Lelands issue - what do you think is right?

[drc]

I know little to nothing about rings, but my experience is Lelands is a reputable auction house. They may be looking into the issue at this point, and I assuem the auction doesn't end for a few weeks.

[FUBAR]

you can tell just by looking the craftsmanship on the fake isn't anywhere near the real one!

[glchen]

I think the point is that the consignor is claiming that the ring in the Leland auction
was manufactured by Balfour in that era. However, the OP believes that this may be a replica ring that was not created by Balfour, and in addition, may not even have been created in the timeframe specified in the auction.

[sports-rings]

regarding your commnts that one is a '55 and one is a '57:

As I mentioned, I keep a database of rings and sadly I do not have a real '57 to compare to the Leland's ring. It is a well known fact among ring collectors that the balfour yankee rings from the 1950's changed very very little over the years, both on the winning rings and the losing rings. The coolest ring is the 1953 Yankee ring, when balfour put a big "5" on the rings to celebrate the Yankees 5th consecutive world series victory but that story is for another day. Other than '53 the Yankee rings rarely changed until the 70's.

The 1955 and 1957 tops should be identical. Not only that but why would Balfour as Fubar pointed out, go back to the drawing board and come up with a hat and stone design that was much more sloppy and poorly fitting than the ring they made 2 years earlier?

It's amazing how real championship rings always look much nicer in person than in photos. they tend to be magnificent. The ring on the right does not have that look - it is clearly a fake in my opinion. If you go back and look at Leland's auctions, this ring is usually auctioned off 1 or 2 times per auction. IN the current auction there are 2 of them. How in the world do these consigners get so many loser salesman samples, auction after auction?

Furthermore, if I had a babe ruth autograph and made a photo copy, would'nt the photocopy look "very similar to the real one?". So I don't think this is an issue that the Lelan's ring looks or does not look like the original, I beleive the bigger issue is that it is a fake and should be treated as a copy.

If anyone feels I am over-reaching, I would be happy to send you a pdf of Irv's Learner's newsletter. THis is the guy that restored that wagner that was just auctioned and he is the person who writes in his newsletter that he will make any Yankee ring. Furthermore, he constantly puts these rings on ebay.

[benjulmag]

To sports-rings.com,

Thanks for the response. As I said, I know little about rings. But I still don't understand why a team any particular year could not ask the ring manufacturer to revise its ring design. Doesn't Balfour make the rings to satisfy its customers (the teams)? So if a team decided it was tired of the design it had used in past years, why is it not plausible a subsequent year could have a completely revised ring design? However, that said, I would think that if the design was to be revised, it would be revised in a material way, not in the minor way the 57 ring appears compared to the 55 ring. So, such a minor revision does raise red flags. I agree with you that if the work appears sloppy, that in and of itself raises additional red flags.

I should also add that even if a ring looks exactly right, I wouldn't consider buying it unless it was accompanied by credible provenance.

[Rob D.]

Just wondering whether there are any updates to this issue.

[sports-rings]

Leland's continues to offer the two Yankee rings on their site. One ring has zero bids, the other ring (pictured in my original post) has only 1 bid for $750.00. After being ignored by Lelands, I posted at this web site, hoping some other collectors would pressure Lelands to do the right thing and take down the rings.

Because they now updated their site to show "This is not an exact duplicate. It varies slightly from those that the players received. This ring was made at a later date", I believe the bidding is way down on these 2 rings.

Although I think Leland's is wrong and should take the rings down or call them copies, and explain they are not real, at least Lelands did something.

Hopefully, the consigner, who I have watched over the years consign fakes to many of the other auction houses and has consigned this exact ring in past lelands auctions will stop trying to pass off these rings as real. I plan to continue to pressure the auction houses not to list these rings as authentic.

Any ideas of other web sites I can post on to alert the collecting community to what's going on?