Best Pen for a Signature on a Baseball?

[mr2686]

Blue Bic Medium point is my pen of choice on baseballs. I can't remember any problems I've had with them, and any problems I've had were ball/ball handling or other pen related.

[Scott Garner]

Originally Posted by mr2686

Blue Bic Medium point is my pen of choice on baseballs. I can't remember any problems I've had with them, and any problems I've had were ball/ball handling or other pen related.

+1 But use blue pen, not black. Black ball point pen fades over time

[Huck]

I have over 100 plus signed baseballs. Due to fading, bleeding etc. I stopped getting balls signed. People swear by the blue bic pen, but there are other factors as to why signatures deteriorate. The leather. The pressure the player exerts when signing. Gaylord Perry is a big cat, hands like mitts but he has the softest signature (will fade) out there. Hand oils. Reggie Jackson after signing a ball used to palm the ball and set it to his right. Exposure to light.

I tried to find the perfect pen and this is what I found.

pigma-micron pens

I never purchased a pen. I just gave up on getting balls signed.

[jimjim]

So this is what I have learned over the past 30 plus years. Pre Selig balls do have toning issues, but overall no major ink issues. There always a few bad apples but I don’t have one AL/NL ball with ink bleeding. A large number of Selig balls from the early 2000s we’re defective and developed oil spots. That has been attributed to the Rawlings manufacturing process. Late Selig era balls and Manfred balls are the major problem in my opinion. They don’t have toning or oil spot issues but I feel these balls have a disproportionate amount of ink bleeding. It has to be the leather as sometimes a small portion of the autograph will bleed and the rest will look fine. Back in the day nobody even thought about pen choices and the balls turned out fine. Now I see discussion after discussion about pens. I used to use bic fine point but they started bleeding on ball after ball. Switched to Pentel and a few of those are now showing minor bleeding. Some people are now using Zebra pens but I feel the jury is still out on those. I wish there was an easy answer but it’s really a crapshoot these days.

[canjond]

Thanks everyone.

Matt - what you describe is exactly what I'm experiencing, too. Many of my old signed balls look perfectly fine. The new Manfred balls are consistently showing bleeding in certain parts of the signature, notwithstanding the fact they are all from different batches of balls, and all stored out of light in the exact same way I store all of my baseballs.

I just purchased a box of Staedtlers so I may try that next.

[jimjim]

Does anyone prep baseballs? I remember when people used to use the cheaper official league balls (OLB), and they would stick them in the oven for a few minutes to dry out the leather. I did that on a few of them and those autographs still look great. I only used a few of those cheaper balls many years ago.

I’ve exclusively used OMLBs for at least 15 years. I’ve never done or heard of anyone prepping OMLBs by placing them in the oven. Thoughts?

[mcgwirecom]

I know they were making a baseball that looked like an Official ML Manfred ball but was made in China I think and had a synthetic cover. These of course were much cheaper then the real thing, but they LOOK like the real thing. Are you sure you have the one with the leather cover? Just throwing it out there...