Question for Jodi B. (and others)

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Posted By: Jodi Birkholm

Baseball autograph collecting was nonexistent in the 1800's. Players like King Kelly who achieved living legend status hardly exist in holographic form outside of one or two examples. This is even the case for a player like Willie Keeler, who lived into the 1920's. The earliest signed items (that were collected by fans, as opposed to documents or petitions) seem to be team-signed balls and multi-signed banquet programs dating from late in the first decade of the last century. Team-signed balls from that era are of course incredibly rare. It's funny to compare the infancy of team-signed major league balls to their later Negro League counterparts. From the 1900 decade to the 1910's you will encounter many players printing their name rather than signing (many only writing their surname). I believe this to be due to the fact that these men were not accustomed to writing on a rounded surface and were approaching the task with some trepidation. You have to also take into account the value placed in legible penmanship in that era--they wanted their contributions to display presentably. Moving into the mid-late 1920's we still see a few hand-printed sigs on team balls, but the familiarity of signing these items has become such that mostly cursive signatures are featured. Fittingly, it took minor league teams a few extra years to make the same transition (likely because the players were just starting to be asked to sign baseballs and were going through the same thing as the players of the past). By the early 1930's practically everyone in the majors were signing baseballs in cursive. You'll still see examples of hand-printed signatures on minor league balls into the early 1950's, but that's where that old custom appears to have ceased. In the case of Negro League team-signed balls, the players' signatures were haphazardly strewn all over the various panels at all angles. Printing and unsteady penmanship were common. Negro League fans didn't seem to have the collecting bug, as is fully evidenced by the extreme shortage of most players' autographs. On a typical Negro League team ball, you would more often than not see a shaky signature actually following the curves of the stitching, making for an arc-shaped, convex autograph! Examples of these traits still appear on modern-day Negro League reunion balls.

As to your other question, Dan, I unfortunately can't pinpoint who the "granddaddy" was. The earliest assemblages of holographic material all originate from player/executive estates or the files of businesses, sportswriters and periodicals. In fact, this very question so vexed me many years ago that I actually wrote a fictionalized biography of the first (and greatest!) baseball autograph collector of them all! I can certainly name some of the collectors from the 1930's-50's (some even still active to this day) who we have to thank for the abundance of vintage 3X5s and cuts, but there really wasn't anybody actively collecting autographs prior to that who did so in such full force to garner themselves the proper attention.