I was scammed!

-

 It was inevitable that I would eventually have to post about an autograph I have in my collection that turned out to be fake, and that day has come.  Back in 2012 I purchased a Willie Mays ball from a dealer at the TriStar show in San Francisco. Keep in mind, I have been in the hobby for 25 years so even 10 years ago I was pretty knowledgeable. That did not stop me from getting hoodwinked though! The ball in question had both 'Say Hey' and JSA authentication, meaning it is in the JSA database as authentic and had Mays' own authentication sticker as well so I assumed I was pretty safe, especially considering the signature itself was close to examples I had seen. Ten years on, I've gained a lot more knowledge as my collection has increased, and I'd recently come across some discourse about fake 'Say Hey' hologram Mays baseballs saturating the market. When looking over a lot of the examples of these baseballs I noticed that mine looked pretty much spot on when compared to forged examples with the Say Hey stickers. I decided to run the ball by the excellent 'Out or Safe' group on Facebook (which I highly recommend fwiw) and to no surprise, my ball was a fake.





My advice would be to avoid baseballs with the Say Hey hologram sticker, even if authenticated through a second party as well.  I'm not sure if this is a fake JSA sticker, but the number does show up in the database. It's either a sticker belonging to another ball, a fake sticker, or JSA authenticated a forged baseball.  Not good.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

John Stockton

-
Image
 One of the notoriously tough autographs to get among all modern era sports figures, I saw recently that John Stockton was going to be doing an ultra rare signing. After looking at the prices, I decided that they were on the pricey side, so instead looked into getting a card off eBay. It is often the case that signings are more expensive than getting an auto card from Panini or Topps, etc. because you can send in exactly what you want to get signed. I don't typically complain about pricing for signings, but I did observe that the cost to send in my own card was 4-5x what buying a John Stockton signed card off eBay would cost. Therefore, I found a fairly priced one and went that direction.  As you can see, I went with an Obsidian auto and this particular card is numbered /35. 
Read more

John Elway

-
Image
 My Hall of Fame and elite quarterback train is still steaming along, as I just added a signed John Elway card to my collection. This card comes from 2023 Prestige football, is numbered /25. I saw that a lot of people were having a lot of luck with their hits in Prestige megas in retail, though the few boxes I opened were crap. I jumped into the eBay market to get this card, as card prices have come down and you can get some of these all time greats for much less than even a year ago. Honestly, I bought this card for the price of two mega boxes, so I'm not sure what I'm even doing buying sealed product in the first place.
Read more

Joe Montana

-
Image
 Much like the Dan Marino and John Elway autos I have posted about recently, I also acquired a Joe Montana Panini autographed card.  Like the Marino card, this is also a blue cracked ice numbered /75. Of the big name, all tike great QB's in the league, I believe the only one I might be missing still is Tom Brady. It might be a while yet before I find a way to get something he signed into my collection.
Read more