Where to get it Authenticated?????

bigtime36

Please give me your input on these, theres two not pictured, Ford and one i cant read. I have no idea if they are fake or real. Got the ball years ago

XanaduNow

You should take the ball out of the case for the pics. I am by NO MEANS educated in autos but that Mantle looks fake to me (based on the ones I've seen).

Arthur

cardfan07

Agreed. You should be able to find some authenticated versions of that signature to compare against.
Hank Bauer, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle - not sure if any of them are real or not.

bigtime36

Ive looked and on some its hard to compare, but i was told that early in Mantles career that his signature was differant.

MooseDog

No, no, no...all those sigs were done by the same person. It looks to me like an attempt at forgery, because the sigs are all made to "look" like real ones. I would guess the models for the signatures were early baseball cards as the Mantle is done in his "1950s" form.

1) Look at the spacing of the letters in all the signatures, roughly the same.
2) The form of the "C" in Collins, Raschi, Mickey and Carey are too similar to be coincidence. Compare the small c's in Raschi and Mickey.
3) The R and Raschi and the R in Maris are the same.
4) The letters in all the sigs are roughly the same size.
5) In Mantle's early sigs the tops of the M's are usually about the same height. This is as distinctive a trait as the "half moons" in his modern signatures. This facisimile on the 1954 Archives card is a good example:



I could go on but I can see these just from the fuzzy scan.

Here are some "good" examples found in a quick internet search ('cause I'm too lazy to pull mine out of my closet):

Andy Carey (modern)



Hank Bauer (the slant and loop beneath the B are all distinctive traits for Bauer)



Vic Raschi (probably a 1970s signature)



Joe Collins (TTM probably early 1970s - Bob Himes was a long time collector I often dealt with)



Roger Maris (early vintage sigs have a variety of different M's - here's his 1959 Topps card - the signature MIGHT be from the original contract signed with Topps but what I wanted to point out is to note the high/low pattern of the tops of the M - this is a distinctive trait in early Maris sigs. Later on in his career his signature was much more fluid and the M became more consistent)



PS. Where's the Ford?