[BillyCoxDodgers3B]

Whatever that slabbed cut is (as opposed to what I strongly feel it is not), it's clearly ancient by baseball standards and was never intended by its writer to be a forgery. If I had to guess, it could very well have been clipped from a piece of correspondence in which the author of the letter was mentioning Seymour in the body of his message. This wouldn't be the first time that I've seen a player's name clipped in such a fashion, then passed off by somebody to be an autograph of said player. Whoever initially cut that "Cy Seymour" and passed it off as his autograph likely did so long before any of us were alive.

There have been other, more innocent scenarios which have happened in the past, wherein a collector or researcher has contacted a player's family seeking an autograph. With perfectly good intent, a descendant has dutifully sent along what they thought was an autograph of their relative, but it turned out to have been written by someone else! Sometimes written by another family member; sometimes it was the autograph of another family member with the same name (such as a Sr. or a Jr.). On other occasions, perhaps it was a document that had been filled out by someone unknown. These things happen. In fact, I was gifted a turn of the century photo by the family of a player which had been taped into the player's scrapbook way back when. Their relatives were happy to inform me that there was an autograph on the back! It wasn't actually an autograph, but rather a penciled identifier just as we've seen on countless press/wire photos.

So, we will likely never know the actual story behind that piece, but the chances are great that it was one of these two scenarios! I've seen these occurrences before and will undoubtedly see them again.