[MEARSAUCTIONS]

It isn't such a matter of guess work. The fact that is often overlooked by skeptics is that professional model bats are quite rare. Store model bats, made for the masses, were mass produced in much larger quantites than what is known to be professional model or game used bats.

For non HOF'ers and lesser stars, it is pretty much likely that if the bat exists, it was issued to the player. The numbers support that. What can't be proven is that the use was only applied by player in question. That is why the grading criteria was designed to represent likelihood of use by player:

A5 = 50% chance
A7= 70% chance
A9= 90% chance
A10 = 100% chance. Documented known players traits with or without solid provenance gets you to this level.

In our opinion, a store model bat, which we dont grade on this scale, doesn't qualify.

The grading was always intented to serve as the likelyhood that the player used the bat.

Back to dating, when you examine a player, take a player like Ken Holloway. His career spanned from 1922-1930. From our experience, a professional model bat bearing his signature in an extremely high percentage of times would fall into the broad MEARS dating range of 1921-1931, as per our worksheet. His career was 1922-1930, so the known manufacturing traits which defined the MEARS dating criteria corresponded with his major league career, thus supporting our dating. This system proved consistent from my years of evaluating bats. What I could not document, was exact year dating which would have defined his time with Detroit (1928) vs Cleveland (1929), but we were confident to date a bat from the overall span of his playing career. I do not consider it guess work as 1,000's of examples have supported our used dating findings. Troy