Quote:
Originally Posted by shelly
Dan, I went out to people that you would not have any idea who they are. I questioned them about the ball not what was signed on the ball. Here is there reply.
The 1927 ball was a one year style because it was Ban Johnsons last year and Barnard followed him. There is a newer top logo with the patent date and the cursive logo.
This has been known for 20-30 yrs its nothing new. Any forger would have figured it out looking at the many 1927 attributed balls (including many Phila A's balls) To say its authentic based upon the style of ball is so flawed, I don't know what to say.
These are from people that I trust.
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A forger would have to be an idiot to buy a 1928 ball, as it wouldn't have Johnson's name on it, and he would have to be an even dumber idiot not to buy the one with the 1925 patent stamp. Even if he ONLY had these two bits of obvious information and guessed from there, he still would have a 1 out of 3 chance of getting it right by complete accident. Not bad odds.
Dan - I completely understand going with your gut. If my gut agreed with your gut, my next step would be to prove that it is a good ball (not the opposite) - we need to adapt the Communist approach of 'guilty until proven innocent' (in my opinion), rather than the opposite, Democratic style. The Communist method caught all the guilty and some of the innocent. Not good for human beings, but great for baseballs. If we did this, the ball would have to be tossed in the trash, as there is nothing other than alleged circumstantial evidence - can you get any worse?
The Democratic style would be to assume the ball is real (which is what we are doing here), and have to prove that it is 'guilty'. But we are further limited by the Democratic approach, in that we can't even produce evidence - provenance is apparently disallowable in our 'autographed ball court', as is questioning the authenticators, and as is any sort of forensic testing.
The above is why so many forged baseballs are floating around.