Sort of Ethical Question Re Baseball Signed W-2 Forms

[Scott Garner]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

Another question to consider is that, if you had not already told us that the SSN's are not blacked out, would any of us have expected them to be visible if offered a player's signed W-2 form? As several others have said, it's common knowledge that contracts are often available with the SSN showing, so a collector might be disappointed or less enthusiastic about obtaining one that had it blacked out, assuming that it was some collector who had done it rather than the player or whoever in the club handled the old contract documents.

In this case though, if the collector had never seen any players' W-2 forms offered, would they know that it was ever available with the SSN showing, or just assume that it was blacked out when the document was released to the general collecting public? In other words, if they're not expecting to see the SSN still visible, how would that have any effect on its value to a collector?

Maybe I'm wrong and there's some sort of W-2 Collecting Community that I'm not aware of. Just offering a little more food for thought on the subject.

Lance,
FWIW, I don't think that you are wrong in assuming that there is not a W-2 collecting community lurking in the weeds.

As an advanced baseball player collector of sorts (Nolan Ryan, Johnny Vander Meer, Bob Feller, Walter Johnson, to name a few), finding an oddball item like a W-2 form from one of my focus players would be something that I would be thrilled to add to my collection. I have other friends that are player specialists (Ryan, Cal Ripken, Carlton Fisk, Mark McGwire, Sandy Koufax, etc.) that would be all over an item like this if it became available in the hobby.

It's weird, but believe it or not, I have a few fellow Ryan collector friends that are after a 1979 Nolan Ryan signed gas station receipt and paper route receipt (Nolan age 15) that I own in my collection. Sometimes the most oddball items are the one's that are the most interesting to an advanced collector.

One way of looking at this is that there is probably someone out there that collects everything. It's just a matter of finding the collector that wants what you're peddling as a seller. When you have two or more people interested in the same thing, then it becomes an auction with sometimes interesting results. As a long time seller, you know this way better than most.