[mighty bombjack]

I was just looking at the ridiculous baseballs in the Coaches Corner thread that was recently bumped up, and it got me thinking. That auction house has been pumping out "autographs" for years and years now. Baseballs "autographed" by guys like Martin Dihigo and Ross Youngs, which would sell for five and quite possibly six figures if authentic, sell for 50-100 bucks. Over and over and over. It also seems to me that the quality of these "autographs" has gone down over the years, as they used to have items that might actually fool a few people but now seem to only auction items that are so obviously fake and signed a few hours before being posted for sale.

So, I've started wondering if something else is happening here. Might these guys be laundering money? I guess that, if they were, the items might sell for even more than they do, but it just seems to me that there has to be a dwindling market for this stuff. I just don't think that there are that many people in the market for a Martin Dihigo autographed baseball, but Martin Dihigo "autographed" baseballs have sold in every single CC monthly auction over the last five years (sometimes multiple in an auction). Who is buying them? And what are they doing with them?

To that end, I want to ask for stories that people here might have about seeing these things for sale in other venues. I have regular ebay searches for most of the harder-to-find HOF autographs, and these things very rarely pop up on ebay at all (usually get removed when they do - even ebay, who has been dropping the ball lately on forgeries, knows a ridiculously bad item when they encounter it). Honestly, I would think that more people who bought these would be trying to flip them. Likewise, anyone who has bought these "autographed" items and tried to flip them would have gotten burned, regardless of whether they purchased the item from CC out of naivety or out of intention to scam. I think that these have to be hard to flip, and in either case (naivety or scam), it just seems like there wouldn't be a lot of repeat business from buyers of junk who couldn't move that junk. Maybe there are people sitting on these items, displaying them proudly or hoping to cash out in the future, but I doubt that there are so many as to explain all of the sales from the last 20+ years.

So, I want to ask about stories, sightings of these "autographed" items for sale in venues other than CC itself. I can say that about ten years ago I saw a Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart cut "autograph" (with ACE cert - whatever happened to those?) for sale at a local flea market, and I did a search and found the thing had sold a few months before at CC. However, as a collector of HOF autographs, I just don't see these things for sale anywhere but CC. I'd like to hear stories of others if any of you have them.

I'm really starting to think that there's something else happening here, that these items just change hands among a small group of people, all of whom are fully aware that there needs to be quotes around the word "autographed." They are simply moving money around on paper and have found a way to do it. Anything is possible, I guess.