[BillyCoxDodgers3B]

Before I started reading all the comments in this thread, which resulted in the silly name calling that is all too common on this forum, I was also going to venture the 100,000 figure for signed baseballs. That's far from a small number, and just think of all the other signed material. Also, I am speaking only of single-signed balls, not team or multi-signed. Signed cards were barely collected in Ruth's day, so I won't even venture a guess on how many Goudeys he may have signed, among other cards.

We hear lots of stories of players signing which are always inflated with hyperbole. A couple of far smaller examples:

King Kelly was arguably the game's first superstar. The earliest story I know which involves a player signing autographs recounts Kelly signing for crowds of kids. I'm not saying it didn't happen, as I'm far from 150 years old, but shouldn't at least a nice handful of autographed album pages have survived? Autograph books were the preferred medium, and as we've seen, tons of them have survived from Kelly's era. Perhaps not teeming with baseball autographs, but what does that tell us?

What about the story in TGOTT of Bugs Raymond trading autographed balls for drinks? Remember, like the Waite Hoyt story, this one came directly from the mouth of his contemporary. Meaningless. Again, logic would dictate a fraction of these having survived the test of time, especially if given to an adult who might have occasion to take better care of it than a child. I suppose one could argue with Prohibition being just around the corner, each and every one of those signed balls was disposed of with the closing of taverns nationwide. Conversely, shouldn't then have some of them have been packed away in boxes shortly after they were signed, therefore even preserving at least one (in decent condition to boot)? Nah. Signed balls were not en vogue in Raymond's era. My best hypothesis is that yes, he did trade baseballs for drinks but didn't sign them. I could see him telling a tall tale about how each ball won a crucial game, etc. That makes so much more sense, doesn't it?