[jimjim]

So this is what I have learned over the past 30 plus years. Pre Selig balls do have toning issues, but overall no major ink issues. There always a few bad apples but I don’t have one AL/NL ball with ink bleeding. A large number of Selig balls from the early 2000s we’re defective and developed oil spots. That has been attributed to the Rawlings manufacturing process. Late Selig era balls and Manfred balls are the major problem in my opinion. They don’t have toning or oil spot issues but I feel these balls have a disproportionate amount of ink bleeding. It has to be the leather as sometimes a small portion of the autograph will bleed and the rest will look fine. Back in the day nobody even thought about pen choices and the balls turned out fine. Now I see discussion after discussion about pens. I used to use bic fine point but they started bleeding on ball after ball. Switched to Pentel and a few of those are now showing minor bleeding. Some people are now using Zebra pens but I feel the jury is still out on those. I wish there was an easy answer but it’s really a crapshoot these days.