[Archive]

Posted By: barrysloate

This just reminded me of an experience I had a few years back.

One of the major auction houses was selling an Upper Deck whatever-it-is card with a cut of Alexander Cartwright's signature. It was touted as unique and ended up selling for at least $10,000.

I once had a large group of Cartwright documents and this particular cut looked awfully familiar. I went back to my photocopies and compared them to the catalog picture and sure enough I found exactly the piece that they cut from one of the documents. It matched up perfectly.

But it wasn't Cartwright's signature. This particular document, although in his hand, was a family tree, and since the baseball Cartwright was AJC the 3rd, his father and grandfather shared the same name. All Upper Deck did was cut out the name of his grandfather and claim it was a signature. It wasn't even signed- it was just a listing of his ancestor's name. Now you can argue that since he wrote it everything was fine, but I argued otherwise.

I brought my photocopy and catalog to the auction and pointed it out to those in charge. They weren't the least bit interested.

So I am always suspicious that these cards that claim to have a piece of some valuable relic are even what they are supposed to be.