I was scammed!

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 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.





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