals team sign an object, then he slapped the sticker on, and the item was auctioned off for charity.

    He basically authenticated the authenticator. The sticker proved it was the real thing.

    Don’t ask me what happened if someone were to swap out the stickers. I don’t know.

    But those stickers were of huge importance. If he lost any, he had to report them lost along with the lost serial numbers. If any were wasted, he had to report that.

    Makes for a pretty good gig. Unfortunately, he only got to do it a few times. Most of his job sucked.

  46. 46.

    Common Sense

    April 21, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    I’m not saying you are incorrect — in fact I agree that anyone with two eyes can see the NFL has rampant abuse — but do you have any proof this is the case?

  47. 47.

    Tokyokie

    April 21, 2009 at 5:49 pm

    Dork

    But the point is, that MLB, not the ballplayers, gets most of the dough from the run-up in price.

    Please explain. How does me obtaining, say, Santana’s sig standing by the dugout, then selling it on Ebay, enrich MLB?

    That sort of transaction doesn’t enrich MLB because MLB doesn’t authenticate an autograph that a fan gets. (Although I believe they vouch for the authenticity of autographs of deceased ballplayers.) MLB slaps a sticker on a piece of memorabilia and voila! it’s authentic. But just as they don’t have the expertise to authenticate an actual autograph from an aging Johnny Mize, they similarly probably lack the ability to distinguish a really good forgery from an actual autograph. But if the memorabilia has that sticker on it, it’s supposed to be genuine, and for that, MLB collects a pretty penny. Good for Bob Feller for trying to subvert the whole system.

  48. 48.

    spot check billy

    April 21, 2009 at 9:31 pm

    Heard this story about 10-15 years ago when the memorabilia market was in one of its upswings: an Orioles pitcher who had been a minor-league lifer and finally broke through to the bigs for a couple of years in his thirties was signing at some small-town community event when a mother asked where her son’s newly signed baseball could be authenticated. He tried to explain that his signature was only worth about 35 cents tops but she still got bent out of shape about it.

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