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Originally Posted by ss
Well that’s interesting and does change things a bit.
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Maybe, and maybe not.
It does likely answer the question as to the exemplar (or "exemplar") used to authenticate the piece in question. I still remain unconvinced that either can be definitively authenticated as compared to the rest of the exemplars of which I am aware. The majority of these date from the Tour and are also signed by others who took part in this moment in baseball history. They're all in period ink, and the other MLB player autographs on these items appear free from issue from my recollection. These Schaefer autographs all bear resemblance to one another, whereas the two in question are outsiders, if you will. Finding a matching example to the cut which recently sold does nothing to sway my initial position as detailed in an earlier post. Unlike the multi-signed Tour pieces mentioned, these two are tiny, standalone cuts with no known back story to serve as provenance. They were clearly written a long time ago, so any nefarious intent can certainly be ruled out.
My hypothesis at this point is this: They may not be secretarial/clubhouse, but perhaps a case of someone identifying something to do with Schaefer a long time ago. At some point, these writings may have been innocently confused by a family member for the real thing when a pioneering collector wrote to them and asked if they had an autograph to spare. These pieces were accepted by the collector as genuine and remained in various collections over the decades. We've seen this happen more than once with other players.
While it would be incredibly beneficial if we had documents signed by Schaefer, I don't ever recall seeing anything of the sort. Has anyone else? Hopefully, something will be unearthed some day. I've been searching for a very long time. I don't seem to have a copy of his WWI draft registration card on file. Although it's been many years since I scoured that resource to seek every player exemplar I could find, I have a vague recollection that I did find the Schaefer card and it was unsigned--likely due to his being a patient at the time. Maybe someone else might confirm, as I'm only going by an aging memory.