So about a year and a half ago, I sent an order to Beckett Grading to have a bunch of rookie cards slabbed solely for authentication.  Among the group was a 1948 Bowman Yogi Berra which bore a wanna-be signature on the front.  It was clear that the hand-written addition to the card was not a true autograph. Hell, it may not have even been an attempt at an autograph.  It could have been some kid just writing Berra’s name on the front of the card.

I digress.  So when I got my order back from BGS, I noticed that the Berra was not encased.  Some grader decided that the card needed to be sent to JSA for authentication purposes. I was confused.  I was pissed. I wrote this piece.

For a while I forgot about the Berra and moved on.  That is until I was confronted with a similar situation earlier this year when I acquired this Bob Feller Rookie and then this Ted Williams Rookie.

Both of these cards bore hand-written names of the players on front.  The Feller was a child-like writing, almost like the Berra.  But the Williams could be mistaken for his autograph.  Knowing what I dealt with on the Berra card, I decided to e-mail Beckett Grading to see if they could just slab the Williams as authentic and add a line about the signature not being real.  I got no answer.  I waited nearly two months and got nothing. Crickets.

So I decided to send in the Williams anyway with a grouping of other cards I wanted crossed over from other grading companies to a BGS/BVG slab.  I was going to write a note asking only for authentication on the card only … I forgot to add it before sealing the package.

Well, lo and behold, BGS graded my Williams as a 2, which is awesome.  The card has crisp edges, corners and a smooth surface, save for the obvious.  But when the BGS order at my house on Saturday, I saw that BGS added a note to the slab’s label: “Not Williams’ Signature.”

Thank you.  That is all I wanted in the first place.  Knowing what they’ve done for the Williams slab, I’ll be re-submitting the Berra (and the Feller) so they can do the same.  I better not get referred to JSA.

This entry was posted on January 8, 2011 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Newspaperman with tags baseball, baseball cards, Beckett Grading, rookie cards, Ted Williams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.