After staring at this for a while, I too have some misgivings. Thanks for providing a very high resolution scan.
I'm bothered by a couple of things. While I may not have the depth of experience as some here I have looked at a lot of autographs in my day and sometimes you have that "Blink" moment that Malcolm Gladwell described in his book.
Given that Gehrig is included here we might make an assumption that this book was signed before his death in 1941. Give the number of Phila. A's all on the two pages we might also assume that this would have been signed during their playing days. One would think this may have been signed at an A's Yankees game at some point. Without spending too much time on rosters and such we might assume a mid-late 1930s time frame.
Now granted the type of pen used might cause some of these issues but I am bothered by a few of these.
The "mistakes" in the Cramer, Earnshaw, Rommel, and Ruffing seem to be too many in number for such a small sample size. Granted these could have been signed standing up or in some awkward way to account for this but to me too coincidental.
The Jimmie's in the Foxx and Dykes signatures are a little too similar for my comfort. From a few samples I've seen the J in Dykes' signature doesn't usually have the severe slant of Foxx and here they are about the same, not to mention they share some characteristics they shouldn't have.
I think maybe the big "giveaway" may be the Earle Mack. Note that the last "Mack" is almost exactly the same as the Connie Mack. Earle's autograph normally had a more "simple" style and flow compared to Connie's sharp angular signature.
Also many of the signatures don't have a strong healthy flow they should have if they were signed by young, athletic men. Many resemble the signatures of these same men later in their lives. Also many of the first letters seem slowly made, while my in-person experience has let me to believe that the first letter of an autograph is usually the strongest.
There is also no reason to cram so many signatures on two pages. Surely the book has more pages, and I'll bet some are blank. And why stick a relatively obscure, hard to find Joe Boley in about the only place it would fit?
My intuition tells me that the Grove, Rolfe, Dickey, and Crosetti were already on the book, and are "good" and that the darker ones were forged.
My two cents, which may be about all it's worth.
I'm kinda willing to bet though, that this would pass one of the big two TPA's.
Just guessing if it passed by one of the big two TPA's value would be $5000-8000 at auction.
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01-26-2013, 10:08 PM
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