Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim65
I used to trust MEARS, a couple years ago I contacted them about items in their auctions that were absolutely fake or no way could be attributed to the player, I gave a list of reasons but the items were sold anyway and they never even responded. I stopped buying from them altogether.
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As Mears likes to say, the LOA's are really Letters of Opinion. If you collect bats from a given era and read a lot of letters, you can learn a lot from reading thosee letters. Reading them helped me figure out what counts as good evidence that an item was game used or that it could have been used by a given player.
At the same time, I now read the letters closely. Auctions can pick things from the letters that lead me to infer things about the bat that the letters don't exactly say. The letters themselves can incline me to leap to conclusions that aren't entirely warranted, but if they describe the bat thoroughly and acccurately, then the letters are still very useful to the educated collector.
BTW: In my experience, John Taube has been objective. Others will have had more experience with him. I used to buy a lot of bats from Mears, and if there was a mixup they treated me very well. Their auction mislabeled a bat now and then, but I still liked the bats that I got. Lately, however, they haven't been auctioning or evaluating much that I want.