Facsimile signed baseball's

[yanks12025]

Hello,
When did they start making facsimile team signed baseball's. I'm looking at a 1942 Reds signed baseball. But it's in super shape, like every auto is a 10, looks to good to be true. Reason i think it's not one is its a National League ball.. Thanks

[Rob D.]

I have Cleveland Indians examples from 1946 and 1948, so a Reds version from earlier in the 1940s seems realistic to me.

[yanks12025]

Rob,
Could you post photos please. Thanks

[Rob D.]

Rob,
Could you post photos please. Thanks

Brock,

I'll try, but no promises. I'll need to find the dang things first.

I can tell you that it's quite obvious that the '48 ball is a facsimile, because there's a stamp on one of the sweet spots that says "1948 Cleveland Indians."

If I remember correctly, the 1946 one has no such stamp, but it's still pretty apparent what it is.



Rob

[yanks12025]

May i have your email and ill shoot you a photo of this one. Thanks

[william_9]

I've seen a 1942 Cardinals team ball that was stamped on a Ford Frick NL ball. I believe the names were stamped in blue. That example was also very clean and came in the original Spalding NL box.

[RichardSimon]

I have never seen a stamped ball on an Official Natl or Amer League ball, so that information is very, very interesting.

[william_9]

Here are a couple photos of the Cardinals ball that I mentioned earlier. It's dated 1941, not 1942 as I previously stated.

[RichardSimon]

Could you show some more photos of other panels.
I realize the ink looks funky, but this one might be a real ball that was exposed to some weird humidity conditions during storage.

[richieb315]

Here is an Official Ball that looks to be a Facsimile signed ball.

[Jay Wolt]

William it doesn't appear to be a facsmile since there are different color inks.
The couple that I have all look the same w/ same ink

[william_9]

Richard, I'll post more when I get home on Sunday. I suppose the possibility exists that it is a hand signed ball but it has some strange characteristics. I'll let you be the judge. I'd say that it's definitely not machine stamped. It looks like the names were laid down one at a time, assembly line style. There is some minor overlap and areas where the ink didn't transfer, but not in a way that looks like the pen skipped, in my opinion.

[vintagebrett]

I can post the other pictures for William. Having had the ball, the signatures definitely did not look like they were written onto the ball but I'm a complete novice when it comes to autographs.

[RichardSimon]

Richie - that appears to be a signed ball.
William - in my experiences, machine stamped balls never have signatures overlapping.

[perezfan]

My take...

Richie's Ball is definitely hand-signed.

William's ball is stamped. The only overlap occurs where a dark blue sig overlaps a light blue sig. So I think the ball was stamped in two separate instances (once with dark blue ink and once with light blue). There is no ovelap of names with common-color ink.

Perhaps they had not yet perfected the art of stamping these balls yet, since this is such an early example. Regardless, there's no way those names were hand-written, IMO.

[GoldenAge50s]

One other telltale clue that a ball is stamped---Look at the sig below Crabtree---it runs right through the stitch holes in about 4 places!

[murphusa]

Just picked up a very nice 1956 Yankees fac ball. Over the years I have had a lot of success selling fac balls to collectors. Reminds them of a time at a ball game