New to hobby.
 

I am new to the hobby and have a couple questions about getting ball signed. I've heard that the balls need to breathe so I drilled a hole on each side of the plastic ball holders is that a bad idea? Also what kind o pen do you recommend for signing? From my understanding all ballpoint pen ink has acid in it, doesn't that mean that at some point the autographs will disintegrate? I've thought about doing India ink because it is a high-quality ink with no acid but that only comes in black. These are made by Pitt and are called artist pens.

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I don't know how airtight a standard baseball cube is. I suppose holes for ventilation couldn't hurt.

Biggest concerns after obtaining the autograph would be light/UV exposure, temperature, and humidity.

As for getting the autograph, you should always use a ROMLB baseball (anything else will cause the autograph to fade especially baseballs made from synthetic leather). I'd also just stick to using a high-quality blue ballpoint (like a Uni-ball Jetstream).

Some users on here have used a fine or small Staedtler Lumocolor in blue and it looks amazing. Pretty confident you'll never have fading issues.

India ink would probably work similar to the Staedtler but as you pointed out only seems to come in black.

Thank you. So the preference among collectors is blue ink?

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Yes blue ink is preferable. I have used for 40 years a plain Bic blue ballpoint medium tip pen with the plastic cap , no gel ink , and I have had no trouble with that . I never touch the sweet spot with my fingers and I try to wipe the ball down with the enclosed paper or a paper towel before getting the baseball signed.
Storage and display are the biggest concerns however.

Something else I've be wanting to do is to buy ROMLBs in advance (year or two) and watch to see if any of them start to turn yellow/blotchy due to manufacturing and discard those for autographs.

I used to buy balls by the case, and there were times I didn't use a few for a couple of years...never had any problems with discoloration or blotches, but most of that comes from either sunlight or oils from the hands that are handling the baseballs.
As for what pen to use, I too prefer the Bic med point blue.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm doing an experiment with a Pitt artist pen which is acid free and is not ballpoint it's India ink which is supposed to last forever.

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Another thing I noticed was ballpoint pens is when you first put the pen on the ball it takes the first letter for the ink to come out smoothly so usually the first letter is missing a little bit of ink.

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I never had a problem with my Bics doing that , but I always did a warm up stroke with the pen to get the ink rolling while waiting . Also when doing TTM and sending the signer my Bics I never had that problem either no matter what type of item was signed.

Whats TTM? That's a great point about getting the pen rolling for beforehand.

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TTM = Thru the Mail, i.e., sending autograph requests to players (or anyone else) thru the mail.


Steve