[thecatspajamas]

Let me give my reason for asking at the outset, because even as I typed that title, it was setting my Spidey senses tingling:

I have a number of signed baseballs which have already started to tone, but are not doing so evenly. Either there are large dark "splotches" of brown on an otherwise white ball, or maybe bands of light toning adjacent to solid white panels, or some combination of the two. My personal preference, and I don't think I am alone in this, is for the ball to have uniform color. I don't care if it's uniformly white, or off-white, or beige, or brown, I would prefer any of the above to a stark white ball with a brown amoeba-shaped patch on it.

Knowing that in many cases, at least some toning is inevitable, is there a way that once I see a ball "starting to go," I can ensure that it evenly turns brown all over without also fading out the signature and/or ball stampings? Preferably something short of dipping it in shellac and letting it age 30 or 40 years.

If this is bordering too much on giving step-by-step techniques for ball-forgers to artificially age their products, just smack me on the wrist with a ruler and I'll move on to worrying about other things. Hopefully there's something simple that I'm overlooking though. I feel weird even asking, as most collectors' efforts go to combatting toning, not promoting it, but those uneven colors really bug me.