1918 Red Sox Babe Ruth Contract (VERY COOL)

[thebigtrain]

The way I see it with sports memorabilia is purely risk vs. reward. As long as people are willing to pay insane amounts of money for this stuff, there will also be forgers trying desperately to get their hands on said money. There's also a disturbing tendency among collectors to trust these major auction houses and authenticators, which plays into the foger's hands.

What amazes me is that many attorneys are themselves high-end collectors fail to "cross examine" the provenance and history of items they purchase. Take the poster earlier in this thread (who actually bid on this) who said "it was offered 13 yrs ago at Guernsey's" as a way to apparently vouch for its authenticity. Who cares about 13 years ago- my question is where was it for the 82 years before that? Did Grandpa find it in his sock drawer, did Barry Halper have it next to Cy Young's ipod or what? If it is real, could it have been stolen from the Red Sox? Why do so few collectors ever ask questions beyond "PSA says its good" or "it was at Guernsey's 12 years ago" etc.

In my office I have a single-signed Ruth, single signed Gerigh, single signed Tris Speaker, single signed Hornsby, and some lesser-known 20s and 30s players. All of them belonged to the great-uncle of the firm's founding partner, who was a sportswriter for the defunct Newark Evening News out of Newark, NJ. He obtained all the sigs in person in the locker rooms, and there are photos of him with several of these players. Guess what else? Most of these balls have been in the same display case in the firm for 50+ years, and they mostly looks brown, old, and crappy, as you'd expect an 80 year item to look. Probably many of the balls were already used when he had them signed (hell, watch the youtube clips of the '52 W.S. and see how long they use the same ball even then- it was prolly 100 X worse in the 20s and 30s).

That's why I call total BS on 99% of these impeccable white balls offered by the major houses with some college dropout "expert" putting a gold seal on a piece of paper saying its real. I demand more, much more. Forgery is not a terribly difficult crime to pull off, and the materials (iron gall ink and nib pens) are cheap and readily available. EVen if the forger shells out a grand on a nice old period A.L. or N.L baseball, the profit when same is inscribed by "Babe Ruth" or "Lou Gerigh" or better yet both of them is astronomical. As far as I'm concerned, without ironclad provenance, I'm not biting. Anything less and you're just a pure sucker.